Study Guide to The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

By Intelligent Education

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling, a 1938 Pulitzer Prize winner.

As an expositional novel of the 1930s, Rawlings wrote of the Florida Crackers, wildlife, and vegetation of the region in such minute detail that readers become intimately acq

• Language: English
• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Release date: Feb 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645423294

Intelligent Education

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INTRODUCTION TO MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., in 1896 and died in Florida in 1953. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1918 she became a newspaper reporter. She worked for the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal and for the Rochester, New York, Journal. She also worked from time to time in advertising and publicity. In 1928 she went to live in Cross Creek, Florida, where she owned an orange grove. She became acquainted with the Florida hammock country and its people, and in 1930 submitted to Scribner’s Magazine some sketches of the country and its people. In 1931 some of these were published in Scribner’s Magazine under the title Cracker Childings. Later she published stories, all having to do with the Florida Crackers, in Scribner’s, Harper’s, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere. In 1931 she lived for several weeks in the Florida scrub country, observing the ways of the people living there. As a result she wrote South Moon Under, which was published in 1933. This book dealt with the shiners (or persons who made their living primarily from moonshining), much like the Forresters of The Yearling. This book was a selection of the Book-of-the Month Club and was well received by the critics. After the publication of this book she went to England to gather material for another novel. In the meantime, at the suggestion of her editor, she became interested in writing a book for children. As a result of this interest she wrote The Yearling, which was published in 1938. This book was selected as the Pulitzer Prize Novel for that year. Although she wrote other books, her only other popularly successful work was Cross Creek, published in 1942. This was a collection of essays, character sketches, narratives and short stories, dealing with her Florida scrub country environment.

LOCAL COLOR AND REALISM

As a reporter it was natural that Mrs. Rawlings should have written primarily from observation. In this sense her work falls in with a great deal of the local color writing of her time. This was primarily reportage of a given area of the country. A number of these writers became popular for their exposition of a particular locality and its customs. Mark Twain had aroused interest in the customs of the Mississippi river folk about the time of the Civil War and in the later part of the century. Bret Harte and others chronicled the people of the Southwest and West. Later Willa Cather wrote about the Midwest and Southwest. There was much interest in isolated localities and the people living in them. While some of this writing was not merely reportage, much of it was. Mrs. Rawlings herself pointed out in a letter to her editor that she had kept notes on the Florida Crackers and observed them closely, as though she were writing a documentary. In a sense The Yearling is a piece of reportage on these people and the effort is to record them exactly as they lived. She reports the wildlife and vegetation of the region in minute detail. The reader of The Yearling becomes intimately acquainted not only with the people of this region and their customs and way of life, but with the physical and natural surroundings. In the manner of a reporter, Mrs. Rawlings remains objective and detached. She makes no real judgment of these people, but merely reports the facts as she sees them. In this sense the book is realistic in its detail and in its treatment of the life of the region. The facts of the book came from actual observation by Mrs. Rawlings. She went on bear hunts and fishing trips, lived in the deep scrub country and talked with people who knew the life of this region intimately. Her fidelity to the facts was so accurate that some newspapers in Florida became alarmed when the book was published, claiming it gave a distorted picture of the state. But Mrs. Rawlings could stand on her work because she could substantiate the accuracy of its details. As Mark Twain did in Huckleberry Finn, Mrs. Rawlings simply superimposed a fictional story on a mass of accurate detail.

SOME LITERARY PARALLELS

The reader of The Yearling will compare it to other similar books. When she wrote this novel her editor, Maxwell Perkins, had suggested she write a book like Huckleberry Finn or other children’s books. The comparison between these books is obvious. They are both about young boys growing up in the wilderness. But the comparison ends there since Huck’s world is very different from Jody’s. There are other books that deal with youth growing into maturity in a frontier situation posing problems of survival. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony and William Faulkner’s The Bear all come to mind. Probably what distinguishes The Yearling is the attitude of its characters. Mrs. Rawlings wrote that she was astonished by the utter lack of bleakness or despair on the part of these people. This was a characteristic of the pioneer people recorded by Steinbeck and others, but it has probably nowhere been more emphasized than in this book.

THE STYLE

The most outstanding attribute of Mrs. Rawlings’ style throughout The Yearling is her lack of intervention as the writer. Mrs. Rawlings uses symbolism sparingly but effectively. The yearling itself is a symbol of helplessness and innocence and then of wildness. The sinkhole is a symbolic resting place for Jody. She does not introduce philosophical or psychological motivations into the story. There is no attempt to explain why the people act as they do. Mrs. Rawlings merely reports what she has observed without giving an explanation for it. Although most of the characters in the book have developed a philosophy of life, it is stated very simply and without elaboration. Mrs. Rawlings adds no interpretation to this nor does she judge it. This is partially substantiated by the third person point of view from which the story is told. Any judgment of the characters or implications drawn about their point of view toward life merely implied. It is left for the reader to supply his own interpretation to the story and to explain the actions of the characters. The dialects used by the people are always accurate and add to the authenticity of the book. Mrs. Rawlings has recorded these speech patterns with a sharp ear both for pronunciations and for expressions used among the Florida hammock-country