(De)colonization through topophilia [Elektronische Ressource] : Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's life and work in Florida / von Kerstin-Verena Martin

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Informations

• Publié par: johannes_gutenberg-universitat_mainz
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 20
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

(De)colonization Through Topophilia:
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Life and Work in Florida



Inaugural-Dissertation
zur Erlangung des Akademischen Grades
eines Dr. phil.,

vorgelegt dem Fachbereich 05: Philosophie und Philologie
der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Mainz

von
Kerstin-Verena Martin
aus
Frankfurt am Main

2006 (De)colonization Through Topophilia: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Life and Work in Florida 1

Contents

Preface 4
I. Introducing Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings – A Snowbird in Florida 9

1.1 Writing Out Of the Margin… 9
1.1.1 Getting Personal! Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Female
Voice Unveiled 20
1.1.1.1 “Jacob’s Ladder” 24
1.1.1.2 “Gal Young Un” 27
1.1.1.3 “This is Truly a Man’s Kind of Humor!” -
The “Quincey Dover Stories” 33
1.2 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Literary Landscapes 38
1.3 The Enchantment of Cross Creek: Topophilia, Spiritual Healing
and (De)colonization 48

II. A Sense of the Sunshine State 52

2.1 Changing Florida – Transitory Eden? 52
2.2 Florida as a Source of Imaginative Appeal 61
2.3 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s “Invisible Florida” 67
2.3.1 The Florida Scrub 69
2.4 Florida People(s) 71
2.4.1 The Poor-Whites of the Florida Countryside 72
2.4.2 The Florida Cracker 75
2.4.3 The Exceptional Portrayal of the Rural Poor Whites in
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Florida Work 77

III. Writing and Narrative Strategies 80

3.1 The Regionalism of the Interwar Years 81
3.1.1 “The Faint Praise That Damns” - Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings’s Critique of a Literary Regionalism 88
3.2 Strategies of Experiential Writing: The Verbalization of “Ecological
Metanoia” 92
(De)colonization Through Topophilia: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Life and Work in Florida 2

IV. The Florida Novels 100

4.1 South Moon Under and Golden Apples 100
4.1.1 Topophilia as a Means of Characterization 100
4.1.1.1 Place as Cosmic Harmony – Indigenous Cracker
Concepts of Self and Life ‘Within’ the Land 102
4.1.1.2 Lost in Place – An Alien in the Florida Hammocks 115
4.1.1.3 Uniting in Otherness – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s
Assertive and Quiet Women 121

4.2 The Yearling 130
4.2.1 A Childhood in the Florida Scrub – The Process of
Growing Up 130
4.2.1.1 Jody and His Parents 131
• Penny’s Philosophy of Life • The Father – Son
Relationship • Ora Baxter and Motherhood • The Role
Allocation inthe Baxter Family
4.2.1.2 Of Angelic Friends, Sneaky Girls, Old Sirens
and a Sailor… 142
4.2.1.3 Flag 144
• Flag – A Mirror Image of Jody’s Childhood and the
Reproduction of Motherhood • The Act of Betrayal and
Jody’s Circular Journey

4.2.2 Writing the Florida Scrub 149
4.2.2.1 The Exceptional Experience of Scrub Nature 149
4.2.2.2 Speaking Cracker! Dialect and Nature Simile 152
4.2.2.3 Scrub Nature as a Means of Characterization 153

4.2.3 The Art of Storytelling 156
4.2.3.1 The Audience is Speaking… 157
4.2.3.2 “Weaving a Spell of Mystery and Magic” – Penny
Baxter’s Power of Articulate Speech 159
4.2.3.3 Jody Baxter – Learning the Nature of the Word 163
(De)colonization Through Topophilia: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Life and Work in Florida 3

4.3 Cross Creek 167
4.3.1 The Ecotone of Cross Creek/Cross Creek 167
4.3.1.1 Writing the Self Through the Nonhuman
Other 173
4.3.1.2 Cross Creek Voices: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s
Communal and Invading Persona/Voice
in Cross Creek 184
4.3.1.3 A Female Modernist’s Dilemma: Camouflage
and Self-Assertion 193
4.3.1.4 My Past Years Have Become Somehow
Unimportant! - “The Ancient Enmity” and
“Our Daily Bread” 203
4.3.1.5 Metanoia Revisited: Overcoming Crisis
in “Hyacinth Drift” 209

