Research

Title: Chosen people: American exceptionalism in Kingsolver's the poisonwood bible Author(s): Susan Strehle Source: **//CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.//** 49.4 (Summer 2008): p413. From //Student Resources in Context//. Document Type: Critical essay

Full Text: ABSTRACT: Kingsolver has called The Poisonwood Bible "a political allegory," developing complex links between the private domestic story of the Price family and the public political narrative of U.S. intervention in the Congo. The novel shows how American exceptionalism reproduces itself in the American home, as Nathan's assumptions about chosen people shape his daughters. After Lumumba and Ruth May die, the daughters choose unsettled homes and complex, diverging paths away from their father's American legacies. Keywords: allegory, political, in fiction; American exceptionalism, Congo, history in literature; home, ideology in; Barbara Kingsolver Barbara Kingsolver was moved to write her epic novel, The Poisonwood Bible (1998), by what she calls "my belief that what happened to the Congo is one of the most important political parables of our century" (Web site). Her goals in this successful, important novel go well beyond criticizing U.S. foreign policy in Africa during the cold war: in the character of Nathan Price, she explores the American assumptions that create national arrogance; and in the characters of his wife, Orleanna, and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May, she considers various ways in which American citizens are rendered passive supporters of, and eventually resistant heirs to, a legacy of imperialism. She calls her novel "a political allegory," an elaborately researched "historical fiction" combining "political and domestic" elements; she says that she wrote it "because as an adult I'm interested in cultural imperialism and post-colonial history" (Web site). She observes that people in the United States "can hardly even say the word 'postcolonial.' We like to think we're the good guys," and thus we avoid recognizing what has been done in our name (Web site). (1) As Kingsolver sees it, the American public did not approve of the decisions made regarding the newly independent Congo; few even knew. Thus, in her allegory, "We're the captive witnesses, just like the wife and daughters of Nathan Price" (Web site). The meanings of Kingsolver's allegory, its complex linkages between the private domestic story of the Price family and the public political narrative of imperialism and murder, have not been adequately explored in published criticism. Indeed, although the novel won prestigious prizes, sold millions of copies, and remains popular almost a decade after its publication, relatively few critical essays have discussed it. (2) Among these, one focuses on home in the novel (Jacobson), while one clarifies the political history of U.S. intervention in the Congo (Kunz); but neither explores their joined implications. No essay reads the novel in light of Kingsolver's allegorical project. Although at least one writer regards the novel as Kingsolver's "masterwork" (Snodgrass 34), others voice reservations that emerge from an insufficient understanding of the novel's allegory. The Poisonwood Bible has been criticized as "preachy," "sentimental," and "a didactic work" with an overly simple and "schematized view of moral life" (Demory 191, 192; York 148-49). Critics have faulted Kingsolver's development of characters, finding Nathan and Rachel simply "bad," and Leah, Anatole, and Brother Fowles simply "good" (Jacobson; York). Others object to her portrayal of Africa as "an essentialized [...] figure" of suffering with a romanticized past (Koza 288) or as an Edenic locus for the disabled (Fox 410). One critic finds the novel self-reflexive and misses its politics altogether: "The Poisonwood Bible is finally more concerned with its own discursive constructedness than with the history and the political, material reality of the Congo" (Jacobs 116). The novel can be understood through its allegory as a powerful artistic reflection on cultural imperialism, I believe; Kingsolver's complex links between private and public, home and homeland, illuminate the novel's focus on American exceptionalism. No recent historian has defined American exceptionalism as well, ironically, as the neoconservative Samuel Huntington, who argues uncritically in favor of renewing American identity after 9/11 through a return to America's foundational values. For Huntington, America should recall its evangelical origins to unify and mobilize the Anglo-Protestant core culture in a restorative "clash" against Islam. He recalls the basis for America's historically exceptional status in Who Are We?: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans defined their mission in the New World in biblical terms. They were a "chosen people" on an "errand in the wilderness," creating "the new Israel" or the "new Jerusalem" in what was clearly "the promised land." America was the site of a "new Heaven and a new earth, the home of justice," God's country. The settlement of America was vested, as Sacvan Bercovitch put it, with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest. This sense of holy mission was easily expanded into millenarian themes of America as "the redeemer nation" and "the visionary republic." (64) (3)Considering himself the chosen emissary of a divinely inspired nation, Nathan affirms just such a sense of America's exceptional status. The Poisonwood Bible shows the historical impact of U.S. intervention in the Congo largely through the retrospective narration of Orleanna. The novel focuses, however, on the reproduction of an exceptionalist national ideology in the American home, together with the passivity that enables it. Through allegory, the novel narrates the logic that sustains an imperialist mission to impose American doctrine on other lands; it also dramatizes the patriarchal mission to create a network of support by disciplining young Americans as quiescent domestic subjects. The story is largely told by four daughters, one sixteen, twins of fourteen, and one five when they arrive in Africa in 1959; their youth reflects Kingsolver's interest in girls' formative