In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Leah Price’s psychological and moral traits are shaped by her cultural, physical, and geographical surroundings. In the beginning, Leah is shaped by her father’s religious nature, the materialistic American society, and her native Bethlehem, Georgia. Over the course of the novel, Leah changes from a religious and materialistic child that only seeks her father’s approval to a more independent yet unreligious person that values the qualities in other people more than approval from her father.
Without the influences on her development as a character that appen before the novel takes place, the significance of the experiences and influences of her development in the Congo would be less apparent and the story would not be as powerful of a bildungsroman as it is. At the beginning of the Poisonwood Bible, Leah Price is a character who has been shaped by her father’s religiousness, and who wants nothing more than to be her father’s favorite child. Nathan Price, due to his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and guilt acquired from his experiences in World War II, used his Southern Baptist religion as an obsessive coping mechanism.
As Orleanna Price states, he married someone who “could probably never truly love her back. ” This was true not just of his wife, but of his daughters as well. Because Nathan Price was unable to truly care about his daughters, he never recognized Leah and spoke to her as if he was not speaking to her at all, but as if “he were speaking to an imaginary congregation. ” Thus, her father’s refusal of acknowledgement inspired Leah to focus her attentions on the Christian religion.
She memorizes verses and puts the most effort into her father’s religion out of all of her siblings in a futile effort to become Nathan’s favorite. All of her drive to be the est daughter shapes her into a child with an unhealthy obsession with religion. Her religiousness is only unhealthy because her motives are not for truly seeking divine forgiveness and want of leading a pious life, but because it is for the purpose of love and approval that will never be given. Despite her efforts, she always falls short in some way.
She mistakes a quote from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for a verse from the book of Luke. She is unable to anticipate her father’s lesson when they are planting the seeds for their garden, and then proceeds to scold herself for not knowing the eason for his story. This constant of never being good enough for the one person she wants to acknowledge her shapes Leah into a very dependent, over-achieving, and unsure teenager who berates herself for never being good enough to please her father. Leah Price is initially shaped by the materialistic nature of the thriving post-war American Society.
While she is not nearly as engrossed with beauty care products as Rachel, she still does not imagine how minimally she will have to live while in the Congo. She understands that there will not be, as her father puts it, “so much as a Piggly Wiggly. In America, Leah is used to having access to food, entertainment, and other commodities whenever she needs them. Growing up in a society where getting anything you could possibly want almost instantly shapes Leah into taking material goods and conveniences for granted.
While she forces herself to be more humble and care less for appearances and vanity than Rachel, she is still used to having food in the refrigerator at all times and having a comfortable and bug-free home. She takes the advances of electricity, plumbing, transportation, and education for granted middle-class American. All of these commodities have shaped er into a person who does not have to provide for herself, and therefore has shaped her into a child that is comparably more dependent than the average child her age.
She does not realize that the Prices will have to grow their own food until she arrives in Kilanga and helps her father plant seeds. She expects that the Prices will have a garden, but only because her father had one in America, and does not think that it will be a primary source of food. Of course, Nathan Price’s pride does not allow him to think that his garden may be a failure of epic proportions, and Leah’s adoration of her father does not allow her to think that he can e wrong in his statement that “those who put in the work will be rewarded appropriately. As the story progresses, the failure of Nathan and Leah’s garden does not initially cause her to suddenly doubt her father and the existence of God, but it does discourage her and she begins to wonder about the justice of God. Just as American materialism as a whole shaped Leah, her immediate environment of Bethlehem, Georgia helped shaped her as well. From the convenience of the Piggly Wiggly, where all of the household day-to-day necessities were purchased, to her advanced status she shared with her twin Adah in school, all of hese immediate situations can be considered her environment.
She, as well as all of her sisters and her mother and father, view the grocery store the Piggly Wiggly as a fixture in their town where they can go buy whatever they need whenever they need it, within operating hours. None of the Prices ever stop to consider the people that work endlessly to keep the Piggly Wiggly open, stocked, and convenient for the public. Her father’s congregation is another example of Leah’s environment prior to the novel that shapes her into the complacent and naive child she is as she enters the novel, and the Congo.
In her hometown f Bethlehem, Georgia, she is raised in the Southern Baptist preaches in, and as such it logically follows that she would has come to know many of the members of the congregation by the beginning of the novel. Because she is surrounded by religious people with the same learnings as her, Leah’s conceptions about her father are habitually reinforced. Being a member of her father’s congregation strengthened Leah’s conception that her father is a divine,righteous, and Holy messenger sent to Earth to spread the True Word of God and be regarded as such.
Because Leah sees no wrong or sin in her father before entering he Congo, she subconsciously projects her feelings of worship of God onto her father. It logically follows, then, that when Leah loses her relationship with her father, she also loses her Christian faith and relationship with God. The moment Leah loses these relationships, she reaches her coming of age, which is more significant to the Poisonwood Bible and its compellingness overall as a bildungsroman than if her development before the novel were different.
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, is a powerful and compelling coming of age story, or bildungsroman about a minister’s family in the Congo during a time of revolution. Both the Congo and the fictional family of the Prices underwent upheaval. As the Prices’ family structure completely dissolved, the individual lives of each of the family members changed forever and the characters developed in major ways.
While every character went through their own triumphs and tribulations that changed their dynamics and interactions with the rest of the characters, Leah Price changed perhaps the most drastically. During her time with her family in Kilanga, Congo, the differences in cultural, physical, and geographical surroundings shape Leah into an independent yet unreligious haracter. However, the significance of her metamorphosis relies on the development of her character in the time set before the novel begins.
Her father’s Cook 5 religiousness, the materialism of American society, and her local environment of Bethlehem, Georgia all shaped Leah into a dependent, naive, and self-berating child whose only desire was recognition from her father. Her father’s enforcement of his Southern Baptist religion provided Leah with the idea for the arduous task of gaining his love and affection, yet his inability to truly care about other people shaped Leah into believing that he was not good enough in the eyes of her father or God.
The materialism of American society and the convenience of buying commodities shaped Leah into a person that took having food, running water, and electricity for granted. Her immediate environment of Bethlehem, Georgia and the people that surrounded her reinforced her misconceptions about her father, which further shaped her into a reliant and complacent child. Without the factors that shaped Leah before she entered the Congo, her transformation and the events that followed would have less significance to her coming of ange and the novel as a whole.
