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Touchy subjects on the poisonwood bible
Essay on The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Touchy subjects on the poisonwood bible
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In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible, characters Adah and Rachel Price differ in their outlooks on life. Adah contrasts Rachel with her inside reality, her dark fiction, as well as her dependence on others due to her slant. Rachel, on the other hand, loves the outside reality, compares her life to that of a light fairy tale, and is independent. Kingsolver’s choice of two vastly different characters aids in the demonstration of the complexity each character has. In order to portray each character’s aspects, Kingsolver uses forms of diction, metaphors, and symbolism. Diction allows for the author to use language for an emphasis on a meaning of the novel. Adah uses palindromes, an elevated form of diction in which a word (or phrase) is reversed. In the beginning of the novel, due to her slant which alters her ability to walk, Adah explains she “recites sentences forwards and back, for the concentration improve[s] her walking,” (Kingsolver 136). Speaking in …show more content…
Similarly both Adah and Rachel compare their lives to fiction. Adah relates and has “strong sympathy for Dr. Jekyll’s dark desires and Mr. Hyde’s crooked body,” (Kingsolver 55). As Adah develops as a character and loses her limp, she begins to “crave that particular darkness” within Dr. Jekyll and that she used to have “curled up within,” (Kingsolver 492) herself before she became well. The use of comparison to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde allows for the reader to be aware that she has always had a connection with the characters since the beginning of the novel, she proclaims to “have read” “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “many times” (Kingsolver 55). As the novel progresses, and she begins to be concerned about “los[ing] [her]self entirely” (Kingsolver 441) along with the loss of her limp, Adah begins to reminisce on the darkness that was similar to Dr. Jekyll’s, she used to carry with
The Poisonwood Bible is the story of an evangelical Baptist preacher named Nathan Price who uproots his wife and four daughters from the modern culture of America and moves them to the Kilanga Village in the Belgian Congo as missionaries. He is bullheaded and obstinate in all his ways. His approach is inflexible, unsympathetic, and unaccepting of the culture and customs of the people of Kilanga. Nathan Price exemplifies the words of Romans 2:4 that says, “Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing the goodness of God leads you to repentance?” He did not share the goodness of God, but sought to spread his uncompromising pious agenda. Instead of leading people to God he turned them away.
Kingsolver uses short sentences to add emphasis in her writings. In doing so, she limits the amount of distractions, because her sentences are short enriching the details in them. At the first page of Orleanna’s episode, her second paragraph already enthuses the level of surprises suspense toward her readers: “First, picture the forest...sucking life out of death” (5). For example, Orleanna begins personifying forest as “forest [eating] itself” (5), and using simile to add human characteristics to animals: “brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown” (5). Kingsolver, however, also contribute many powerful use of literary devices to create the setting, such as the use of metaphors. The constant reference to green mamba snake alludes to Adam and Eve, where Kingsolver disintegrate the purity of Ruth May. Through the ranges of the novel, Kingsolver specifically creates Leah with more to say, which means there are more paragraphs in her perspective. From the start of the novel, Kingsolver structures Adah’s sentences differently and unique from the other protagonist, because Kingsolver uses Adah’s condition to evolve in a much stronger diction. For example, one of her first paragraph begins with “SUNRISE TANTALIZE, evil eyes hypnotize: that is the morning, Congo pink...the shinny black-line clipped into pieces” (30). Although Adah’s powerful diction emphasizes Congo, Rachel’s malapropism constructs the limited knowledge she actually has for the real world, which also causes to mature slower: “They are Episopotamians” (167). In doing so, the use of short sentences create imagery, which Kingsolver inputs the tension and the diction while in each episode. With that being said, Kingsolver uses structure to carry out her literary techniques to unfoil the significance of Congo’s Independence, while demonstrating the effect of multiple narrations in the
perceive the novel in the rational of an eleven-year-old girl. One short, simple sentence is followed by another , relating each in an easy flow of thoughts. Gibbons allows this stream of thoughts to again emphasize the childish perception of life’s greatest tragedies. For example, Gibbons uses the simple diction and stream of consciousness as Ellen searches herself for the true person she is. Gibbons uses this to show the reader how Ellen is an average girl who enjoys all of the things normal children relish and to contrast the naive lucidity of the sentences to the depth of the conceptions which Ellen has such a simplistic way of explaining.
Murphy, B. & Shirley J. The Literary Encyclopedia. [nl], August 31, 2004. Available at: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2326. Access on: 22 Aug 2010.
In the novel “Poisonwood Bible” by Kingsolver, the author, motivated by social responsibility, advances her argument that recognition concerning the oppression and exploitation via “men who desire to rob [Congo] blind” needs to be divulged, utilizing fictional characters Orleanna and Ruth May as direct symbols representing the Congo’s exploitation.
