Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Rivers (1977)

Sense of is most descriptive phrase to emerge from relatively small amount of criticism on works of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. phrase appeared first in review of Yearling in Times Literary Supplement on December 24, 1938, and has been used since by her critics, whether directly or indirectly, in placing her in categories of regionalist, local colorist, Southern gothicist, and twentieth-century realist. One of two full-length books on Rawlings, Gordon Bigelow's Frontier Eden, epitomizes in its imaginative and provocative title her preoccupation with creating locale. Rawlings herself best expressed meaning and importance of of when she said in her autobiographical Cross Creek, the matter of adjustment to physical environment is as fascinating as adjustment of man to man, and as many-sided. that is right for one is wrong for another, and I think that much human unhappiness comes from ignoring primordial relation of man to his background. (1) Among memorable elements of her stories, probably of and her cracker characters have been most admired by her readers, but place has been interpreted largely as preoccupation with pictorial description of setting. phrase of may be used, however, in broader critical evaluation of artistic merit of her stories. Place, or setting, is used in her Florida stories as chief architectonic element for showing her essential theme that in order to be happy, man must know or discover relationship to suitable physical setting. Rawlings uses rivers in her writings as chief aspect of and as chief thematic element of setting. In all her stories in which man seeks to identify with his natural environment, there is consciousness of river either as outside limits of setting or as connecting link between her setting and rest of world. She came to love rivers in North Central Florida which outline scrub, known today as Ocala National Forest; two which appear prominently in her fiction are St. Johns and Ocklawaha. She described this river-bordered world: The Florida scrub was unique.... There was perhaps no similar region anywhere. It was vast dry rectangular plateau, bounded on three sides by two rivers. Ocklawaha, flowing towards north, bounded it on west. At north-west corner of rectangle Ocklawaha turned sharply at right angles and flowed due east, joining, at north-east corner, St. Johns river which formed eastern demarcation.... Within these deep watery lines scrub stood aloof, uninhabited through its wider reaches. (2) This is from South Moon Under, her first novel, and is thus her earliest description of river borders which were to become in succeeding works framework of her sense of for Cross Creek and scrub. Though not symbolist, despite her emergence as writer during fluent years of deliberate symbolists, she is indeed strongly conscious literary artist. Dismissed lightly at times as merely descriptive, Rawlings's novels are carefully knit together through use of description itself as structural element in her plot, rather than as simply an elaboration of real story. But of all geographical entities focused on in her writing--clearings, landings, hammocks, pine islands, homesteads--the description of rivers is most significant to course of her story-telling art as well as to her own life. Rivers were for her perfect conceptualization of order because they offered structure without excessive orderliness. She protested another form of boundary, elegance of new fence at her Cross Creek home, because it would bring a wanton orderliness that is out of (CC, p. 9). Her own career shows need for such boundaries as rivers, which give sense of place. …