I Guess Now We Move On to Actually Writing the Thing

Based on what Rebekah and I discussed in class on Monday, I've got a fairly good idea of where to go with my paper. My thesis involves discussing paradoxes and contradictions in terms of each of the characters, but I'm also planning on analyzing the paradoxes of the environment they live in (the Congo under control of the Europeans, for example). My goals for today are to

Finalize the order of what I analyze
Figure out the best way to synthesize my sources together
Write at least a respectable portion of the rough draft, but hopefully all of it
Get in the right frame of mind to prepare to write the rest of the paper and drafts.

With luck, I'll get most or even all of these done during our writing hours!


Update:

Wow, that hour went by a lot faster than I thought it would. I only managed to get about halfway through the paper (of course, it's the rough draft, so the final product will most likely be even longer). But still, it helped so much to have this time to just plan out and write the paper! Here's what I have:

The Paradoxes of The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible has been hailed as many things: a symbol of female empowerment, criticism of the United States’ interference in the newly-formed Independent Republic of the Congo, and even an analysis of the destructive nature of religion. However, though all of these readings of her book have merit, none of them quite encapsulate everything that The Poisonwood Bible is as a whole. Kingsolver’s novel is not just a historical opinion piece set to fiction, or a feminist work, or any of these, though bits and pieces of them are quite prevalent within the text. Regardless of other readings and interpretations of the work, what The Poisonwood Bible contains at its very core are the themes of paradox, balance, and contradiction within both the individual and the environment they find themselves in. The book, to summarize briefly, documents the lives of the fictional Price family as they move to the Congo on a religious mission to convert the people of the village of Kilanga. It is narrated by each of the women in the Price family: the mother, Orleanna, and her four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May. Each woman has her own inner paradoxes and conflicts, and some of them find balance in the Congo while others only find more disparity.

But what about the Congo itself? It and the village of Kilanga are a veritable hoard of paradoxes and contradictions, all of which somehow meld together into a balance unlike anything else seen in the world. The Congo the Prices find themselves is the country controlled by Belgium, a contradiction in and of itself, being an African nation ruled by a king in faraway Europe. Yet another paradox the Prices find themselves in is the paradox of prosperity. According to a 1962 history of the Belgian Congo written by George Martelli, during this time “the Congo embarked on a period of prosperity unequalled in any other African country.” (Martelli 205). And yet, to the Prices’ eyes, none of this prosperity is evident in Kilanga. Orleanna describes how the entire village subsists on enormous amounts of tubers called manioc, and almost nothing else (Kingsolver 92), indicating that none of this prosperity has come to the ordinary people. Indeed, Martelli explains that the wealth was mainly in the large cities of the Congo, where a quarter of the entire population lived. This left the other three quarters out in the dust, and yet, the people of Kilanga still remain despite their seeming lack of any kind of decent living. The paradox of this, that prosperity does not cause the majority of the population to prosper, adds to the deeper meaning of Kingsolver’s narrative by bringing to light the idea that sometimes one’s idea of happiness or prosperity is not needed for another.

Of course, each of the daughters has her own idea of happiness in an environment rocked by contradiction. Rachel, the oldest, exemplifies the kind of paradox that fuses two completely incompatible parts. She clings with a fury to the ideals and culture of America, and becomes a living paradox of a Western woman in an African nation. Rather than keep the balance the Congo has formed, she attempts to assimilate her own views of how people should act and be compared to one another, and yet at the same time keep herself aloof from the natives she finds all around her. Her inner paradox shapes her actions; where Leah finds herself almost at home within the activities and culture of the Congolese, Rachel purposefully excludes herself in a vain attempt to convince herself that nothing has changed. Roy Cook writes in his book Paradoxes that “they are in one sense nothing more than extremely clever puzzles,” (Cook 1) and Kingsolver’s purpose in these paradoxes is to give the reader a puzzle to solve, with the solution being a deeper understanding of Rachel as a character and as a common figure seen in society.

Leah Price, the second daughter of Orleanna and twin to Adah, exemplifies the concept of balance between two sides. Unlike Rachel, who simply refuses to accept her environment as natural, Leah dives right in and learns all she can. Thus we have the paradox of a white woman attempting to live in a black culture, but also the balance of Leah now part of two worlds. However, the balance is not omnipresent; Kingsolver brings in conflict to disrupt this balance in the form of Leah’s father, Nathan Price, in order to examine this balance more closely by breaking it apart. Leah’s actions are not viewed favorably by Nathan, and he attempts to pull her back to Western ways entirely. In her Master’s thesis discussing the resolution of conflicts within Kingsolver’s different books, Catherine Altmaier points out that, because of this, Leah is “both the most changed and the least changed” of the Price daughters (Altmaier 15). She refuses to accept her father’s view that their cultures are mutually exclusive, and when she finally escapes his tyranny, she says in her words that “I don’t know what has crept in to take his place... [Some] trust in Creation, which is made fresh daily and isn’t lost in translation.” (Kingsolver 525) Only once she escapes a paradoxical view of the world can Leah find her own balance of African and American.