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'A Critical Literary Analysis of the Fiction of Barbara Kingsolver'

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'A Critical Literary Analysis of the Fiction of Barbara Kingsolver' “The Things That Attach People”: A Critical Literary Analysis of the Fiction of Barbara Kingsolver Ceri Gorton, MA Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy JULY 2009 ABSTRACT This is the first full-length scholarly work dedicated to the fiction of Kentucky-raised feminist activist and trained biologist Barbara Kingsolver. Interrogating the political efficacy of the work of an author who proclaims that art “should be political” and that “literature should inform as well as enlighten”, this thesis explores the ways in which Kingsolver positions herself variously as an environmentalist, liberal, communitarian, feminist and agrarian. It unpacks the author’s issues-based approach to writing fiction and its effect on her commercial popularity and through close readings of her fiction provides an assessment of this popular and critically acclaimed contemporary American writer. This study maps the oeuvre of a writer who has achieved critical success in the form of Pulitzer nominations, American Booksellers Book of the Year awards, a National Medal for Arts, and commercial success in the form of bestselling novels and even non-fiction works – not to mention the populist accolade of being selected as an Oprah’s Book Club author. It analyses tropes, techniques and tensions in Kingsolver’s novels and short stories published between 1988 and 2001, namely The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland and Other Stories (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and Prodigal Summer (2001). Rather than act as an introductory survey, this assessment posits that there exists a difficult but fruitful tension between writing fiction for readers and writing to a political agenda. Kingsolver promotes both of these through her narrative strategies and preoccupations. In the end, I argue that Kingsolver’s pursuit of popular appeal, far from compromising her politics, is a political strategy in itself. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I give particular thanks to my thesis supervisors, Professors Sharon Monteith and Judith Newman at The University of Nottingham, for their invaluable guidance and support throughout my studies – they have been an inspiration. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose generous support in the form of a full-time studentship and contribution to the funding of my research trip to the Library of Congress in 2007 enabled me to write this thesis. I am grateful to the British Association for American Studies for considering my work worthy of the Malcolm Bradbury Award for Best Postgraduate Proposal in the Field of American Literary Studies 2007, and for contributing towards my US-based research in the form of a BAAS Travel Prize. A Travel Prize from the Graduate School at The University of Nottingham provided the final portion of funding for my research trip, which directly informed my analysis of Kingsolver’s work and allowed me to share my research by presenting papers at conferences in the US and Mexico. I have enjoyed conversations with scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, facilitated by the following conferences, which helped to develop my understanding of topics as seemingly diverse as Oprah Winfrey and Appalachian farming: The American Culture Association & Popular Culture Association Conference in Boston, April 2007; The American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Puebla, Mexico, April 2007; Re-mapping the American South Conference, University of the West of England, September 2006; Identities Conference, Edge Hill College, March 2005. For his immeasurably perceptive comments, unerring support, and surprisingly useful nineteenth-century anecdotes, I offer my heartfelt thanks to Mark Storey. For setting an example to aspire to, as well as for her friendship, I thank Dr Sinéad Moynihan. The support of my family has been the constant joy which has kept me going and for that, they deserve the greatest thanks of all. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 59 Identity, Memory and Environment in Homeland and Other Stories CHAPTER 2 94 “Hogs go deaf at harvest time”: Tropes and Tensions in the Adoption Narratives of The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven CHAPTER 3 132 Locating “Ground Orientation” in Animal Dreams CHAPTER 4 174 “This is a work of fiction”: The Political Efficacy of Inter-/Intra-textual Dynamics in The Poisonwood Bible CHAPTER 5 218 An Ecological Prothalamium: The Union of Interrelatedness, Ecofeminism and “Othered” Voices in Prodigal Summer A CODA 250 “Only We Can Demolish Our Own Ideals”: Taking a Stand on the Kingsolver Oeuvre BIBLIOGRAPHY 258 1 INTRODUCTION Barbara Kingsolver claims to start “every book, every novel, with a