The Symbolic Significance of Methuselah as It Reflects the Price Family in Specific and the Congo in General in the Book "The Poisonwood Bible"

In Life, you can’t force people to do something they don’t want to do or be someone they’re not. In the historical fiction novel The Poisonwood Bible, Orleanna Price experiences such a rough quarrel and becomes cut off from her hometown. Orleanna Price who is Nathan’s wife becomes indignant with her husband’s decisions to take a missionary trip to the Congo. She was a very intelligent woman but because of her husband behavior she is sometimes forced to hide her own talents from others. The Price family experience while being in the Congo started to drift their family away from each other as a whole. They were not mentally or physically stable to fit in Africa but with the help of others they were able to get along in the Congo. Mama Mwanza

Orleanna is the mother of four daughters and her being this character as well as her personality of being caring and invested in others creates her purpose for the story as retelling the story of her family and their trip to the Congo. She is creating this scene to show what happened and how she has learned from this experience and hopes to improve others lives based on her experiences. In the political allegory, Orleanna is the person in the world who has seen the wrong doing’s of the world, in this case the imperialism of countries, and advises those to step up and support the cause bettering lives of those less fortunate. Her character creates a call to action through the miseries she has seen her family struggle through. The author’s purpose in writing The Poisonwood Bible is to not only show the different influences and outcomes that colonialism has on people and nations, but to also show that it is wrong and not necessarily the superior way of doing something. Orleanna is the spokesperson for how the colonialism is wrong and something must

There is strong juxtaposition in The Poisonwood Bible when it comes to American versus Congolese culture. While Mama Mwanza is viewed as equal in the Congo for her disability, Adah is considered an outcast in American society because of her hemiplegia. Ruth May talks about Mama Mwanza’s disability as if it is something strange, yet she reveals that the people living in their village do not look at Mama Mwanza as any different from them. She says that “Why, they just don’t let on, like she was a regular person. Nobody bats their eye when she scoots by on her hands and goes on down to her field or the river to wash clothes with the other ladies that work down there every day.” The phrasing of this implies that the Price family looks at Mama Mwanza

When Orleanna's family first landed in Africa, they absolutely despised every aspect of it, they were disgusted by the way the Congolese people dressed, they disliked their life style, and basically dreaded being in Africa. Their perspective of Africa changed the longer they stayed. Ruth May ended up teaching and playing with some of the children despite the fact that she does not speak the local language. Rachel got first hand experience as to how the people of Africa lived, but her opinion of them remained relatively the same. Adah on the other hand changed a lot after her trip to Africa. When she returned to America to go to college, she thought that everything in America was just bland and pointless. Adah's whole mindset . Orleanna herself has also gained a better understanding while she stayed in Africa. Right before she left, she gave away all of her family possessions to a woman, knowing that she will need it more. “All of them had lost children before, it dawned on me through my shock. A quote said by Leah “Our suffering now was no greater than theirs had been, no more real or tragic. No different” (Kingsolver, 1998) shows that she understands what the Congolese people lost, and how they are no

During the beginning of the Price family’s arrival at the Congo, the family settles in an unfamiliar land of Kilanga and Nathan is being portrayed as the physical representation of the American perspective on the African people by creating conflict. Since the family is from Georgia, the surroundings and the atmosphere of

Symbols have a major impact on both Things Fall Apart and The Poisonwood Bible. They help display the story in different perspectives and help us understand concepts we don’t always pick up on when first reading the novels. These symbols reveal more in depth detail about the themes of each novel as well as add to the development of characters. Some major symbols seen in Things Fall Apart are the locusts which make a reference to the Bible and are a metaphor for the coming missionaries, Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, who symbolizes Okonkwo’s failures, and fire which symbolizes destruction. The major themes in The Poisonwood Bible are the snake which represents a character from the bible, Methuselah who symbolizes the fate of the Congo and the poisonwood tree which symbolizes Nathan’s mistakes.