education in and by the home. (4) An evangelical Baptist missionary, Nathan practices both hegemonic discipline of his wife and daughters and, occasionally, the violent abuse latent in his attitude toward women and inferior others. Both strategies aim to produce just the docile bodies needed for the reproduction of the imperial home and the maintenance of empire. I begin with analysis of Nathan, showing in some detail how he enacts American exceptionalism. I turn then to the four daughters, exploring how they are taught the absence of their own election, instructed in a binary vision of reality, and disciplined into silence and passivity. Nathan shapes all of his daughters, each of whom reflects him in different ways and battles his legacy with various results, considered in the final section. "His Confidenee in the Lord Is Exceptional" In his journey to the Congo, Nathan recapitulates the founding of America. A new Puritan, he preaches the salvation of Christianity and the damnation awaiting those who refuse it, the superiority of American farming methods and technology, and the exceptional qualities of American civilization. Since the Lord has saved him from the Bataan Death March, Nathan believes that he is intended for a great and significant mission: his "confidence in the Lord is exceptional" (276). He believes that God has chosen him to bring the Word to a new frontier in the African wilderness, where he will create a purified community. Returning to the model of Christ's baptism in the River Jordan, he hopes to baptize saved Africans in the crocodile-infested Kwilu River. Nathan is arrogant, inflexible, and passionately committed: in short, an American exceptionalist. Persuaded of Americans' election as the chosen people, he ignores local Congolese customs, resists help and information from villagers, and strenuously insists throughout on his own exceptional destiny. These same dismissive attitudes toward Africans, coupled with an inexorable certainty of American power and right, inform America's actions in the Congo during the time of the novel (1959-61). America did not invent imperialism or the exploitation of Africa: Kingsolver reminds readers of the sordid history of imperial control under Belgium, which extracted a vast fortune in rubber and diamonds from an enslaved population. When the Underdowns, a Belgian missionary couple, tell the Prices that Belgium "went on speaking of rule with a fatherly hand" Orleanna objects: "Using these people like slaves in your rubber plantations and your mines and I don't know what all? We've heard what goes on [...] One old fellow got his hand whacked off up at Coquilhatville, and ran away while he was still spurting blood!" (165). Horrific tales of murder, rape, and the chopping off of Congolese hands carne out of the Belgian Congo, detailed by Adam Hochschild in King Leopold's Ghost (1998). But when Belgium granted independence and charismatic Patrice Lumumba was elected prime minister in June 1960, the United States intervened to overthrow a government and depose a leader. Desperate to prevent a communist takeover--"another Cuba" in Africa--top U.S. officials decided that Lumumba must be removed (Berkeley 110). In August 1960, CIA director Allen Dulles called the change of leadership an "urgent and prime objective," and in September, Dulles cabled Leopoldville that "we wish give every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position" (Wrong 79-80; Kalb 102). A scientist was sent with poison (never used) to kill Lumumba, and $1 million was funneled through the United Nations to support an alternative leader, Joseph Mobutu, with what Kingsolver calls "freshly purchased soldiers" (320). Rebel troops finally murdered Lumumba in January 1961, leaving the American-supported Mobutu to enjoy thirty-six years of despotic "kleptocracy" from which the Congo has not yet recovered (Berkeley 111; Wrong). American imperialism works to distinguish itself from its European antecedents by championing freedom and democracy, disavowing outright profits, claiming benevolence, and asserting that American righteousness makes American acts right. (5) These understandings color the narrative of American intervention in the Congo. As the story unfoided to the public, first in 1975 in the Senate Select Committee headed by Frank Church (D-Idaho), and then in severa] books detailing events leading to Mobutu's dictatorship, President Eisenhower himself authorized the assassination and overthrow of the government (Kalb 102-03; Wrong 80; Berkeley 110). He must have believed that sacrificing an elected leader's life in the name of Western security was fundamentally different from the brutalities of Belgian colonial rule; thus he would distance his own "fatherly hand" from the Belgians'. He probably thought of the action as necessary for the safety of a free world caught in cold-war oppositions, rather than imperialist meddling in the choices of an independent democratic people. Diane Kunz concludes that the United States acted on "credible" fears that Lumumba would be "easy prey" for an assault by "Communist agents" who "actively subverted liberal institutions in the United States and elsewhere. [...] Equally clearly we can understand that for Africa, Communist domination would have been at least as great a disaster as what eventually befell the continent" (295). In her view, American intervention was appropriate and necessary. Yet from Kingsolver's perspective, the president and his administration acted from positions much like that of Nathan: arrogant, persuaded they spoke for God and goodness, they pursued a course founded on America's exceptionalist identity as the world's chosen people. (6) In characterizing Nathan as an American exceptionalist, Kingsolver takes care to root Nathan's religion in American Puritanism, buttressed by his confidence in the providential history of his nation. Americans are God's chosen people, he holds, and of his family's endeavor, he might say with William Bradford that "their condition was not ordinary, their ends were good and honorable, their calling lawful and urgent; and therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding" (Miller 14). Nathan's God practices simple, direct justice: "God created