660 Kingsolver, Barbara
catastrophes, hunger, political instability, and other
upheavals. This experience will turn into a test of
faith. The members of the Price family will face this
test not as a family kept together by a deeply suffo-
cating patriarchal figure, but as separate individuals
growing and gradually freeing themselves from the
grasp of that absolute ruler. As the Congo sees its
hope for democracy vanish after independence, the
Price family disintegrates into nothingness: The
fallen father is left behind somewhere in the Con-
golese jungle, and the girls-turning-into-women
construct their lives away from each other and
beyond the limits once imposed upon them by a
conservative Christian father. This text can be fur-
ther analyzed through three main themes: ethics,
family, and guilt. The notion of ethics plays out in
the roles played by the text’s Christian figures in the
Christianizing/colonizing process. Family is evoked
by the disintegration of the traditional Christian
family outside the Christian world. Finally, the
theme of guilt is the focus of the life choices of the
members of the disbanded Price family who, years
after the fall of their family and the democratic
Congo, reflect (or not) upon their responsibility in
the demise of both.
Sophie Croisy
ethicS in The Poisonwood Bible
In The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver conducts a
thorough critique of Christian ethics through the
intervention of multiple characters with a different
vision of Christianity, of its potential salvaging role,
and of Christians’ ethical responsibility in the world.
Baptist preacher and missionary Nathan Price’s
strict ethics, constructed upon traditional Christian
beliefs and teachings, are quite ascetic. Price is a
tyrannical, self-proclaimed messianic figure who
carries the word of God and thus must be respected
and obeyed. He won’t hesitate to force upon the
Kilanga community the idea of a baptism day in
the Kilanga River even though he knows that the
river is infested with crocodiles and thus deadly to
the children. His attachment to Christian ritual is
obsessive, and when Kilanga children start dying
fast from an epidemic of Kakakaka (dysentery),
his daughter Adah cannot help noticing that “he
doesn’t seem to mind the corpses so much as the
soul unsaved” since none of the dead children had
yet been baptized. His behavior here exemplifies
his daughter Rachel’s description of him as being
a man carrying “numerous deadly weapons” inside
him, these weapons being a patriarchal and colo-
nialist frame of mind.
There are, however, Christian characters in the
text whose idea of Christianity’s role in the colonial
and postcolonial Congo evolves through the rela-
tionship they build with this country. These Chris-
tian characters offer a positive and modern image
of Christianity, participate in a critical analysis of
Christian beliefs and ethics, and question the intrin-
sic goodness and worthiness of traditional Christian
values and some of the people practicing them. As
Brother Fowles once tells Orleanna Price, “For cer-
tain Mrs. Price, there are Christians, and then there
are Christians.”
Orleanna Price was raised a Christian and
believed in the goodness of the evangelizing task
before coming to the Congo, but she comes to
distrust her husband’s ambition because of his
incapacity to reconcile faith and life, to commu-
nicate and build a relationship with the leaders of
the Kilanga community toward which he shows no
respect. Unlike Reverend Price, Brother Fowles, a
missionary who had come to the Kilanga commu-
nity to preach the gospel before Nathan Price, was
able to build a relationship with the chief of the
Kilanga village, Tata Ndu. His role as a missionary
was not to impose an ethics of life based on Chris-
tian teachings, but to engage in conversations with
Tata Ndu about ethics and share Christian values
with him, hoping that some would be adopted by
the community. Although Brother Fowles never
managed to convince Tata Ndu that there were
great benefits in monogamy, “each of those wives
[in the community] has profited from the teachings
of Jesus. In my six years here I saw the practice of
wife beating fall into great disfavor. Secret little
altars to Tata Jesus appeared in most every kitchen,
as a result.” Brother Fowles has a very pedagogical
approach to missionary work, a communicative
approach always respectful of his interlocutor’s
opinion.
Leah Price marries a Congolese man and dis-
cards, little by little, all of her father’s Christian