The Poisonwood Bible Analysis

Finished 11-11-06
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Orleanna Price is the character who ties Barbara Kingsolver’s entire work, The Poisonwood Bible together. She dwells mostly in the past and views it with regret in relation to the decisions she made. Her feelings about the past comprise a theme of the novel; namely, guilt. Orleanna focuses mostly on her guilt in relation to what she has done to her children, but through this, one can see that the message of the novel is that lasting guilt is harmful, yet potentially beneficial in certain ways.

The root of Orleanna’s guilt comes from her decision to marry her husband Nathan. She feels that her action compromised her children’s lives in connection to the events in Africa. By marrying Nathan, she basically doomed her children to experience all the tragedies that were to befall them. Because of her belief and hope that Nathan truly did have God backing him up, she continued to follow him, even to Africa. She “trod on Africa without a thought” with the “[belief] there lay some marrow of honest instruction” (9) both in Africa and in Nathan. In this way, Nathan was Orleanna’s fountain of guilt.

Although Orleanna was finally able to leave Nathan, she still suffered from the repercussions of her decision to stay with him. For decades afterward, she thought continuously of Africa and desperately tried to self-counsel herself, “grow[ing] tragedy out of herself like a bad haircut” (408). She eventually came to terms with Africa and Nathan, “the Congo . . . slipp[ing] out of her old flesh, to pretend it isn’t scarred” (495). Her regret helped her remember everything that passed, and by remembering it she accepted it. If her memories had been suppressed, they would have ailed her, slowly but surely.

Orleanna’s deepest guilt was the death of Ruth May. “If only . . . [she] hadn’t let Nathan take [her family] to Kilanga in the first place” (324) her youngest daughter would not have died. The death of Orleanna’s “little beast, little favorite” (89) devastated her. Ruth May was the child that Orleanna “held in her arms for an hour after [Ruth May went] to sleep” (382). Her youngest daughter was her true love, her respite after the stress of raising three babies practically all at the same time, and after Ruth May was gone, Orleanna’s guilt increased. Even though Orleanna claimed that “[Adah] is her youngest now. . . she is still clutching her baby” (493).

Orleanna’s regret is shared by every character in the novel, even if it is not the same type of regret. Leah feels regret that she is not able to save Africa from the treachery of America’s involvement with the Congo, Adah has regret that she was such a burden to her family–particularly her mother–all those years, and Rachel regrets coming to Africa in the first place. Even Nathan felt guilty about and was “profoundly embarrassed by [Orleanna’s] pregnancies” (198).

However, despite all the regret and guilt present in the novel, Orleanna (the voice from which the reader gathers his or her perception of the past) still “pocket[s] [each] small miracle . . . [throughout] the whole of her life” (542). Even though guilt is a very omnipresent theme in The Poisonwood Bible, hope and acceptance still live on. Orleanna learns to look at her mistake of marrying Nathan in a positive view for if “[she] had . . . not married . . . Nathan, [her] . . . children would never have seen the light of this world” (324). Ruth May would have never been alive, for even the short period that she was on Earth, and Orleanna would have never known her. Orleanna accepted her destiny and knew that “Nathan Price was all the marriage [she] needed” (531). Her marriage to Nathan was enough to produce her children, whom she loves.

Guilt ruined Orleanna’s life; that is, she could have lived easier were she to forget her guilt. But by deciding to remember her guilt and accept it, she kept alive the memories of Africa and what took place there. She learned life lessons and finally accepted that her trials came merely of “walking through the valley of [her] fate” (324).