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Seldomly does traveling come without unexpected results, notably exemplified by the individual quests that the young Price women unknowingly embark upon in The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver). Rachel, Leah, and Adah all climb aboard the same airplane, but the psychological journeys they go on are immensely different. Realizing that everyone can take the same journey, but not everyone takes the same quest leads to an intricate understanding of what contributes to personal values and identity.
The eldest of the three daughters, Rachel, is presented as a typical self-obsessed teenager.
She arrives in the Congo with her mirror as her prized possession. Her beginning views follows an entitled attitude, “I wanted to live under the safe protection of somebody who wore decent clothes, bought meat from the grocery store like the Good Lord intended, and cared about others.” (4.5.5) She does not realize that only the last statement is mentioned in the bible; but her most predominant flaw was that she only cared about how people saw her.
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As Rachel spends more time in the Congo, she learns how to express what she is proud of; 'My proudest achievement is the swimming pool, patio, and gardens, which I put in entirely by myself'. (5.9.7) The journey of living in the Congo and marrying multiple husbands gave her something to be proud of. Rachel even compares her hotel to a whole country because she feels that’s the significance it has. This hotel that the Congo gifted her is the object that teaches to care inwardly instead of outwardly.
Rachel makes the hotel the best it can be because she wants to, not because she wants to impress others. Traveling to a different place gave her the personal growth that she needed to express herself properly.
Leah took a much different quest that made her who she was at the end of the novel. She started out in the Congo worshipping the ground her father walked on, “The rusted embroidery hoops left an unsightly orange ring on the linen that may have damaged my prospects for good.” (2.5.28) Leah’s prospects here were to develop the skills to be a proper housewife, because that’s what her father values. He thinks that a woman means nothing if she’s not married. Leah wanted to be exactly what he wanted her to be, but this does not last long. After traveling to the Congo and meeting Anatole, she decides to marry for love instead of marrying for religiously taught values. “We were married [...] in a ceremony that was neither quite Christian nor Bantu. (5.6.19) The life in the Congo that she has allows her to break through and let her strong idealism lead her. This is the deciding trait that pushes her to do her best in righting the ‘wrongs’ of the Congolese people. Leah’s quest very specifically led her to lose faith in her father and gain faith and confidence in herself.
Adah Price is the most changed because of the journey to Kilanga. She starts out as a disabled girl, viewing her life from the outside and not taking part in it. She writes her own poetry that distinguishes her from everyone else, “If I were a doctor poet, I would spend all day with people who could not run past me, and then I would go home and write whatever I liked about their insides” (2.8.2) She’s an outsider, and happy to be one, with her handicap as a big part of her identity. However, when she arrives in the Congo, she discovers that most people there are also disabled in some way: 'Nobody cares that she's bad on one whole side, because they've all got their own handicap' (1.7.11). This services Adah in realizing that she is capable of everything she could ever want to do. When the ant attack happens in Kilanga, she confirmed her thought that she values her life, even if she hadn’t been an active participant in it. 'If they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious' (3.20.15). Adah didn’t act on her passions until then, but this compassion for life is what drives her to become a doctor. She values all levels of life, not just human, but microscopic to gigantic and this ultimately leads to the success of her career. Her journey to the Congo gave her her own quest of life, which showed her what she truly valued.
These three sisters, Rachel, Leah, and Adah, all show how every journey hands each person their own quest that contributes to personal perceptions and attitudes about the world and themselves.
Journey: Personal Life Quest. (2022, Apr 25). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/journey-personal-life-quest-essay
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