Treasures of the Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University: Fiction about Nature in Florida

The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in literature, history, political science, ethnography, linguistics, anthropology, and related subjects.

Among them is The Yearling, a novel by American writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

Rawlings lived in rural Florida and wrote fictions with themes and settings related to her home. Her best known work, The Yearling, is about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn.

A fawn is a young deer in its first year.

A yearling is an animal (especially a sheep, calf, or foal) that is one year old or in its second year.

The book has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and several other languages.

The TU Library circulating collection also includes several other books about deer.

A doctoral thesis about The Yearling observed:

Regionalism was the literary vehicle Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings chose for her novel, and in so doing, she responded rhetorically to an exigence, in accordance with the constraints of her personal theory of composition.

Regionalism, at that point in history, served as a response to a crisis; that is, the untenable situation of a population in the midst of society’s ills during the Depression. Her writing had as its purpose the communication of the beauty which Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings found in the Big Scrub country and its people, and by extension, of humanity in harmony with the environment.

That Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ purpose was effectively achieved has been borne out by thorough investigation of the responses of both her general readership and her professional critics… Regionalism in a literary production usually concerns itself with a specific culture and its customs, speech patterns, physical landscape, legends, traditions, and ideological or social point of view.

The resultant interaction of the human individual with the immediate environment through the peculiarities of language, landscape, culture, race, and tradition are the domain of regionalism. Usually infused in this process is a sentimental romanticism for an historical period by which the past becomes a vehicle for the study of the present and the future.

The artists often fashioned their fiction. from vanishing aspects of the region. […] Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ attempted to preserve that which was .lost and dying, the traditions of the past, and for this she has been acclaimed a great Southern Regionalist.

Through the time warp of Cross Creek, the American past, the frontier, the tradition of nature, and the purity of the individual all could be brought into focus. Yet, Marjorie Kinnan ·Rawlings cared little for the mantle of Southern Regionalist.

She described herself “as a writer who often suffers under the epithet of regional,” for in the late 1930’s: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings considered regionalism limited. She denigrated her title thus:

“Regionalism written on purpose is perhaps as spurious a form of literary expression as ever reaches print. It is not even a decent bastard, for back of illegitimacy is usually a simple, if-ill-timed, honesty.”

Her concern at being neatly classified as a regionalist is understandable. During the 1930’s she was working in the literary milieu of Hemingway, Wolfe, and Fitzgerald, who were .the outstanding literary figures of her time, and the apparently popular were realism, naturalism, or social consciousness.

Here is a brief excerpt from the first pages of The Yearling:

The clearing itself was pleasant if the unweeded rows of young shafts of corn were not before him. The wild bees had found the chinaberry tree by the front gate. They burrowed into the fragile clusters of lavender bloom as greedily as though there were no other flowers in the scrub; as though they had forgotten the yellow jessamine of March; the sweet bay and the magnolias ahead of them in May. It occurred to him that he might follow the swift line of flight of the black and gold bodies, and so find a bee-tree, full of amber honey.

The winter’s cane syrup was gone and most of the jellies. Finding a bee-tree was nobler work than hoeing, and the corn could wait another day. The afternoon was alive with a soft stirring. It bored into him as the bees bored into the chinaberry blossoms, so that he must be gone across the clearing, through the pines and down the road to the running branch. The bee-tree might be near the water.

He stood his hoe against the split-rail fence. He walked down the cornfield until he was out of sight of the cabin. He swung himself over the fence on his two hands. Old Julia the hound had followed his father in the wagon to Grahamsville, but Rip the bull-dog and Perk the new feice saw the form clear the fence and ran toward him. Rip barked deeply but the voice of the small mongrel was high and shrill. They wagged deprecatory short tails when they recognized him.

He sent them back to the yard. They watched after him indifferently. They were a sorry pair, he thought, good for nothing but the chase, the catch and the kill. They had no interest in him except when he brought them their plates of table scraps night and morning. Old Julia was a gentle thing with humans, but her worn-toothed devotion was only for his father, Penny Baxter. Jody had tried to make up to Julia, but she would have none of him.

“You was pups together,” his father told him, “ten year gone, when you was two year old and her a baby. You hurted the leetle thing, not meanin’ no harm. She cain’t bring herself to trust you. Hounds is often that-a-way.”

He made a circle around the sheds and corn-crib and cut south through the black-jack. He wished he had a dog like Grandma Hutto’s. It was white and curly-haired and did tricks. When Grandma Hutto laughed and shook and could not stop, the dog jumped into her lap and licked her face, wagging its plumed tail as though it laughed with her.

He would like anything that was his own, that licked his face and followed him as old Julia followed his father. He cut into the sand road and began to run east. It was two miles to the Glen, but it seemed to Jody that he could run forever. There was no ache in his legs, as when he hoed the corn. He slowed down to make the road last longer.

He had passed the big pines and left them behind. Where he walked now, the scrub had closed in, walling in the road with dense sand pines, each one so thin it seemed to the boy it might make kindling by itself. The road went up an incline. At the top he stopped. The April sky was framed by the tawny sand and the pines. It was as blue as his homespun shirt, dyed with Grandma Hutto’s indigo. Small clouds were stationary, like bolls of cotton. As he watched, the sunlight left the sky a moment and the clouds were gray. […]

The east bank of the road shelved suddenly. It dropped below him twenty feet to a spring. The bank was dense with magnolia and loblolly bay, sweet gum and gray-barked ash. He went down to the spring in the cool darkness of their shadows. A sharp pleasure came over him. This was a secret and a lovely place.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)