Book two is entitled “The Revelation” and the girls’ sections is entitled “The Things We Learned.” The Revelation was intended to mainly the Price family, excluding the father. The theme revelation has another definition: apocalypse. In the bible, the apocalypse leads to destruction and demise right before when God makes it a better place. In connection to the book, at this time the new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba was elected. This election set the stage for the independence movement in the Congo. In addition, Methuselah (the parrot) passes away as soon as he is freed, after being banned from liberation for most of his life. This foretells the destiny of Congo and the delicate independence they acquired. The Book of Revelation explains about how God’s creation encountered savagery and anguish so that it will become altered. The Belgian doctor who treats Ruth May for her broken arm has a little conflict with the Reverend. He prophesies that Congo will experience savagery and anguish if it changes to a self-determining state from a colony. In the Revelation section of the story, all the members of the Price family come to face a new sense of comprehension about the Congo’s culture, plants, animals and tradition. Throughout the book, the characters go through many hardships and success which permits them to learn

The only answer for this can be because Leubal was motivated by some internal need to help her because of her humanity. He felt it was somehow his duty to keep her because she was a human being and he identified with her suffering. She suffered because she was a slave, and because he was a crucial element of the system that hurt her so, Leubal felt obliged to make amends. At his personal economic expense, he decided to ease his conscience and do something that would be out-of-the-ordinary for any slaveholder of the time. To alleviate his guilt, he offered humanity. Leubal was a slaveholder whose conscience would not let him treat humans as property.2

No one shows the oppression, inflicted upon the Congo’s people in hope of spreading imperialism, better than the main characters in this story. Nathans only goal is to convert all of the native people’s beliefs to Christianity. By hoping to doing this, they will be able to grasp control and establish their dominance upon the village. This can be seen through Orleannas thoughts, “Call it oppression, complicity stupefaction, call it what you’d like, it doesn’t matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror’s music and sang a new song of her own” (Kingsolver 385). Kingsolver shows that individuals are always going to want and demand control, however the victims of this oppression will fight past it and won’t give in. Many people have come before the Price family, trying to do the same thing. However, the natives are smarter than to give into their new ideologies.

a novel titled Fools Crow. In this story, Mik-api’s experience as a medicine man not only provides an insight into the spirituality of the Native American culture, but it also has a great impact on the story. The author portrays this with great artistic quality through the sharing Mik-api’s story of

This can be read as a religious allegory because it talks about the Baptist missionaries. They had to deal with the rejection from the Congolese people. The Congolese people rejected the religion and the Price family since they were white. The Price family also had to deal with the same diseases and situations as the people of the Congo. They had to sleep with mosquito nets or the mosquitos would have eaten them alive. Some of the Prices (Leah, Adah and Orleanna) almost got eaten by

in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. She was exiled by her family but found

Father to the Price family, Nathan Price emerged his family into this mission in the hopes to spread religion to Congo. He chose to endanger his family in the hopes that he would be able to affect the religion of everyone he influenced. Similar to Rachel, Nathan also represents western ideals influencing Congo. Nathan believed that an education for women was a waste. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes. [...] It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes." This proves that Nathan Price was sexism towards his family was driven by his belief of Christianity. Throughout the book Nathan represents the Christianity in America in the sixties.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines oppression as the “prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control”. It also defines freedom as “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint”. In his novel, A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah effectively uses symbols to emphasize the story’s central theme of oppression and freedom in order to portray how certain objects improved his state of emancipation. The plot is based on real events that Ishmael Beah endured during the Sierra Leone Civil War as a solider. A few of the symbols he uses to emphasize the central theme is Ishmael’s gun, cassettes and drugs.

The use of this allusion at this point in the novel is a strange moment of irony, and a dark foreshadowing of the fate of the Congo. Throughout the novel, Methuselah and the Congo lead parallel journeys: Methuselah is locked in a cage for so long that once set free, he is still dependent on his captors and thus unable to fly—very similar to that of the relationship between the Congo and its colonizers. As Methuselah’s death falls on the day of the Congo’s independence, Adah sees his death in a hopeful light, drawing a literal comparison of Dickinson’s poem to his feathers (Kingsolver 226). For her, both Methuselah and the Congo have finally achieved freedom. So although Methuselah’s fallen feathers actually mean his murder, it’s still a sign