Both Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and the Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver explore the ideas of defying social norms for women in societies where this is uncommon, unique and sets a precedent. The novels contain female characters who grow and become independent as their story progresses, as well as encourage other women around them to grow in a similar way.
forced to go to the Congo in the village of Kilanga due to the religious minded, power-hungry
Does situation make the conformist? As a result of human instinct, people adapt and assimilate to the society around them as a survival tactic. This state of conformity often lasts an entire lifetime; continually taking in the thoughts, expectations, and attitudes of those surrounding the individual and becoming a model of what is interpreted to be society’s ideal. However, distinguishing the difference between growth and individuality, and mere changes that occur from society’s fluctuations in the norms causes debate. A literary character that highlights this dispute is Barbara Kingsolver’s Rachel Price from The Poisonwood Bible who is a nonconformist who after growing up in a household and society of oppression, presents to the public the
Adah’s alienating experience with American life greatly deviates from the life she builds in the Congo. In Kilanga, Adah is the one seen as normal out of the Price family, as according to Ruth May “they’ve all got their own handicap children or a mam with no feet, or their eye put out” (Kingsolver 53.) Rachel is the one seen by the villagers as the odd one out, as her platinum blonde hair is an irregularity in the Congo. This struggle to adjust to being perfectly ordinary is a new one for Adah, who is simultaneously trying to find her independence. Throughout the novel, Adah stays quiet, choosing to be alone with her thoughts instead of talking with the family that she struggles to relate to. This conscious alienation results in the dependence
In an increasingly globalized society, people from around the world are being connected like never before. Culture clash, one consequence of this increased connectivity, is when people from different backgrounds who have opposing basic beliefs and customs come into contact. This is usually thought to be an inevitable barrier when meeting people from a culture which is not one’s own. However, I believe that being open minded and flexible can overcome culture clash. People from different backgrounds tend to conflict on basic understandings, but this can be overcome due to mutual understanding of each other beliefs and culture.
At the outset, Atwood gives the reader an exceedingly basic outline of a story with characters John and Mary in plotline A. As we move along to the subsequent plots she adds more detail and depth to the characters and their stories, although she refers back with “If you want a happy ending, try A” (p.327), while alluding that other endings may not be as happy, although possibly not as dull and foreseeable as they were in plot A. Each successive plot is a new telling of the same basic story line; labeled alphabetically A-F; the different plots describe how the character’s lives are lived with all stories ending as they did in A. The stories tell of love gained or of love lost; love given but not reciprocated. The characters experience heartache, suicide, sadness, humiliation, crimes of passion, even happiness; ultimately all ending in death regardless of “the stretch in between”. (p.329)
In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hyde becomes Jekyll's demonic, monstrous alter ego. Certainly Stevenson presents him immediately as this from the outset. Hissing as he speaks, Hyde has "a kind of black sneering coolness . . . like Satan". He also strikes those who witness him as being "pale and dwarfish" and simian like. The Strange Case unfolds with the search by the men to uncover the secret of Hyde. As the narrator, Utterson, says, "If he be Mr. Hyde . . . I shall be Mr. Seek". Utterson begins his quest with a cursory search for his own demons. Fearing for Jekyll because the good doctor has so strangely altered his will in favor of Hyde, Utterson examines his own conscience, "and the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded a while in his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there" (SC, 42). Like so many eminent Victorians, Utterson lives a mildly double life and feels mildly apprehensive about it. An ugly dwarf like Hyde may jump out from his own boxed self, but for him such art unlikely creature is still envisioned as a toy. Although, from the beginning Hyde fills him with a distaste for life (SC, 40, not until the final, fatal night, after he storms the cabinet, can Utterson conceive of the enormity of Jekyll's second self. Only then does he realize that "he was looking on the body of a self-dcstroyer" (SC, 70); Jekyll and Hyde are one in death as they must have been in life.
Within every story or poem, there is always an interpretation made by the reader, whether right or wrong. In doing so, one must thoughtfully analyze all aspects of the story in order to make the most accurate assessment based on the literary elements the author has used. Compared and contrasted within the two short stories, “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, and John Updike’s “A&P,” the literary elements character and theme are made evident. These two elements are prominent in each of the differing stories yet similarities are found through each by studying the elements. The girls’ innocence and naivety as characters act as passages to show something superior, oppression in society shown towards women that is not equally shown towards men.
Angela Carter’s work could be described as radical, original, surreal, and has also incorporated elements into her novels that create a Shakespearean presence among them. Wise Children, manages to coalesce allusions and imagery towards Shakespeare’s plays, almost as an homage to the writer. The most comprehensive allusion perhaps being the book itself, which is structured with five chapters, an allusion to Shakespeare’s five act plays, accompanied with a Dramatis Personae at the end of her novel.
Meyer, Michael. "Eveline." Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, and Writing. S.l.: Bedford Bks St Martin'S, 2014. 420-23. Print.