V. Concluding Remarks: The ‘Natural’ (Inter)relatedness of Life and Work 214


Bibliography 219










(De)colonization Through Topophilia: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Life and Work in Florida 4

Preface
Standing on the shoulder of Route 1, on the outskirts of Cross Creek,
Florida, visitors find the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s State Historic Site,
this ‘quiet place,’ time has left unchanged. It was only for a brief moment
that the public and the literary world perceived Cross Creek, the home of the
writer, ecologist, and anthropologist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The author
moved and called Florida her home, deciding that she would live in the
‘uncivilized’ heartland of the Florida peninsula while on a vacation with her
first husband Charles Rawlings. With their marriage on shaky grounds and
facing literary failure up North, Rawlings needed a drastic change in her
life, and the heartland of the Florida peninsula provided the environment
that would impact her physically and spiritually. Rawlings’s biographical
preconditions – a childhood spent in the rural area of Rock Creek, outside of
Washington, D.C., a father who instilled in her a respect for nature’s
restorative power – enabled her to immediately embrace Florida’s nature.
1Spending her days outside in the orange groves, the scrub or the Florida
hammocks, feeling the intense Florida heat, as well as the cool and mild
spring rain falling on her skin or the mysticism of the morning fog, she
quickly developed a love, a sense for this unusual place. The “human
being’s affective ties” (Tuan, Topophilia 93) with one’s immediate
surroundings is defined by the neologism – Topophilia - coined by the
humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Rawlings writes of ‘beauty’ when
2referring to the Creek; her topophilia comes alive in her Florida writings,
unmasking her natural environment into symbols of cultural critique and
metaphors for identity transformation.
The life and work of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings strongly coalesces
with the move to Florida, entering a reciprocal, symbiotic relationship.
Without the ‘inspiration’ of the overwhelming and inescapable natural
world of Cross Creek, Rawlings would neither have been able to face and
overcome her failed marriage nor excel through the hostile climate women
writers faced during the Roaring Twenties and especially during the
Depression era. With (re)confinement and (re)consignment of women to the

1 Florida’s oldest horticultural community; the scrub is an open pineland with an understory
of oaks and palmettos. The largest area occurs in the Ocala National Forest.
(De)colonization Through Topophilia: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Life and Work in Florida 5

domestic realm, Rawlings remained unaffected in her Florida hamlet. At
Cross Creek, she created a ‘room of her own,’ a utopian gender-free space
in which she was able to write and heal as society reverted around her.
Writing about nature and the indigenous backwoods community of
3the Florida Cracker, Rawlings was able to parallel the ‘colonization’ or
domination of the ‘invisible’ scrub region and its inhabitants with her own
‘colonization’ and the situatedness of women in the 1930s patriarchal
American society. Both forms of colonization had a common basis in
‘otherness,’ finding them marginalized by a patriarchal and hierarchal
center. Throughout her Florida literature, Rawlings deconstructs dualisms
and hierarchies; such as the strict Western separation between nature and
culture, opting for their radical interrelatedness. ‘Inscribing’ herself into the
natural ecosystem of the Florida backwoods - where every individual
organism is interrelated and interdependent - she draws a picture of a
‘natural’ and sometimes utopian society in which gender, class and race do
not automatically define or predetermine identity and behavior roles.
However, this ‘decolonization’ or liberation from oppressive patriarchal
structures in the society of her time is closely connected and restricted to the
remoteness of her place and its status as ‘colony,’ making her a prisoner of
her own constructed space.
With the surface text radiant with an eloquent and detailed depiction
of life in the Florida backwoods, the natural world and man’s interaction
with it, Rawlings has been forgotten in the forming of a (Southern) women’s
literary canon, rather regulated to male local colorists or regionalists.
Frequently overlooked is her close friendship and extensive correspondence
with editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s Press, who influenced, nurtured
and refined her work. As the editor of the ‘literary geniuses’ of the Lost
Generation, he brought her in contact with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and many more; this connection to the ‘genius