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Personification
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Book 5, Chapter 72
Explanation and Analysis:
The setting of The Poisonwood Bible is immensely important: it drives both the plot and the themes of the story, and Kingsolver describes the Congo with care and detail. The novel is mostly set in the small rural village Kilanga, located in the Congo. However, flashbacks and present-day events alike sometimes mean the characters return to American South, or they go to other areas in the Congo or Africa.
As settings, both the United States and the wealthy, white parts of Africa that Rachel inhabits operate as foils against Kilanga. When the Prices return to the United States, for instance, its prosperity and environment have been defamiliarized to them. Leah says this upon returning to the United States in Book 5:
It’s a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking I was losing my sight or maybe my hearing. But it was the sense of smell that was gone. Even in the grocery store, surrounded in one aisle by more kinds of food than will ever be known in a Congolese lifetime, there was nothing on the air but a vague, disinfected emptiness.
Kilanga lacks both the amenities (such as road connectivity to urban areas) and the environment of the United States. Much of the conflict in the novel could be described as occurring between the Price family and their new home. Nathan tries and fails to plant a garden the American way; it is only when he follows Mama Tataba's advice and shapes his garden into "burial mounds" that the Prices successfully grow food. In this moment, and in many other moments in the novel, the setting forces the Prices to change and adapt. Eventually, Leah prefers (or at least respects and understands) many aspects of the Congo.
The setting also brings with it a heavy history and complex political context. As Kingsolver explains through her narrators, Belgium's colonial control over the Congo was cruel and inescapable. Belgium claimed both the resources and the people of the area as its own, and the arbitrary borders Europeans forced on Africa mean that disparate African cultures and languages have been grouped together within the Congo. Congolese attempts to establish a democracy are undermined both from the inside (because the Congo's borders contain Africans who speak different languages and have vastly different cultures) and from the outside (by intervening world powers such as Belgium and the United States).
Related Themes:
