Characters of various literary works are often placed in such circumstances where their life perception, moral principles and values are checked. The author intentionally creates such problems for this or that character to face with where firmness of his or her behavior either reveals or never shows itself. Depicting characters caught between colliding cultures is one of the mechanisms that the author may resort to in order to study his or her personality deeply through.
Barbara Kingsolver is known for this technique. She often explores the problems of race, family, politics, environment and other burning issues of the society that is constantly changing through depicting characters caught between colliding cultures. Her novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998) deals with various problems, among which the problem of colliding cultures is one of the dominant ones.
Barbara Kingsolver’s formidable literary talents gave birth to the story of one family which is torn between two cultures. This is a novel about a missionary family, the Prices, who in 1959 moved from Georgia to the Belgian Congo. As a result of this drastic change in the life of the family two different cultures collide: the Western and the African. Unstoppable forces of nature and history that accompany every undertaking of the family deepen the gap between cultures and the desire of the members of the family to adjust themselves to the new environment.
The novel is built around the exploration of the tragic destiny of the missionary family whose head, the patriarch Nathan Price is a silver-tongued tent revival preacher who tries to get salvation to the heathen of a remote African remote village Kilanga. Nathan Price has dragged his wife Orleanna and four daughters: Rachel, Leah, Adah, Ruth May to the squalid African outpost for this purpose, but because of his being blind to the realities of the surrounding culture, Nathan never admits the complete and utter failure of his enterprise.
Though the story of the family is narrated throughout the novel by one of the Price women and Nathan is not given the functions of narrator we are empowered to judge about this character through the facts at our disposal and make corresponding conclusions about this character’s relevance to the work as a whole. We choose the character of Nathan Price as the one that has his own assumption of the cultural collision presented in the work and responses in his own way to it.
But before we get down into analysis of this character we should point out that though The Poisonwood Bible is not autobiographical, it is based on the author’s personal experience which acquires special significance as far as the cultural collision is concerned. When Barbara Kingslover’s father served in the Belgian Congo she spent a life-changing year there. Considering her child experience living in Africa the author later confessed, “I couldn’t begin to imagine the life that was rolling out ahead of me.
But I did understand it would pass over me with the force of a river, and that I needed to pin the water to its banks and hold it still, somehow, to give myself time to know it” (Rubenstei 1). We are inclined to believe that giving oneself some time to realize the difference between cultures, to feel it and to make one’s own conclusions – this is the recipe for ruining the gap between cultures that Nathan Price neglected to make use of.
As a former soldier of the World War II, Nathan once escaped the Battaan Death March. He was luckier than the rest of his battalion and that is why he started to consider oneself as a coward, despised by God. It is obvious that this position impacted all Nathan’s life and the lives of the people around him. Nathan decides that he will never act as a coward again – he will never escape from the dangerous situations, will face them bravely and will help other people to save their souls through his missionary work.
But reading the novel one realizes that Nathan does not correspond to the image of a brave man, he is just the same coward as he was before and he fails to care of other people. He is not trying to save as many souls as he can; the only person he is devoted to is he himself. His cowardice is the driving force for adopting his rigid and simplistic moral code. Nathan does not want to admit the injustice of life and finds the easiest way to adjust to it by convincing himself that there is some deity that controls the existence of good and bad on Earth. Everything good is rewarded and everything bad is punished by this deity. Nathan’s cowardice and self-delusion become more evident as his egomaniac traits reveal themselves.
Though Nathan’s care of his own soul only is masked by his missionary work it is obvious that his attempts to save unenlightened souls of African people have nothing to do with their well-being. Getting a personal ticket to salvation is his main concern and he does not stop before imperiling the lives of his family. He does not realize the threat of disaster under which his family is. Nathan is unable to look outside of his personal ambitions for his family’s sake.
It seems to us that Nathan does not simply neglect caring his family, but he does not love them at all. Being a male chauvinist he dismisses the women’s rights to have their own views on this or that issue. Nathan seems to take revenge on those who are capable of making him different from the one he wants to be. Nathan believes that God is always watching him and does not evaluate positively any activity that does not spread His name.
Nathan becomes enraged with his own sexual urges and he turns his rage on his family. Nathan’s constant abusive behavior and endangerment of the lives of his family cannot be justified by his faith in God, as it contradicts any religion existing in the world. Moreover, religious person should respect other people’s views on religion. In Nathan’s case there is absolute neglect of the Africans’ right for the religious freedom.
The Prices believe that they carry with them religion and culture that are far superior to those that already exist in Kilanga. They expect to become the masters of their new domain without taking into consideration that the villagers of Kilanga resist to any changes in the way of their life.
Nathan’s attempt to plant a vegetable garden that cannot bear fruit in this area is a symbol of his desire to become superior over the natives. But here his faith begins to waver and only after several weeks of idle attempts to plant a vegetable garden he realizes that there are no African pollinators that suit to North American vegetables. The thing is that Nathan was not simply trying to provide food for his family but to instruct the Africans in agricultural principles being reluctant to adjust his knowledge to the laws of African agriculture. In the long run Nathan’s garden grows huge but it never bears fruit. Isn’t it a perfect author’s hint on the Americans’ failure to bring their culture to the African village?
Also, the author is brilliant in describing the things that the Price family carried from America. The Prices believe that such things as cake mixes and pinking shears that they brought with them will help them to survive in Congo. But soon they realize that they have brought the wrong things – as these are not common things but their beliefs that they are burdened with. When the Prices leave the village they do not take their possessions but they carry the indelible mark that Africa has left on them.
All seventeen months that the Prices live in Kilanga Nathan never gives up his idea of baptizing the natives and he does not care that their religion satisfies them. He serves as a personal embodiment of Western colonialism and expose of cultural arrogance, in particular. Nathan is the head of his family and every member of it believes that the United States culture is superior to foreign ones.
We suppose that this was the author’s intention to show the United States’ attempts to impose their culture on other nations through creating the character of Nathan. This character’s wish to satisfy his own needs through the missionary activity is the basis for revealing the theme of the cultural arrogance of the West. Nathan’s reluctance to listen and to hear the needs of others – no matter whether it is his family or other nations – prevents him from breaking the cultural differences he has faced with.
Nathan is depicted both as the source of the problem arising and as the one who tries to solve them. Hence the importance of this character for revealing the novel’s leading themes. Nathan failed to overcome the cultural divergences as well as he failed to understand the people around. Who knows what devastating consequences this might have if we consider Nathan not as a mere character of the book, but as an embodiment of the problem that the modern society keeps on solving?
Works Cited
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. Harper Perennial, 1999.
Rubenstei, Roberta. “The Mark of Africa.” World and I Apr. 1999: 254.