question” in the hope of writing her way “to an answer.”1 It is appropriate that the first full-length study of Kingsolver’s fiction should also begin with a set of questions and the intention of writing towards answering them. Asking literary and political questions of Kingsolver’s fiction, I offer close readings of her six fictional books in order to map Kingsolver’s popular appeal and to assess the extent to which the novels and short stories explore the political positions she espouses. I locate Kingsolver’s combination of global and local themes on a political-literary spectrum, arguing that such fiction is too often reduced to a misleading binary of popular and literary. I analyse her fictional negotiation of the perceived tension between art and the market, and art and politics, and explore the extent to which Kingsolver’s pursuit of literary popularity may also be said to compromise her politics. Interviewers flag Kingsolver’s ability to “straddle different worlds with apparent ease” and this trait stands out both in the ways in which her fictional characters represent a variety of political viewpoints, and in her own multiple roles as “bestselling writer, eco-campaigner, farmer [and] mother.”2 Just as Hollywood films must appeal to multiple demographics to create blockbuster audiences, so Kingsolver’s spectrum of political positions can be seen as the logical extension of a search for mass appeal in a series of niche markets. My methodology is as multi-faceted as the structuring principles and thematic preoccupations of Kingsolver’s fiction. I analyse her narrative techniques and the tropes she employs, and examine their potential political effects in order to define the Kingsolver oeuvre. I suggest that in different novels Kingsolver selectively 1 Elisabeth L. Beattie, “Barbara Kingsolver Interview” in Conversations with Kentucky Writers, ed. Elisabeth L. Beattie (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 164. 2 Ed Pilkington, “Back to the land: Barbara Kingsolver Interview,” The Guardian (June 26, 2007), http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/consumer/story/0,,2111508,00.html (accessed July 12, 2007). 2 adopts guiding principles that mark her work as (variously) regional, communitarian, environmentalist, feminist, and liberal. While the existing journalism and critical articles about Kingsolver highlight these various aspects of her fiction and non-fiction work, all return to the fact that her work is overwhelmingly popular.3 This popularity will therefore be explored in the context of its “middlebrow” tendencies, in a revision of a term first made popular in the late nineteenth century. The title of this thesis refers to a statement made by Kingsolver during a 1993 interview in which she claimed her fiction is about “the things that attach people, rather than the things that drive them apart.”4 This thesis explores the ways in which Kingsolver’s preoccupation with interrelatedness in all its facets illuminates her appeal to a popular audience for her fiction, which I argue is itself a political strategy. Issues that Kingsolver claims to be “central to my reason for living”5 unsurprisingly recur in her fiction. Publishers Weekly glibly, but fairly accurately, lists “Kingsolverian” issues as “Native Americans, US involvement in Nicaragua, environmental issues, parental relationships [and] women taking charge of their own lives.”6 However, it is not only these political issues which inspire this thesis, but the precise ways in which they are presented so as to appeal to a popular readership. As Kingsolver notes, the issues to which she returns are “fundamentally related, fundamentally the same” and “can be reduced to a certain central idea – seeing ourselves are part of something larger.”7 In this way, interrelatedness extends beyond themes and tropes to aesthetics, to reveal the structuring political principles of her popular fictions. 3 To take a single Kingsolver novel as an example of the author’s commercial and critical popularity, The Poisonwood Bible was the American Booksellers Book of the Year 1998, and appeared in the top ten books of 1998 as compiled by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Village Voice. That year, it was also a critically acclaimed runner up for the PEN/Faulkner and Pulitzer literary prizes. While sales figures are notoriously difficult to assess accurately, Publishing Research Quarterly reports that The Poisonwood Bible remained in the Top 100 Bestselling book chart for 137 weeks. 4 Perry, 154. 5 See Kendall, 46. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 3 Kingsolver’s protagonists, the intertexts she creates with other novels, and the way she arranges the chapters in her novels each exhibit a reliance on interrelatedness as a way to explore political issues through empathetic characters and romantic stories which in turn secure popular appeal. Her characters are predominantly
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