a world of work and rewards [...] on a big, balanced scale" Nathan says, so righteous acts will be rewarded (37). Because God watches and judges constantly, the Prices, like the Puritans, can read God's justice in the small events of their daily domestic lives. When they devote themselves to duty and self-denial, they will thrive; bur if they fall into idleness and dissipation, punishment will follow as their just deserts. Orleanna recalls: Nathan believed one thing above all else: that the Lord notices righteousness, and rewards it. [...] if we suffered [...] it was proof that one of us had committed a failure of virtue. I understood the failure to be mine. If I stood still for a moment in the backyard between hanging up sheets to notice the damp grass tingling under my bare feet, His eyes observed my idleness. God heard whenever I let slip one of my father's curse words, and He watched me take my bath, daring me to enjoy the warm water. (200)Because suffering is the just consequence of a failure of virtue, misfortune conveys God's negative judgment--for Nathan, a judgment of others. Nathan's faith in God is complemented by his belief in the superiority of American civilization. He plans to introduce American farming practices with a "demonstration garden" in Kilanga; he will show the Congolese how to raise American crops like Kentucky Wonder beans and Big Boy tomatoes and then supply food and seeds to the Africans (35). To produce this American bounty, and despite Mama Tataba's advice that seeds will not grow in the Congo unless be mounds the earth, Nathan reconfigures African earth into American farmland. He levels the garden into "flat-as-Kansas beds," making them "as flat as the Great Plains" (63, 41). He believes that civilization comes to Africa only from without, from its colonizers who import their superior cultures: "The Belgians and American business brought civilization to the Congo! American aid will be the Congo's salvation" (121). He tells Leah that, after independence, American aid will "set right" the slums outside Leopoldville (231-32). With a naive faith in the American government's will to solve problems in the Congo that it has not addressed in American cities, be sees America as the redeemer nation. Above all, he believes in American instrumentalism, that "take-hold" initiative to solve problems with technology. To reenact and update Jesus's biblical miracle of the loaves and fishes, he uses imported American dynamite; be has men throw it into the river, killing thousands of fish. As Adah reports, the fish rot because of a lack of refrigeration, and "[o]ur village was blessed for weeks with the smell of putrefaction" (70). In the tradition of American independence and individualism, Nathan practices Emersonian self-reliance. When the Underdowns arrive at the airport to help the Prices navigate through customs, "Father made it clear we were completely self-reliarit" (17). Mama Tataba's advice to create mounds in the garden and her warning not to touch the poisonwood tree strike Nathan as meddlesome, and he dismisses her. When drought and famine dry up the food supply and Orleanna and Ruth May lie sick with malaria, "The Reverend seemed unconcerned" writes Adah (217). He dismisses his translator, Anatole, and delivers sermons by himself in "wildly half-baked Kikongo" (213). Although Nathan might wish to model his independent self-determination in the wilderness after American heroes like James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking, it falls ironically short. In fact, Nathan relies for his life on the labor of his wife and daughters and the gifts of his African neighbors, whose help he ignores. Nathan believes in his cultural and racial superiority to the Congolese. To adapt Chinua Achebe's memorable phrase for Conrad, Nathan combines the "evil of imperial exploitation" with "the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth" (Achebe 349). Nathan regards Africans as lacking in maturity, intellect, and sophistication; he also condemns them as pagans who worship false gods. In his first words to the people of Kilanga who have prepared a feast of welcome, he rails against their "Nakedness [...] and darkness of the soul!" in a biblical harangue comparing them to the denizens of Sodom and Gomorrah (Kingsolver, Poisonwood 27; emphasis in original). Nathan dismisses the people's belief in gods and ancestors as false idolatry and the traditional priest Tata Kuvudundu as a witch doctor (131). He considers Brother Fowles foolish and deluded in his respect for the Congolese, and he ridicules Orleanna for treating Anatole as a valued guest at dinner. The Congolese, he says, "don't have the temperament or the intellect" to want political freedom and apply "the logic of children in a display of childish ignorance" (168, 332). In the distorted evolutionary logic of nineteenth-century imperialism, Nathan considers Africa as inadequately evolved, backward, primitive--a childish culture dwarfed by its grown-up Westem colonizers--and thus in need of help from the advanced West. As Leah puts it, "My father thinks the Congo is just lagging behind and he can help bring it up to snuff" (284). Nathan's attitudes toward women follow from his patriarchal faith in God's masculinity and his contempt for those not identical to himself. He believes that women's purpose in life is to marry and support their mates: "My father says that a girl who fails to marry is veering from God's plan," Leah writes (149). As a result, when Leah and Adah are declared "exceptional children" by their elementary school principal, Nathan "warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much for us. 'Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say [...] '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'" (56). Women's ideas and voices annoy Nathan, who complains about the "blabber" of his family and who "often says he views himself as the captain of a sinking mess of female minds" (34, 36). His attitudes reduce women to bodies, but he abhors the female body as well for its temptation to sin. He rejects sexuality, hates and fears nakedness, and feels embarrassed by Orleanna's pregnancies; he responds to intercourse with guilt, "blaming me [Orleanna] for