The One-Eyed Preacher, His Crooked Daughter, and Villagers Waving Their Stumps: Barbara Kingsolver’s Use of Disability in The Poisonwood Bible

“My parents always gave me to know that I could make a difference,” explains Barbara Kingsolver, “and I’d better make one.”¹ Kingsolver’s commitment to making a difference has shaped her literary career as her stories “promote social change by engaging themes of social injustice.”² Her novel The Poisonwood Bible is an ambitious critique of the white patriarchal tradition that authorized western colonization of Africa and legitimized the subjugation of women. But in this novel, Kingsolver also situates disability, alongside race and gender, as a locus of oppression. Adah Price, one of the novel’s narrators, sums up the western philosophy toward illness and disability this way: “Don’t we have a cheerful, simple morality here in Western Civilization: expect perfection, and revile the missed mark,”³ a philosophy that both elevates the medicalization of illness and impairment and stigmatizes individuals who are not “perfected.” While illness and impairment have biological origins, disability itself is “a cultural condition,” argues Mark Jeffreys, “a marginalized group identity that has a history of oppression and exclusion, a stigmatized category created to serve the interests of the dominant ideology.”⁴ Kingsolver’s Congolese villagers, neither stigmatized nor marginalized by disability, clearly conform to this constructionist view. But Kingsolver also utilizes cultural conceptions of disability in her characterization of Nathan Price, an American missionary to the Congo, accepting the literary shorthand of the one-eyed man. Between the simple stereotype that is Nathan and the unmarked villagers, Kingsolver places Adah, Nathan’s teenage daughter who struggles to find her identity outside of the cultural narratives that threaten to define her by her disability.

Literary representations of disability may rely on cultural presuppositions to fuel the reader’s attitude toward a character, both utilizing and solidifying cultural misunderstandings about people with disabilities and their experiences in the world. In “Modernist Freaks and Postmodern Geeks,” David Mitchell identifies this “shorthand method of characterization” in literature, which designates the “literary grotesque [. . .] as a visible symptom of social disorganization and collapse.”⁵ Disability functions as “a crutch on which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and social critique.”⁶ Rosemarie Garland Thomson expands on disability’s literary designation, explaining that “focusing on a body feature to describe a character throws the reader into a confrontation with the character that is predetermined by cultural notions about disability.”⁷

Had Kingsolver offered Nathan as her only disabled character, accusations that she took a literary shortcut by way of painful cultural stereotypes would be justified (and some might argue they remain justified). But her complement of characters with disabilities prevents easy generalizations about the meaning of disability in literature or in culture. At a minimum, Kingsolver challenges readers to consider the complexity of disability experiences and the interaction between culture and bodies. While disability continues to serve a metaphorical function in each case, identity relies on a complex of factors, of which disability is but one, and only in the case of Nathan does it serve entirely as representative trope for his own spiritual and psychological damage and the larger colonialist oppression of Africa by white men who could not see past their own self interest; Nathan’s metaphorical blindness extends to all white men in Africa.

But she does not simply set a one-eyed preacher in the middle of her novel and leave disability to serve only a singular, predetermined character function. She offers a far more sophisticated use in Adah who also lives with a disability, the result of a prenatal brain injury which crippled the right side of her body but liberated her vision of the world. Five-year-old sister Ruth May explains that “[Adah] is bad on one whole side and doesn’t talk because she is brain-damaged and also hates us all. She reads books upside down.”⁸ In “Narrative Prosthesis,” David Mitchell asserts that characters with disabilities serve another function in literature, “as dynamic entities that resist or refuse the cultural scripts assigned to them.”⁹ It is...