Seeds of Change: Critical Essays on Barbara Kingsolver

Imagined Geographies

Imagined Geographies Kristin J. Jacobson Pittman, Kentucky, one of the settings for my novel, The Bean Trees, is a very real place of the kind that can’t be found on a map. —Barbara Kingsolver, “Dialogue” hether the protagonists in Barbara Kingsolver’s novels are leaving or returning home, their travels carefully situate them within real histories and political geographies. Their journeys also often carry them through and to imaginary locations. Kingsolver’s decision to locate so much of her realist fiction in invented locales has put her literary and political reputation on the line. Scholars such as Krista Comer, Kathleen Godfrey, and Diane Kunz condemn Kingsolver’s fictional sites. For example, Comer faults the “fantasy topography” (147) of Grace, Arizona, in Animal Dreamsforits“deracinated...deregionalized”(142)andconsummately “ahistorical” plot (148). Building from cultural geographer David Harvey’s conception of “spatiotemporal utopianism,” this essay maps an alternative understanding of the political efficacy of Kingsolver’s controversial imagined geographies. The analysis that follows confirms that Kingsolver’s geopolitics are by no means perfect; however, Harvey’s work on utopian space helps us see how these imperfect fictional locations grounded in present realities still provide important guides to finding approaches, if not solutions, to current social inequities. As seen in much speculative fiction, the fictional locales in Kingsolver’s realist, political novels construct imagined, hopeful geographies that challenge the reader to envision alternative realities. I specifically focus on the invented locations found in three of Kingsolver’s novels: W Kristin J. Jacobson 176 TheBeanTrees,AnimalDreams,andThePoisonwoodBible.MuchofTheBean Treestakesplaceinafictionalizedsectionof Tucson,Arizona.AnimalDreams is also set in the Southwest, in the made-up town of Grace, Arizona. Finally, significant sections of The Poisonwood Bible take place in an invented Congolese village. Kingsolver’s landscapes, as Amanda Cockrell points out, mark and transform her characters (3). Likewise, rather than produce roadblocks to America’s political consciousness, the settings’ unreality is key to their political aims to mark and transform the reader. Theorizing Place: Kingsolver’s Problematic and Promising Fictional Locales The predicaments involved in the presentation of fictional locales, especially those located in the American West, are clearly articulated by Krista Comer in Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing and by Kathleen Godfrey in her article “Barbara Kingsolver’s Cherokee Nation: Problems of Representation in Pigs in Heaven.”1 According to Comer, the uncritical “wilderness plot” found in Kingsolver’s fiction “usually contains the following: a love of wideopen , ‘wild’ spaces; a penchant for the mystical, which is also the ‘natural ,’ American Indian; the suggestion of redemptive possibility; a disavowal of the industrial or technological; and representations of woman as nature ” (127). Describing Animal Dreams as a story “that could happen anywhere in the United States,” Comer condemns the novel’s presentation of the Southwest: “Spanish names and a paganized Catholic-American Indian ritual” mark the novel’s stereotypical Southwest location (142, 143). As a result, Comer suggests that the rural “utopic and pastoral impulse available in the wilderness plot . . . [cause] the tale’s progressive politics [to] implode” (149). Godfrey also argues, “Kingsolver’s depiction is undercut by authorial and rhetorical practices which commodify, ritualize and idealize the Cherokee” (259). Writing about The Poisonwood Bible, Kimberly Koza similarly maintains the African setting and characters provide little more than local color (287–88): “Africa seems to function as a backdrop for working out essentially American concerns” (293). Given Africa’s colonial histories—not to mention its present relationship with the United States—situating Africa as white women’s Other produces a menacing geography. 177 Imagined Geographies Clearly at stake in scholars’ condemnations of Kingsolver’s fictional and frequently utopian settings is more than whether places like Grace, Arizona, can be located on a map. After all, while Grace, Arizona—as Kingsolver points out in Animal Dreams’ “Author’s Note”—is imaginary, the novel specifically refers to Grace’s proximity to Tucson, Arizona, and Las Cruces, New Mexico. The characters’ travels as well as other geographic hints locate Grace in Arizona’s Catalina Mountain Range. In fact, we know that the New Mexico border is “thirty miles to the east” (57). Such geographic boundaries are not what shape scholars’ objections. The presentation of the regions’ cultural geographies, especially the representation of indigenous cultures, forms the debate’s parameters. Both Comer and Godfrey, for instance, censure Kingsolver by linking her idealized landscapes to commodified and exoticized representations of the Southwest.2 Additionally, Koza’s claim that The Poisonwood Bible is primarily...