my wantonness" (198). As Leah comes to realize, women have no place in her father's system of values--indeed, no place in his view of the Kingdom of Heaven: "For Father, the Kingdom of the Lord is an uncomplicated place, where tall, handsome boys fight on the side that always wins. [...] But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules don't quite apply to us, nor protect us either" (244). Women and girls cannot be exceptional, in Nathan's view; their proper role is quiet, humble acquiescence to and support for the exceptional man. Nathan's character does not speak or write his own sections of The Poisonwood Bible, but he dominates his wife and daughters to such an extent that he remains central to the novel. He serves as a negative portrait, not of the Christian missionary or the masculine head of household, but rather of the American exceptionalist convinced of his own righteousness. Kingsolver describes him as "charismatic and complex" and insists that he "is single-minded all right, but hardly one-sided" (Web site). As I have argued, Nathan demonstrates a web of arrogant attitudes that undergird and explain a particularly American version of self-righteous imperialism. Although Nathan has nothing to do with the decision to overthrow the Congo's government and assassinate its leader, his attitudes have everything to do with those of the historical figures who made the decisions. Nathan uses his power over his children--the "exceptional" twins, the less gifted Rachel and young Ruth May--to reduce, channel, and contain their gifts. He would make them into girls and citizens who do not think for themselves, but passively accept the decisions of others. Kingsolver's novel has a pointed feminist awareness of the limited roles taught to and required of women in America. But the narrative of their education extends beyond exposing the devaluation of girls to suggest how children of both genders can be disciplined into the passivity required for a broad-based support of imperialism. At this level, the novel meditates on the production of citizens who offer blind trust and acceptance to their leaders and thereby enable their nation to commit atrocities: it explores the conditions of possibility for American exceptionalism. In this sense, the novel is about America's international posture and politics, as well as the reproduction of American ideology in the home. (7) Training "Exceptional Children" When the Prices fly to the Congo, they carry vital parts of their American home with them. They bring a hammer, seeds, and Betty Crocker cake mixes. They bring schoolbooks and homework, so the education of Rachel, Leah, and Adah can go on undisturbed. They bring fabric, intended for baptismal dresses for African children, but used for curtains to enable a Western privacy otherwise unknown in the small town of Kilanga. They bring a photograph of America's president, Eisenhower, which Orleanna will hang in the kitchen house for its symbolic assurance that the family has not traveled beyond his benevolent reach. Orleanna brings embroidery hoops, thread, and patterns for her daughters: they will work on linens for their hope chests, dedicated to the promised reproduction of the home in their married lives. As they travel, padded by the excess baggage they have worn on their bodies, they are exporting the American home--materials to replicate it, as well as assumptions about its cultural superiority--in ways that graphically insulate them against contact with the colonized land. The goal of their American home is self-propagation: to replicate Georgia in the jungle, to convert Africans to Western worship, to transmogrify Congolese earth into Kansas fields, and to raise children prepared for and enthusiastic about the perpetuation of America's religious and secular values. Although each daughter is unique, all are shaped by their experience in the Price household. Kingsolver self-consciously writes about home: "I've spent hundreds of pages, even whole novels, trying to explain what home means to me. Sometimes I think it's the only thing I ever write about," she says in "Household Words" (197). In fact, as I will show later in this essay, the Price women eventually secede from their father's home and refuse to reproduce it in their later lives; I agree with Ruth Smith and Kristin Jacobson that this novel unsettles home. (8) One of Kingsolver's achievements in this allegorical novel, however, is to illuminate the subtle but inexorable shaping power of home, which operates to bring the Prices into line with the Eisenhowers. Although critics have explored their differences, showing how the girls' values, like their voices, are impressively distinct, their similarities comment in important ways on how the American home constructs a domestic support system for an exceptionalist ideology. In Nathan's understanding, God's chosen people are male; women may be called as helpers and mates, but they need to be trained above all else to accept their secondary and supporting status. Rachel comments that "[i]t's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them" (337). For the daughters, his indifference and Orleanna's exhaustion teach the girls to compete for a limited amount of love and to obsess about being chosen--or more accurately, about being passed over. The most dramatic example of this occurs to Adah, whose life changes course on the night her mother chooses Ruth May to carry as she flees the driver ants, ignoring Adah's spoken plea for help. Weeks later, she observes that "Mother held on tight to the hand of Ruth May, her chosen child" (345); months later, she reflects that in leaving Africa after Ruth May's death, "she chose me" (413; emphasis in original). Even years later, Adah worries that her mother might "choose Leah" if she returns to the United States with her children, and she telephones her mother in the middle of the night to ask about these choices (444). Ruth May loves her mother best and enjoys time alone with her: "Mama, I hope he never comes back," she says of her absent father (215). But even Ruth May believes that she is passed over in favor of Nathan, the chosen Price: "Baby Jesus knows what I said about wishing Father would never come back anymore, and