Poisonwood Bible Imperialism

Culture, it’s what define a nation. It also plays a key role in shaping the reactions and the events that play out through the story of The Poisonwood Bible. It can be evidently seen in characters such as Nathan Price. Nathan is witnessing the congo after years of turmoil caused by king leopold and his cronies. “For Europeans, Africa remained the supplier of valuable raw materials—human bodies and elephant tusks. But otherwise they saw the continent as faceless, blank, empty a place on the map waiting to be explored, one ever more frequently described by the phrase that says more about the seer than the seen: the Dark Continent.” (Hochschild, 1).The imperialism of this time shows that the congo was even an afterthought for the people who
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He is very much a man of the house kind of guy. This is the kind of culture that he was raised in. He was born of a time that didn’t tolerate much of outsiders and racism and social darwinism was rampant. The years after European Imperialism made a movement of Eugenics that was addressed in Brave New World . “‘bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development.” (Huxley 6). Wherein the time of WW1 - WW2 there was this idea that people can be made perfect with the right genes. This was the basis for Hitler’s campaigns for AntiSemitism.
“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty
Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” (Hitler,
60). This only reinforces how resistant he is throughout the book. He becomes more and more aggressive to those who oppose his views like Brother Fowles and the congolese. The congolese even look at the Price family as sort of an Oddity. And with even more disdain.
Trauma is a physical and mental experience that leaves a person broken and in need of repair. Nathan, before the events of the book The Poisonwood Bible, is the only one of his