How does Kingsolver present themes of captivity, freedom, love, and betrayal in The Poisonwood Bible?

The Poisonwood Bible, written by Barbara Kingsolver, is a multi-faceted story about a family that moves to the Congo. Throughout the story, many themes are presented through multiple points of view. Some of these themes include freedom versus captivity and love versus betrayal.

A major part of this novel is the political unrest in the Congo. Many nations have tried to colonize the Congo, including the United States and Belgium. The people of the Congo are struggling with their own freedom and feel like captives because their country is not in their control. There is also a sense of love versus betrayal on the political front, as there is an assassination planned in the story.

Another example of freedom versus captivity as a theme is in the Price family itself. Nathan, the father of the family, decides to move his entire family of women to the Congo. His wife, Orleanna, has no say in many of the decisions Nathan makes for their family and is in a sense held captive in her own marriage. The daughters in this story are held captive by their father as well. He makes demanding requests of their behaviors and beliefs. The girls are required to share his same spiritual belief system which is essentially a fundamentalist and extremist mentality. By the end of the novel, most of the Price women have found a way to free themselves from their father.

Nathan also helps develop the theme of love versus betrayal. As a father, Nathan is supposed to make decisions that are best for his family. Throughout the entire story, Nathan makes choices that only benefit himself instead. His selfishness is a type of betrayal to his family. Orelanna also struggles with love and betrayal several times throughout this novel, although less so than her husband. Orleanna must choose between her daughters several times in this story, which although beneficial to one daughter is a betrayal to the others. Orleanna also betrays all of her daughters by remaining married to her husband. Although she knows that Nathan is poisoning her family, Orleanna does not make any adjustments and her family remains stuck in their situation.

The Poisonwood Bible is a great resource to spark discussion about many important literary themes.

There are several types of captivity explored in this novel. On the surface, the people of the Congo are captives in many ways - throughout their history of being colonized by other nations (in this novel, Belgium and then the U.S. trying to control them). So there is political captivity and freedom. The Congolese are attempting a freedom movement in this novel, and many of the characters are involved in it (Anatole, Leah, etc.) 

There is also spiritual and emotional captivity. All of the Price women are emotional captives of their father and husband, Nathan. He is abusive and controlling. They each have a unique emotional captivity as well - Adah is crippled emotionally and physically, Rachel is crippled emotionally and grows into a woman constantly seeking approval through low-life men. Orleanna is crippled emotionally and it scars her and affects her relationships with her children, etc. The women are also spiritual captives to Nathan's version of religion, which is presented as fundamental extremism in this novel. None of them experience any of the freedom that true faith allows, which is disturbing, since they are a family of missionaries supposed to be bringing the "good news" to the natives.

There is also physical captivity. Adah is handicapped physically, but eventually she is freed from her physical captivity. Nelson and Anatole all have physical issues that hold them captive for awhile (i.e. Anatole's scarred face).

There is also cultural captivity. The Underdowns are closed-minded and racist so in a sense, they are captives of their own colonizers' mentality.

What types of captivity and freedom are explored in The Poisonwood Bible?

Two of the many kinds of captivity Kingsolver explores in The Poisonwood Bible, a novel of impressive sweep, are the captivity of one's preconceived ideas and the captivity of poverty.

Nathan Price arrives in Kilanga in the Congo as a Baptist preacher and becomes the captive of his inability to change his ideas or bend to the realities of his new home. He is a captive of survivor's guilt from living through the Battaan Death March in World War II, and this makes him rigid. He wants to impress the "natives" with the superiority of his own culture in order to convert them, but he only bemuses them, such as when he dynamites the river to impress them with the number of fish he can kill. His lack of ability to communicate in the native language symbolizes his inability to communicate in general. His captivity to his own ideas makes him an ineffectual minister and father. Rachel, who is most like her father, also becomes a captive of American ideology, including keeping up a happy face, and a captive of her own emotional scars, isolated and limited in her fine American hotel.

Leah, in contrast, becomes liberated from the narrow-mindedness that holds her father captive, but, especially after her marriage to Anatole, becomes the captive of African poverty. She won't take advantage of her white privilege and so lives as the native Africans do. Through Leah, white audiences get a strong sense of how hunger and lack of protein can come to preoccupy and limit a life.

Adah Price, like the many maimed Africans who don't have the protections commonplace to more privileged peoples, transcends the captivity of her body's limitations, and as Kingsolver shows, develops her mind and soul. While she never underrates poverty or disability as a form of captivity, Kingsolver points to narrow-mindedness as possibly the worst captivity.

Another way capitivity and freedom is represented is in the form of physical deformity.  Adah is deformed and in the USA she is the object of scrutiny for her deformity...she is trapped in a body that will not perform to her orders.  In the Congo, however, everyone has some sort of deformity as a byproduct of life.  Their neighbor lost her legs in a fire and scoots around on her behind using her arms as most use their legs.  Because of this, Adah feels "free" here.  The only reason people stare at her here is because she is white...not because of her deformity.

Also, Methuselah, the parrot, is freed from his cage where he had lived through three missionary families.  However, because he had been in the cage for so long, he never leaves the area.  It is as if he has forgotten how to fly.  He lives in the nearby tree by day and the latrine by night until the cat kills and eats him, thus "freeing" him from life in the Congo.

Captivity and freedom is shown in two ways. First, it's shown in how Nathan treats the Africans, representing what happens when one country imposes its beliefs on a foreign culture. It's also shown in how Nathan treats his family. Both situations reflect the theme of free will.

Nathan tries to force his beliefs of Christianity upon the villagers, but he never attempts to understand their culture. He misuses their language and sees them all as heathens. He never considers things from their perspective. He represents the corruption of America's colonization and its participation in overthrowing governments for their own interests. The villagers are able to resist Nathan because they've already established their spiritual and cultural views.

Nathan's family is held captive because he controls their lives. He's never allowed them to establish a strong sense of themselves outside of the family. The freedom of his wife and daughters comes at a very high price. Orleanna, his wife, finally gathers enough courage to break away from Nathan when her daughter Ruth dies. Leah becomes independent when she joins Anatole and stays in Africa. Adah eventually rejects her cynical views and feels sympathy for the poverty-stricken lives of the natives.

What types of love and betrayal does Kingsolver explore in The Poisonwood Bible?

Nathan's lack of love for his family is also his betrayal of them. He rules them with an iron hand, cruelly abusing them. He betrays them when he doesn't allow his wife or daughters to explore any sense of themselves outside of the family. His wife, Orleanna, knows he could never love her because he believes it's his duty to save the Africans from themselves.

Orleanna loves her daughters, but she continues to stay with Nathan, thus betraying her daughters. It isn't until Ruth May, her youngest daughter, dies that she gets the courage to try and get her other daughters out of Africa. Ruth May's death haunts her for the rest of her life, and she feels she betrayed her by not taking her daughters out sooner.

The major theme of the book is the effect of colonialism on the people of Africa. The effect of colonialism is seen through the eyes of the Price family. Europe and the U.S. exploited Africa for its riches, forcing its people into labor. This colonialism is a betrayal of the people of Africa and the love those people have for their country. Colonialism destroyed their traditions, bringing chaos into their lives.

What is the main theme of Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible?

Although it is difficult and reductive to discuss any significant work of literature in terms of a single theme (on this point see, for instance, Richard Levin’s classic indictment of thematic criticism, titled New Readings vs. Old Plays), certainly a few major themes do suggest themselves to anyone reading Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible.  Partly this is because Kingsolver is clearly intent on making various thematic points, sometimes stating them quite openly (as in the second quotation below).  One of those points, for instance, involves attempts to impose domination and the kinds of resistance such attempts often provoke.  Perhaps the main example of a person in this novel who tries to impose domination is the father, Nathan Price, who not only attempts to dominate (and thereby eventually alienates) his wife and daughters but who also tries to dominate nature and native Africans during his time as a Christian missionary in the Congo. He is in many ways a representative of arrogant colonialism, and both his family and the Africans with whom he comes into contact suffer the results of his efforts to impose control of various kinds.

In one passage, for instance, his young daughter Leah describes how her father attempts to prepare a garden in their new African location:

He beat down a square of tall grass and wild pink flowers, all without ever once looking at me.  Then he bent over and began to rip out long handfuls of grass with quick, energetic jerks as though tearing out the hair of the world.  . . . He often says he views himself as the captain of a sinking mess of female minds. I know he must find me tiresome, yet still I like spending time with my father very much more than I like doing anything else.

This passage suggests both the positives and the negatives of Nathan Price as a father, a Christian missionary, and a man.  On the one hand he is hard-working, energetic, and determined. On the other hand he is not especially sensitive either to natural beauty or to the needs or perceptions of others.  There is a certainly violence implied in the passage just quoted, as well as a clear implication of patriarchal domination and the desire to transform things and people (in this case the landscape) to suit his own sense of what he needs and wants.  His frustration with his wives and daughters is somewhat comic at this point in the book, but, as the novel develops, he will ultimately lose their affection and be deserted by them.  Finally, the villagers whom he came to “help” will turn against him and in fact burn him alive. His efforts to dominate and control his family and the native Africans will eventually result in great losses for himself and for his wife and children. Toward the end of the book, another daughter, Adah, who is now an adult and who has not only escaped her father’s influence but who has also become a medical researcher, reflects on the ambiguities of colonialism, including (implicitly) the kind of colonialism represented by Nathan Price:

In the service of saving Africa’s babies and extracting its mineral soul, the West has built a path to its own door and thrown it wide for the plague.

What issues does Kingsolver raise in The Poisonwood Bible?

Nathan the Christian missionary shares the assumptions of many white Westerners regarding Africa. He sees it as a hotbed of savagery, backwardness, and rampant superstition. In particular, he has a profound contempt for native religious practices, which he sees as evil and barbaric. What Africans need, according to him, is to be instructed in the ways of Christ, and he, Nathan, is going to play his part in bringing the word of God to these poor, benighted "savages."

In the hands of Nathan and those like him, Christianity is no longer just a religion; it becomes a weapon of imperialism, a way of keeping the indigenous people under the control of their alleged racial and cultural superiors.

Nathan may very well be sincere in his desire to save those "unable to save themselves," but at no point has he ever stopped to ask himself whether the Congolese either want or need to be saved. Like the arrogant imperialist he is, he blithely assumes that these supposedly backward people are incapable of making their own decisions in life and must therefore be told what to do and how to behave by their alleged betters.

In Nathan's hands, Christianity has become a blunt instrument of imperialism, a useful means for undermining indigenous tradition. Kingsolver's implication is that in an African context, what is supposed to be a religion of peace has been distorted in order to provide moral justification for the domination and control of indigenous peoples.