Humans have the unique ability to create artwork. Be that in the form of a painting, musical composition, or work of fiction, creativity is the ability to rearrange available materials to create something unique and innovative. Many writers view writing as a way to express their deepest ideas and emotions creatively. American journalist Earnest Hemmingway believed that “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Writers often will use their own life experiences to re-experience important parts of their lives and translate it into a story to share with the world. Barbara Kingsolver expresses her ideas on sexism, cultural imperialism, and religion by creating the fictional story of the Poisonwood Bible using her own life experiences as content for the story.
Childhood events can massively affect the direction and outcome of one’s life. Childhood is where people develop the aspects of themselves that determine who they are as a person and what they represent. Barbara Kingsolver fervently explores cultural imperialism in a way that relates back to her own childhood memories. Kingsolver recounts, “We lived in Central Africa… I got a real extreme look at what it’s like to be a minority. It was an enormous adventure that let me know at the age of seven that there’s a great big world out there” (Epstein). White Americans make up 72% of the population, which implies that many of them have never been a racial minority. Barbara Kingsolver was in the unique position as a white American seven year old to be able to experience being a racial minority and she thinks back on this when writing The Poisonwood Bible. Nathan Price and his family voyage to the Congo with the intention of spreading the Word of God t...
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...een Barbara Kingsolver’s own life and The Poisonwood Bible make it clear that she used many of her personal ideas and experiences to create a novel that shares her opinions on sexism, cultural imperialism, and religion.
Works Cited
Austenfeild, Anne Marie. “The Revelatory Narrative Circle in Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible.” Journal of Narrative Theory 36.2 (2006). 293-305. Project MUSE. Web 22 Jan. 2014.
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DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion. London: Greenwood press. 1999. Print.
Epstein, Robin. “Barbara Kingsolver.” The Progressive, Feb. 1996. Biography in context. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952. 1955. Print.
Inquiry Contract Research Essay The Poisonwood Bible took place in the Congo during the 1960’s, which was a time of political unrest for the Congolese. The Congo gained their independence from the Belgians in 1960, and elected their first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba wanted complete control of the country, including it’s natural resources, of which the United States had “gained strategic stake in” (Nzongola-Ntalaja) because it included uranium mines. At this time, America was in the midst of the Cold War with the USSR, so the control of these mines for America was critical, especially because they believed Lumumba was siding with the Soviets.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is a work of historical fiction. The novel is based the Congo in 1959, while it was still under Belgian control. Nathan Price is a southern Baptist preacher from Bethlehem, Georgia who uproots his family, consisting of wife and three daughters, and takes them on a mission trip to Kilanga. Orleanna Price, Nathan’s wife, narrates the beginning of each book within the novel. Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May rotate the narration throughout each book. Rachel is the oldest Price child, and high materialistic. She refuses to accept the ways of the Congo, believing that she is better than everyone simply because of where she had her start in life. Leah is the next oldest, and she is a self-proclaimed tomboy. She likes to climb trees and practically worships at the feet of her father. Adah is the handicapped one, with a physical deformity. However, this deformity does not limit her, instead making her the smartest of the Price girls. Ruth May is the baby of the family, and has not yet lost the childhood innocence that she views the world with. Barbara Kingsolver uses a very interesting narrative style in the novel, switching between four narrators between the ages of five and fifteen, who are all female. Kingsolver's use of multiple narrative perspectives serve to amplify life in the Congo during the early 1960s through characterization, religion, and politics.
Historically, the job of women in society is to care for the husband, the home, and the children. As a homemaker, it has been up to the woman to support the husband and care for the house; as a mother, the role was to care for the children and pass along cultural traditions and values to the children. These roles are no different in the African-American community, except for the fact that they are magnified to even larger proportions. The image of the mother in African-American culture is one of guidance, love, and wisdom; quite often the mother is the shaping and driving force of African-American children. This is reflected in the literature of the African-American as a special bond of love and loyalty to the mother figure. Just as the role of motherhood in African-American culture is magnified and elevated, so is the role of the wife. The literature reflects this by showing the African-American man struggling to make a living for himself and his family with his wife either being emotionally or physically submissive. Understanding the role of women in the African-American community starts by examining the roles of women in African-American literature. Because literature is a reflection of the community from which it comes, the portrayal of women in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain (1952) is consistent with the roles mentioned above.
Trilling, Lionel. "Review of Black Boy." Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York : Amistad, 1993.
