The Poisonwood Bible Analysis

In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, Orleanna Price’s life is presented as a neverending struggle for freedom, whether it is freedom from her husband or freedom from her guilt over her youngest daughter’s death. Orleanna’s trials in the Congo show the extent of the love she has for her daughters as well as how she betrays them.
Orleanna Price, after her marriage, loses her sense of self and falls into the same prison of guilt as her husband. Orleanna had a cheerful childhood despite growing up in the middle of the Great Depression. She spent her days running wild on the outskirts of town with her cousins and worshipping the “miracles of a passionate nature” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 193). She thinks fondly of her childhood and

describes her younger self as “bursting utterly with happiness” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 193). Orleanna especially had a deep connection and understanding of the natural world which she held closely to her sense of self. After marrying Nathan, she quickly lost this happy and simple freedom that came with her childhood as she too was dragged into the prison of guilt Nathan had fallen into after his return from war. Orleanna was so trapped by him that she felt “swallowed by Nathan’s mission, body and soul” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 198). She describes his judgemental overseeing when she says, “If I stood still for a moment in the backyard between hanging up sheets to notice the damp grass tingling under my bare feet, His eyes observed my idleness” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 200). Her feelings of imprisonment only worsen after giving birth to three children in two years, making her a slave to the needs of her children, and effectively taking away her strength to stand up against her husband.
Orleanna was betrayed by her husband in that Nathan consistently chose himself and his own needs over his family’s needs.

He made the selfish choice to stay in the Congo despite the dangerous exposure of life-threatening disease, anti-white extremist groups, and deadly wildlife to his wife and children. In a different way, Orleanna also betrayed her family. By not immediately taking her children and leaving the Congo with the Underdowns, she allowed what she feared most to happen: the death of one of her daughters. After their plane departs, she lies in bed and doesn’t leave for weeks knowing the full extent of what was bound to happen eventually. In a way, she betrays her daughters by passively allowing them to get hurt. She lies in her bed for so long because she was already mourning and trying to live with the guilt she knew would be coming. As Leah observed after Ruth May’s death, “She behaved as if someone else had already told her, before we got there” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 368). Orleanna had also more directly betrayed Adah. During the vicious ant invasion in Kilanga, Orleanna realizes that she can only save one child and must choose between Adah and Ruth May. She betrays Adah by choosing “the sweet intact child with golden ringlets and perfectly paired strong legs” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 412) over the “dark mute adolescent dragging a stubborn, disjunct half-body” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 412). While Orleanna is redeemed for this betrayal by choosing to take Adah with

her to America, she feels as though she can never be forgiven for Ruth May’s death.
Orleanna blames herself for her role in the death of her youngest daughter, Ruth May, and lives the rest of her life trying to be freed from the burden of her guilt by a forgiveness she refuses to give herself.

Orleanna thought of Ruth May as her “uncaptured favorite child” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 7) and loved her more deeply than any of her sisters or even herself. By not leaving Nathan sooner, she felt as if she betrayed Ruth May as leaving would have prevented her needless death. “How can a mother live with only herself to blame?” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 6) she asks as she spends the rest of her life calculating how old Ruth May would be were she alive, begging her for forgiveness. She remains a captive prisoner of this guilt until her last day on Earth. Ruth May, from the eyes in the trees, explains that she is a prisoner of her own creation as “if you feel a gnawing at your bones, that is only yourself, hungry” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 537). Just before her death, however, she is absolved of her guilt by the dead Ruth May who tells her to “slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward” (Kingsolver, 1998, p.

543).
The main meaning or lesson from The Poisonwood Bible is that guilt can and will eat away at a person until there is nothing left of them but a pile of bones that have been picked clean. The only way to survive guilt is to forgive yourself. Leah states, “If I could reach backward somehow to give Father just one gift, it would be the simple human relief of knowing you’ve done wrong, and living through it” (Kingsolver, 1998, p. 525). Orleanna and Nathan both succumbed to guilt and it transformed them into people that either directly or indirectly caused the people nearest to them to suffer. Orleanna’s life was spent in the captivity of her own guilt, but she chose to fight back and selflessly march for the freedom of others.