Father is the preacher. So God and them love him the best" (215). Leah is the only daughter who wants to be chosen by her father: "I crave heaven," she says, "and to be my father's favorite" (66). She is jealous of Adah when Nathan, pleased at the increase in his congregation after Adah escapes from the lion, puts "his arm around her shoulder in public! Which is not entirely fair" (151). Children of the promised land and daughters of God's messenger, these girls experience only the absence of election. Not chosen people, they must serve in secondary supporting roles behind a distant leader/father who holds absolute power. This focus on being chosen or elect, with its opposition in being damned, abandoned, passed over, or--in Thomas Pynchon's term--preterite (509, 760, for example), underscores a habit of binary thought inscribed in all four daughters by their father. With origins in the Puritan view of the world as divided between saved and damned, it permeates the secular thought of the Price children and leads them to read experience as a set of polar oppositions. They are conditioned to think of alternatives in binary polarities that function to minimize choices and discourage the imagination of complex middle terms. Ruth May, for example, ponders racial differences and struggles to understand relationships between whites and blacks. Her thinking leads to the erasure of middle grounds and ambiguities, as black and white are ranked by law: "The man in church said they're different from us and needs ought to keep to their own. Jimmy Crow says that, and he makes the laws" (20). Twins Leah and Adah naturally reflect on duality and doubling, and their understandings also reflect the binary hierarchy of elect and preterite. Leah's distinctions come closest to duplicating her father's religious binaries; she sees her father as a heroic enlightener, the Congo as "unenlightened glory" (17). Even later, she says, "I want to be righteous, Anatole. To know right from wrong [...] to live the right way and be redeemed" (309). Adah, developed unevenly as a result of hemiplegia (and resentful of her healthy sister), bitterly contrasts her elect sister with her own preterite self: "I am a lame gallimaufry and she remains perfect" (34). Materialistic Rachel repeatedly contrasts elect "home" with preterite "here." These patterns of binary perception, shared by all four sisters, reflect their father's reduction of complex phenomena into simple choices that offer, at base, no choice at all. They are similarly conditioned by their father's Puritan heritage to believe in a direct, simple balance of just rewards and punishments for their actions, and thus to read God's intervention in their daily lives. But like Orleanna, they are programmed by their gender to fail in virtue; just as they cannot be chosen, they cannot follow the narrow path of righteousness. Influenced by Nathan's negative and wrathful theology, which bears strong resemblance to the Jonathan Edwards of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," the Price children expect punishment and struggle anxiously to avert it. Ruth May often rehearses the rules she knows, as if to reconfirm and memorize, and in the "Mother May I" game, she acts out a rule-bound version of parental permission with herself as the maternal lawgiver. When the driver ants arrive in the village, each girl interprets the event as a negative judgment rather than an act of nature. Leah is tempted to see the ants as "the hand of God," who "hates us"; "the Lord is supposed to be with me, and he's not!" she protests (307-09). The girls reveal just what their father has taught them: they are constantly judged and often found wanting. Their anxiety over his frequent negative judgments and sudden punishments produces watchful, self-restrained children and citizens. Nathan's punishments commonly explode over words that should not be spoken; thus they encourage silent obedience. He punishes with the biblical verse and occasionally with physical violence as well: he punishes Ruth May with the razor strop (54), hits Leah so hard he leaves a hand-shaped bruise on her neck (156), and beats Rachel so severely she falls against the wall (238). These physical punishments are almost always for "talking back" or saying things of which he does not approve. He also beats them for exchanging useless words rather than applying themselves industriously to producing his dinner; the three older girls have "an unresolved argument over whether there are or are not worms in the flour,' and he beats all of them (219; emphasis in original). When the parrot Methuselah begins to say "damn!" in a feminine voice, Nathan demands to know who taught the word to him. Leah narrates the anxiety suffered by herself, Rachel, and Adah as they protect their mother. "Oh, dear Lord. He was staring directly at me. My heart palpitated fiercely," she writes (67). He orders the three older daughters to copy a verse culminating in the warning "to watch what proceeds out of your mouth" (67). Children raised with a firm commitment to this principle will be, as the folk saying has it, seen and not heard. Democratic citizens produced on this model will not object to their nation's actions. All of Nathan's teachings discipline his children to passivity: not to express themselves, not to speak, not to develop opinions or ideas, not to choose or act in the world. By mocking and devaluing their intelligence (as "a mess of female minds"), be tries to convince them not to exercise it. By punishing infractions of speech, he enjoins them to a kind of silence that assents and obeys his word. What he cannot silence, he expels: he casts Methuselah out into the jungle to stop the parrot's uncontainable speech. The mute Adah reflects the culmination of her father's wishes: because she does not voice desires, objections, or ideas, her father determines things for her. Her silence, which turns out to be learned or chosen, muzzles her considerable intelligence and renders her agreeable to a father who thinks of it as "God's Christmas bonus to one of His worthier employees" (34). From another angle, the dead Ruth May represents an even more perfect symbol for the silent acceptance Nathan cultivates in his