Study Guide to The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645423294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

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 acquainted not only with the people of the region and their customs and way of life, but with the physical and natural surroundings. Moreover, she shows in the manner of a reporter how to remain objective and detached, making no real judgment on the people. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Rawlings’ classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

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 people. The simplicity of her writing style is thus reflected in the simplicity of the speech of the characters as well as their simple way of life.

THE YEARLING

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

CHAPTERS 1 - 7

CHAPTERS 1-4

As the book opens it is a balmy Friday afternoon in April. Jody Baxter has left the cabin in which he lives with his mother and father in the hammock country of Florida to hoe in the cornfield. He is diverted by the beauty of the spring day and feels more like playing than working. He decides to follow the bees to the spring and see if there is a bee-tree there. He justifies this action on the grounds that gathering honey would be more important than hoeing the corn. When he arrives at the spring he decides to make a flutter-mill, like the one his friend Oliver Hutto made for him. This he does, and sits watching it turn over in the water. Soon he falls asleep in a fine mist of rain. When he wakes up he returns to the cabin to find that his father is doing his chores for him. His mother has not missed him and his father is not angry. The next day it is discovered that a huge bear, named Slewfoot (because he has lost a toe in a bear trap) has killed the Baxters’ sow. Jody’s father agrees to let Jody accompany him on a hunt for the bear. They set out with their three dogs and the father’s primitive muzzle-loading gun and finally bring Slewfoot to bay at the creek. Jody’s father tries to shoot the bear, but his gun backfires. Old Julia, the hound, is badly wounded by Slewfoot and the bear gets away.

Comment: Man and Nature

What strikes the reader most in the beginning of this book is the placidity of the scene and the emphasis placed on the natural environment. When we first meet Jody he seems to be blended into the natural scene, which Mrs. Rawlings describes in great detail. He appears to be one with nature. There hardly seems to be a separation between his own feelings as a person and the general feeling emanating from his natural surroundings. It is spring, a time when nature is at its height. The flowers are blooming, the bees are buzzing about, and there is a proliferation of natural growth. Even the air itself is surfeited with this feeling. The spring fever that Jody experiences symbolizes the placidity of the natural surroundings. April is indeed a traditional time of happiness and placidity. It is a time of youth.

Jody does not question this environment of which he is a part. Rather, his strongest feeling is that he is in fact a part of it in a mystical way. He feels he is connected with the creek, which flows to the lake; the lake in turn is a part of the river, which flows to the sea. Just as April is a time of youth, it is also a time of change. Like youth it looks forward to changes to be brought about as the seasons progress. In this way it is ominous. Like nature itself, Jody will change. He will go through a cycle, like the seasons of the year which he passes through during the course of this book. He is at a time in his life, at the age of thirteen, when he will change significantly. Mrs. Rawlings is interested in this change as a passage from childhood to manhood. Thus the opening scene, in which we find a traditional placidity and happiness and the pervasiveness of nature, serves not only to introduce us to Jody and his surroundings, but to the omnipresence of change. Further, the mill-wheel itself stands as a symbol of mutability, or change. This is Jody’s attempt to arrest nature and to create something permanent.

At this point Jody is highly conversant with his natural surroundings. One reviewer pointed out that Jody is a sort of St. Francis, in the sense that he seems to have a sort of natural, almost religious, affinity with animals and other natural beings. Concerning nature, there are only two qualifications that Jody makes in his own mind: (1) He separates the animate from the inanimate; (2) He separates the practical from the impractical. Although he would like to have a pet of his own, he finds that the dogs, which might ordinarily have a function as pets, have a purely practical function. The same is true of Trixie, the cow, and the pigs. They are there only for the purpose of providing milk and meat. Jody therefore searches for something “impractical” to which he can attach himself. He searches for relief from the overburdening practicality of his own life.

In this first section he learns another separation in nature: some natural objects are a menace and must be removed. When Slewfoot comes to the corral and kills the sow, Jody becomes suddenly aware of a law of nature: both man and beast must provide themselves with food or starve to death. Slewfoot is, in effect, by killing the sow, doing the same thing man must do. He must kill for his food, or die. This is yet another practicality with which Jody is faced and, once he realizes this, his appetite for something impractical-a pet which will serve not only as a companion but as a symbol of that area in which it is not necessary to be practical-is intensified. When Jody goes to the spring instead of hoeing the corn, this dramatically displays Jody’s dilemma. Although this action may appear from an adult point of view to be incidental, it must be borne in mind that to a child nothing is ever really incidental. His father justifies Jody’s action on the grounds that Jody will not always be a child, and that once he is an adult he will discover that he is overcome with the necessities of living. Penny Baxter, Jody’s father, draws this inference from his own childhood, which had been severe and restrictive, not only because his father, a minister, had very puritanical ideas, but because the business of obtaining food and staying alive had been particularly difficult. Penny recognizes the necessity of allowing as much freedom to Jody as is possible. We will see how this dilemma works out in the end.

JODY’S RELATIONSHIP TO HIS PARENTS

From the beginning it is evi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
• 2) Textual Analysis
• 3) Character Analyses
• 4) Critical Commentary
• 5) Essay Questions and Answers