Ruth May In The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver used Ruth May in the Poisonwood Bible to summarize her overarching message of misinformation that was present throughout the entirety of the novel. The first instance of misinformation occurred when the Price family arrived at the airport to leave for the Congo. Everyone over packed and they had to decide what was imperative to take and what they could throw away. They ended up taking things that were not needed and had no use in the Congo such as cake mix. While cake mix is vital to a birthday celebration in America, in the Congo the people don’t have the ingredients or supplies to make such a thing. Ruth May Price is constantly around the misinformation that Kingsolver creates and was made to be the innocent child of the story. As a younger child, Ruth May is ignorant to the culture change and continues with her childhood antics …show more content…
But being in the Congo, those pets can be deadly and the people that she spies on could be dangerous. Like the cake mix, these innocent American childish habits should have been left behind and replaced with information about the Congo. Kingsolver wanted Ruth May to continue living her own innocent lifestyle by keeping pets and spying to show how Nathan and Oleanna (her parents) have made a mistake coming to the Congo without any previous knowledge, and how Americans can be tragically misinformed.
Book two, The Revelation, is meant to describe what the members of the Price family learned in the Congo. While Ruth May’s chapters were short in book one, the length of her passages started to increase as her adventure went on and as her growth progressed. Her chapters give insight to the wonderment of a child visiting a jungle but from the perspective of viewing the surroundings like a zoo instead of real life. The purpose of a zoo is