children. Her wrapped body, planted in his "Great Plains" garden, is the ironic fruit of his labors in the Congo. Disciplined into docile bodies that leave decisions to their leader/father, Nathan's daughters represent both women and citizens who are produced in support of a patriarchal American exceptionalism. Unssettling Home and Homeland Kingsolver's novel is an education story or bildungsroman in which the narrators learn crucial lessons from their experience. Orleanna and her daughters do not overtly rebel against Nathan's rule until the day of Lumumba's murder and Ruth May's death. On that day, they all abandon him. Orleanna, Rachel, Leah, and Adah walk out of Kilanga in the rain, leaving behind Nathan and the God he represents. Although their assessment of their own complicity in Africa's misfortunes and their sister's death varies according to their personality, the survivors give up on the settled home that was planned for them. In different ways, they also abandon the America they had hoped for, with its promise of an exceptional destiny. Soon after Ruth May's death, the family scatters, and each woman moves through a series of unsettled places. Orleanna moves to a "plywood cabin," followed by an apartment in Atlanta and a small brick house on Sanderling Island where she can stand on the sea wall, glaring at Africa across the ocean (408). She remains isolated anal never takes another partner. Rachel has seemed to be most influenced by her father's view of women's need to marry: Her habitual expression, "man oh man," reflects the close attention she pays to males of every age. Unlike her sisters, she works diligently on her hope-chest embroidery and even more assiduously on her posture, cuticles, hair, and clothing--all designed to attract a mate. After a disappointing stint living with Eeben Axelroot, she has two brief, disappointing marriages. She takes lovers from among the married businessmen who stay at the Equatorial Hotel, but never marries again and has no children. Rachel knows that Nathan would condemn her African lifestyle: "Oh, if Father could see me now, wouldn't he give me The Verse!" (515). Adah, like her very different older sister, takes lovers but refuses marriage and has no children; after attending university and medical school, she rents an apartment in Atlanta and devotes herself to work. These three women refuse the married state for which women were supposed to be intended; each of them chooses independence in a commercial hotel or a rented, impermanent place. Leah's marriage also does not "settle" in the way her father would have intended. Leah weds Anatole "in a ceremony that was neither quite Christian nor Bantu" and lives a monogamous life with her husband and children (432). But Anatole is in and out of prison, and she lives in a series of transient places, including a shack in Kinshasa, a thatched mud hut in the Kimvula District, and a house on a cooperative agricultural station in Angola. Married to an African husband her father and his culture would abhor, she has biracial children, four sons with whom racist Rachel disavows kinship. Rather than founding a dynasty or perpetuating a legacy, her children will counter the white imperial curse on Africa and erase the sins of the fathers: The boys "are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether" (526). Her sisters call her marriage into question: Although she admires Anatole, Adah observes that Leah's "religion is the suffering," and Rachel comments that after Ruth May's death, "Leah's decided to pay for it by becoming the Bride of Africa" (442, 465; emphasis in original). In a marriage that deconstructs the racial exclusivity of white America, reverses the imperial process in Africa, and counters her own personal legacy of guilt, Leah certainly does not establish a home in any conventional sense. (9) After their experience in Africa, the surviving members of Nathan's family also lose or renounce a secure and confident relationship with the American homeland. Only Orleanna and Adah return to the United States; the others remain in Africa--although none live in the Congo ruled by Mobutu. With her eyes fixed on Africa, Orleanna chooses a series of marginal and even oppositional positions; for example, she participates in civil rights marches designed to protest her government's racist laws. Although Adah appears to live a version of the American dream--becoming a doctor in Atlanta--she understands that her mother's sense of complicity holds for all the survivors: "All human odes are essentially one. 'My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it'" (492). Adah's choices lead her away from practicing medicine for American citizens; instead, she researches African viruses. Like her mother, she keeps an eye on Africa, and like her sisters, she undoes and inverts her father's legacy: "Out of sympathy for the Devil and Africa, I left the healing profession. I became a witch doctor. My church is the Great Rift Valley that lies along the eastern boundary of Congo" (528). Rather than trying to cure Ebola and AIDS (in the imperialist model of advanced American science solving African problems) Adah studies the viruses with respect and admiration. Three sisters remain in Africa, both physically and spiritually distanced from their American homeland. Ruth May has been transformed by death into "muntu Africa," the spirit of all beings, including the green mamba snake (537). In the novel's last section, her spirituality recast in non-Western ways, she inverts her father's baptismal prayer and urges her mother to find a secular peace--to forgive, remember, and "[m]ove on. Walk forward into the light" (543). With a pointed sense of her nation's guilt in the death of Lumumba and the long, damaging dictatorship of Mobutu, Leah chooses Africa and renounces America: "When the neighbors or students ask me my nationality, I tell them I come from a country that no longer exists" (433). She has made several trips to the United States--to visit her mother, study agronomy, vaccinate her children, recover from disease--but found herself more "a stranger each time" (466). What finally convinces Leah to choose estrangement is the pervasive racism she sees in America: The citizens of my homeland