Mary Wollstonecraft lived in a time where women had no right to vote, no right to education beyond what their mother or governess taught them, and basically no right to individuality or an opinion. They were considered possessions and virtually had no mind of their own. She realized that this was a problem of society and openly voiced her opinions on the matter. She wrote the book A Vindication of the Rights of Women in response to a literary response to the society's so-called proper behavior of a woman and what her rights should be. But her opinions were brought on by more that the ability to think for herself; she suffered much during her childhood and throughout the years to come. Wollstonecraft dealt with the beating of her mother and sister, death of a close friend, and even a nervous breakdown of her sister. Her own experiences in her life inspired her to write a book that would cause her to be criticized harshly for her radical views.
She goes on to tell readers of a child's perception of race with other life examples that she learned from her own students. She states that children learn prejudices and stereotypes early on in life from cartoons, story books and their own parents. They are easily susceptible these things even if th...
childhood was filled with thriving community as well as isolation from the hatred and racism that lurked outside of the confines of Eatonville. “[Zora’s] early childhood was so free from discrimination that it took a trip to Jacksonville, with its...
Hare writes that the color white symbolizes purity and black stands for evil and derogatory referent and that “... theirs brains,..., at last has been washed white as snow.”. At a young age, children are taught how to read children’s books. ‘“Why are they always white children?” asked by a five-year old Black girl” (Larrick, 63), as many books seen are only white. Nancy Larrick wrote an article about children’s book and argued how children’s books portrays only whites in books, while there are many non white children and white children across the United States that are reading these books about white children. Larrick also points out that across the country 6,340,000 million non white children are learning to read and understand the American way of life in books which either omit them entirely or scarcely mention them in it (63), and of the 5.206 children's book, only 394 included one or more blacks, which was an average of 6.7 per cent (64). Children’s books will not contain a black hero/heroine because in the books, being depicted as a slave or a servant, or better yet to ...
To the modern white women who grew up in comfort and did not have to work until she graduated from high school, the life of Anne Moody reads as shocking, and almost too bad to be true. Indeed, white women of the modern age have grown accustomed to a certain standard of living that lies lightyears away from the experience of growing up black in the rural south. Anne Moody mystifies the reader in her gripping and beautifully written memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, while paralleling her own life to the evolution of the Civil Rights movement. This is done throughout major turning points in the author’s life, and a detailed explanation of what had to be endured in the name of equality.
The early 1900s was a very challenging time for Negroes especially young women who developed issues in regards to their identities. Their concerns stemmed from their skin colors. Either they were fair skinned due mixed heritage or just dark skinned. Young African American women experienced issues with racial identity which caused them to be in a constant struggle that prohibits them from loving themselves and the skin they are in. The purpose of this paper is to examine those issues in the context of selected creative literature. I will be discussing the various aspects of them and to aid in my analysis, I will be utilizing the works of Nella Larsen from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Jessie Bennett Redmond Fauset, and Wallace Brown.
I chose this book not only for its representation of African-American characters, but also for portraying a family of an economic status that one usually does
The first effect of racism is a sense of loss. Children are first exposed to the world beyond their families via print and media. Western literature and movies often paint a similar picture – of blonde hair, blue-eyed children climbing trees and eating apples. This, as discussed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her TED talk ‘The Dangers of a Single Story’, subjects children to the single story of what books and childhood should be like. The sense of loss emerges when children of minority realize the reality of their lives wo...
In the novel, the author proposes that the African American female slave’s need to overcome three obstacles was what unavoidably separated her from the rest of society; she was black, female, and a slave, in a white male dominating society. The novel “locates black women at the intersection of racial and sexual ideologies and politics (12).” White begins by illustrating the Europeans’ two major stereotypes o...
...rt-breaking result of racism in the United States and the subject has made its way into the African American literary tradition. Slave narratives such as Douglass’ Narratives and Negro spirituals such as “I feel like my time ain’t long” and “Many Thousands Gone” have made African American literature true to the history that has been recorded. A present day controversial subject in our society is why can’t people, especially African Americans, forget about slavery and the adversity against African Americans? It is believed that African Americans have progressed and made advancement since that time; however, with writers like Elizabeth Alexander, the past just can’t go away forgotten; especially a past that was as gruesome as that of African Americans. Every single bloody lash, death and groaning happened and as she said we have to “say it plain” that it happened.
In this article “The Danger of a Single Story” Chimamanda Adichie talks about how the exclusively English and American books she read as a child lead her to believe that books were, essentially, about foreigners, and that they “had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.” Not only did this lack of representation of Africans in books make the author feel like books weren’t for or about people like her, but it also led a reader of her books to make negative sweeping generalizations about African people, because her book was the only representation of Africans that that reader had seen. This lack of representation hurt not only the people lacking representation, but the people