regarded my husband and children as primitives, or freaks. On the streets, from a distance, they'd scowl at us, thinking we were merely the scourge they already knew and loathed--the mixed-race couple, with mongrel children as advertisement of our sins. [...] I can't drag a husband and sons into a life where their beauty will blossom and wither in darkness. (468-69)Like Ruth May, Leah becomes a part of Africa, working in small steps to erase the legacies of the America she has renounced. The most complex of the expatriate children, Rachel appears to remain her father's quintessentially American daughter, but can neither go back nor believe in the national myths any longer. Rachel maintains some of the worst attitudes and assumptions she has inherited from her father and her fatherland. She is materialistic, racist, selfish, vain, and shallow. Like her father, Rachel expresses contempt for Africans' intellect and competence, and she maintains the segregation of her American childhood in her hotel. With many latter-day Americans, she abandons her father's Protestant theology while retaining a firm commitment to the material rewards held by the Protestant ethic to signify God's approval. With some justice, then, one critic calls her "clueless and morally neutral" and another "a rather heavy-handed symbol of crass American consumerism and paternalistic racism" (Ognibene 31; Demory 191). While making Rachel a flawed and comic character, Kingsolver also suggests that her faults should be considered in relation to her American heritage. Rachel recognizes the fatal absence at the heart of America's exceptionalist promises. Her sister Adah writes cryptically, "Rachel seems incapable of remorse, but she is not. She wears those pale white eyes around her neck so she can look in every direction and ward off the attack" (491). Part of a group of references to Eliot's "those are pearls that were his eyes" Adah suggests that Rachel dresses up in affluence, complete with pearl necklace, to repress both her grief over the losses of Ruth May and the Congo and her understanding that she has really inherited a wasteland. Rachel expresses pain, however ironic its phrasing, over her loss of the redeemer nation: "I've missed being a part of something you could really believe in" (512). When Ruth May dies, Rachel grieves for her mother and realizes that nothing would ever be all right again. [...] Until that moment I'd always believed I could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened. The misery, the hunt, the ants [...]--those were just stories I would tell someday with a laugh and a toss of my hair, when Africa was faraway and make-believe like the people in history books. The tragedies that happened to Africans were not mine. We were different, not just because we were white and had our vaccinations, but because we were simply a much, much luckier kind of person. I would get back home to Bethlehem, Georgia, and be exactly the same Rachel as before. (366-67)Ruth May's death cancels Rachel's belief that she can return to a carefree, fortunate destiny in America. It demolishes her illusion that Americans are a different "kind of person" from Africans: a privileged, exceptional breed, as her father and her homeland have implicitly promised, who will be excepted from the miseries and tragedies of the world. Kingsolver's novel links private and public, home and homeland, to develop her political allegory about the dangers of American exceptionalism. The novel's implications exceed a historical concern over U.S. foreign policy in the Congo in 1960 and speak to an ongoing fear that America's very foundational myths make its leaders liable to assume postures of arrogance in world affairs. The novel suggests that seemingly innocuous practices in the privacy of American homes may in fact reproduce the conditions of possibility for national arrogance. In the aftermath of Ruth May's death, developed at a length that puzzles some readers, The Poisonwood Bible also suggests alternatives in the daughters' pathways out of the American legacy represented by Nathan. With the collapse of their father's American exceptionalist mission in the wilderness, the daughters turn away from the Word to embrace words--plural, secular, nuanced, spoken, interpreted, exchanged, and affirmed. They fulfill the potential of their first-person narratives, whether these are understood as interior monologues or journal entries, to use language to think for themselves about the meanings in their experience. In the process of finding words to tell their stories, they move away from simple binary opposites and into the mazed world of complex alternatives. Rejecting their father's arrogant claim to speak for God, together with their nation's imperialist presumption to decide for other peoples, these children of exceptionalism speak only for themselves. It is their mission, like Kingsolver's, to recognize in the world's preterite the only chosen people. BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY BINGHAMTON, NEW YORK WORKS CITED Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul Armstrong. Norton critical ed. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 2006. 336-49. Berkeley, Bill. The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa. New York: Basic, 2001. DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. Demory, Pamela H. "Into the Heart of Light: Barbara Kingsolver Rereads Heart of Darkness." Conradiana 34.3 (2002): 181-95. Epstein, Robin. "The Progressive Interview: BK." Progressive Feb. 1996: 33-37. Fox, Stephen D. "Barbara Kingsolver and Keri Hulme: Disability, Family, and Culture." Critique 45 (2004): 405-20. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Mariner, 1998. Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. New York: Simon, 2004. Jacobs, J. U. "Translating the 'Heart of Darkness': Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Contemporary Congo Book." Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 14.2 (2002): 104-17. Jacobson, Kristin J. "The Neodomestic American Novel: The Politics of Home in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.'" Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 24.1 (2005): 105-27. Kalb, Madeleine G. The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa--From Eisenhower to Kennedy. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Kaplan, Amy. '"Left Alone with America': The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture." Cultures of United Sates Imperialista. Ed. Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.3-21. Kingsolver, Barbara. "Household Words." Small Wonder: Essays. New York: Harper, 2002. 195-205. --. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: Harper, 1998. --. Web site. 16 Feb. 2005 . Koza, Kimberly A. "The Africa of Two Western Women Writers: Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Laurence." Critique 44 (2003): 284-94. Kunz, Diane. "White Men in Africa: On Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible ." Novel History: Historiam and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other). Ed. Mark C. Carnes. New York: Simon, 2001. 285-97. Leonard, John. "Kingsolver in the Jungle, Catullus & Wolfe at the Door." Nation 11-18 Jan. 1999: 28-33. Miller, Perry, ed. The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry. Garden City: Doubleday-Anchor, 1956. Ognibene, Elaine R. "The Missionary Position: Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.'" College Literature 30.3 (2003): 19-36. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973. Smith, Ruth L. "Negotiating Homes: Morality as a Scarce Good." Cultural Critique 38 (1997-98): 177-95. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Barbara Kingsolver: A Literary Companion. Jefferson: McFarland, 2004. Spanos, William V. American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam. Albany: State U of New York P, 2008. Thomas, P. L. Reading, Learning, Teaching Barbara Kingsolver. New York: Lang, 2005. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible: A Reader's Guide. New York: Continuum, 2001. Wrong, Michela. In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living 011 the Brink of Disaster in Mobum 's Congo. New York: Harper, 2001. York, R. A. The Extension of Life: Fiction and History in the American Novel. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UE 2003. NOTES (1.) Kingsolver observes, "It's very hard to criticize this country, our domestic or our foreign policy, or our attitude, or our Americanism [...] Even though we're a secular state, we're deeply religious about the religion of America" (Epstein 36). (2.) The Poisonwood Bible had sold more than a million copies by 2000; it won the National Book Prize of South Africa, the Orange Prize, the Patterson Fiction Prize, and the Book Sense Book of the Year Award from the American Booksellers Association. It was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Village Voice. In 2000, Oprah selected it for Oprah's Book Club, and then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton praised it in O: The Oprah Magazine. It was reviewed positively by Jane Smiley and hailed by John Leonard in the Nation as "a magnificent fiction and a ferocious bill of indictment" (28). Nine years after its publication, the novel continues to be taught in high school and college classes; one book offers strategies for teaching the novel (Thomas), and reader's guides by Barnes & Noble and Wagner-Martin provide summaries and commentary. (3.) Huntington's quotes come from Bercovitch, Hastings, and Morone. In an attempt to undermine the negative connotations accming to American exceptionalism, Huntington writes that "exceptionalism" has now turned to "universalism," as democracy is now accepted "as the only legitimate form of government" (257). I am indebted to my colleague William V. Spanos for his insightful analysis of Huntington's relation to American exceptionalism (187-241). (4.) Kingsolver rejects the idea that Nathan represents maleness: "Male or female, we are not like him" (Web site). Although the novel addresses the patriarchal treatment of daughters, its larger focus is on the production of subjects who will accept or ignore the reign of an exceptionalist ideology. (5.) Amy Kaplan writes that "'imperialism has been simultaneously formative and disavowed in the foundational discourse of American studies" and observes, in a reading of Perry Miller that would serve as well for Nathan, that he "represents a coherent America by constructing Africa as an imperial unconscious of national identity" (5). (6.) Orleanna writes an ironic version: the grandfatherly president whose "household was the world [...] finished making up his mind about things. He'd given Lumumba a chance, he felt. The Congo had been independent for fifty-one days" (320). (7.) I would complicate Kimberly Koza's assessment that "Kingsolver's novel is essentially about America, not Africa" (287). The novel attends to America's international role and situates its representation of the Congo in elaborate historical and cultural research. (8.) Smith has written that "the moral significance" of homes in Kingsolver's fiction reflects "complexity and uncertainty" (193-94), and Jacobson concludes that the "neodomestic politics" in The Poisonwood Bible "argue for change and instability" (120). (9.) DeMarr sees Leah as "the most memorable" of the women and adds, "If any one character serves as protagonist, it is Leah" (130). Although I agree that Kingsolver sympathizes with many of Leah's later views and decisions, Leah also has important flaws, including a pride much like her father's that blinds her in Kilanga. The novel's live perspectives give it a collective protagonist rather than a single individual, appropriately reinforcing its critique of American individualism. Strehle, Susan **Source Citation** (MLA 7th Edition) Strehle, Susan. "Chosen people: American exceptionalism in Kingsolver's the poisonwood bible." //CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction// 49.4 (2008): 413+. //Student Resources in Context//. Web. 14 Sept. 2013. Document URL http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA187623503&v=2.1&u=peac17207&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w
 * Full Text:** COPYRIGHT 2008 Taylor & Francis Ltd.@http://heldref.metapress.com/app/home/journal.asp?referrer=parent&backto=browsepublicationsresults,10,48;
 * Gale Document Number:** GALE|A187623503