Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Cosmic Dance at Cross Creek
When author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings moved from urban life to an orange grove in rural Florida, she also travelled from disenchantment to re-enchantment. Her personal journey reveals that enchantment is a way of experiencing and relating to the earth that provides a strong basis for preserving it for future generations. The enchantment that Rawlings found at her home in the Florida scrub lies in stark contrast to the disenchantment she experienced as a city dweller during the Great Depression. Since enchantment is a concept that is more readily experienced than explained, it is helpful to understand what it meant for her both in terms of her own experiences recorded in Cross Creek as well as through the eyes of one of her most beloved fictional characters. In addition, it is important to consider what mindset about people and place made Rawlings susceptible to enchantment. Lastly, Rawlings demonstrates how enchantment with a place naturally leads to environmental preservation. She beautifully imparts wisdom of vital practicality for those living in a world that is largely characterized by disenchantment and all the damage it spawns.
In order to better understand the enchantment that Rawlings discovered at Cross Creek, it is helpful to consider the contrasting disenchantment she experienced prior to her move to Florida in 1928. Rawlings’s disenchantment with urban life is clearly articulated in her poem “Having Left Cities Behind Me”:
Now, having left cities behind me, turned
Away forever from the strange, gregarious
Huddling of men by stones, I find those various
Great towns I knew fused into one, burned
Together in the fire of my despising …[1]
Rawlings was certainly not alone in her feelings of alienation and loathing during this period, which would only have been heightened by her keen sense of poetic sensitivity to her surroundings. In Clear-cutting Eden, Christopher Rieger makes the following observation:
As Richard Pells explains, many young artists of the 1930s were attracted to folk cultures as they became disenchanted with a capitalist system that seemed to have lost any sense of purpose: ‘The depression confirmed their belief that American ideals were dangerously distorted and unreal, that competition and acquisitiveness were eroding the country’s social foundations, that the quality of human life under capitalism offered men no sense of community of common experience.’[2]
In contrast, Rawlings’s new home at Cross Creek offered “remoteness from urban confusion … with such beauty and grace that once entangled with it, no other place seems possible.”[3] For Rawlings, Cross Creek is a place of enchantment where entering into a forest is like stepping “out of one world and into the mysterious heart of another”[4] where she discovers “the essence of an ancient and secret magic” that recovers the “mystic loveliness of childhood again.”[5] At Cross Creek, Rawlings discovered something similar to what author Henry David Thoreau had realized at Walden Pond, a place where one could live in harmony with nature.[6]
Rawlings beautifully illustrates the concept of enchantment as she tells the story of one of her most beloved characters, the young boy Jody, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Yearling. Rieger notes that “Rawlings is able to capture the youthful viewpoint of Jody Baxter, who finds wonder in virtually everything new that he encounters, creating a compelling novel for all readers.”[7] Two examples serve to illustrate this point. In the opening chapter of The Yearling, the narrator says of Jody:
He was addled with April. He was dizzy with Spring. He was as drunk as Lem Forrester on a Saturday night. His head was swimming with the strong brew made up of the sun and the air and the thin gray rain … A mark was on him from the day’s delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember.[8]
As Rawlings’s biographer, Samuel Bellman, notes, “The Yearling was set in a magic moment of experience—a kind of secular epiphany, involving the writer herself, as a child—and in harmony with the universe.”[9] At Cross Creek, Rawlings appears to have recaptured the awe and wonder she experienced as a child.
Later in the story, Jody and his father, Penny, happen upon … cranes [that] were dancing a cotillion as surely as it was danced at Volusia. Two stood apart, erect and white, making a music that was part cry and part singing. The rhythm was irregular like the dance. The other birds were in a circle, several moved counter-clock-wise. The musicians made their music. The dancers raised their wings and lifted their feet, first one and then the other. They sunk their heads down in their snowy breasts, lifted them and sunk again. They moved soundlessly, part awkwardness, part grace. The dance was solemn. Wings fluttered, rising and falling like out-stretched arms. The outer circle shuffled around and around. The group in the center attained a slow frenzy.[10]
After returning home for dinner, Jody and Penny could not speak. “They had seen a thing that was unearthly. They were in a trance from the strong spell of its beauty.”[11] Exposure to nature provided opportunities for serendipitous experiences of grandeur that brought both the father and the son to the level ground of unspeakable wonder and amazement.
Rawlings also demonstrates enchantment through her own experiences as told in Cross Creek, noting:
I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to. In the lakeside hammock there is a constant stirring in the tree-tops, as though on the stillest of days the breathing of the earth is yet audible. The Spanish moss sways a little always … It is impossible to be among the woods animals on their own ground without a feeling of expanding one’s own world, as when any foreign country is visited.[12]
Having found the natural setting in and around her home in rural Florida to be a magical place for her, it is hard for Rawlings to imagine life without recourse to it on a regular basis. By deeply experiencing and embracing her surroundings, she is transported in a way that others might liken to a distant voyage. Just stepping out her door and into the midst of her orange trees has tremendous allure as she states:
Enchantment lies in different things for each of us. For me, it is in this: to step out of the bright sunlight into the shade of orange trees; to walk under the arched canopy of their jadelike leaves; to see the long aisles of lichened trunks spread ahead in a geometric rhythm; to feel the mystery of a seclusion that yet has shafts of light striking through it.[13]
Seeing the unique beauty of the individual parts as well as the harmony of the whole of the natural world around her, creates a sense of transcendent wonder that is both mysterious and magical for Rawlings.
While others may consider the road near her home “lonely, because there is not human traffic and human stirring,” she “walked it in ecstasy, and in joy it is beloved” because she recognized that it teemed with life “and it is given to us to join ourselves with them and be comforted.”[14] Even though she had walked the nearby and familiar road on almost a daily basis, Rawling's intimate knowledge led to deeper appreciation and openness to fresh discoveries of the wonders of the natural world not far from her doorstep. But rather than passively receiving them with her senses, she wedded her soul to them and experienced a deep communion.
After considering glimpses of what enchantment means for Rawlings, it is important to evaluate what undergirds her ability to be enchanted in a world that seems disenchanted for so many. In the last chapter of Cross Creek, Rawlings makes reference to Thoreau as one who “went off to live in the woods alone, to find out what the world was like”[15] and Bellman notes that “the reader has the sense that she has put herself on record in this book much as poet Walt Whitman or Thoreau had done in their books a hundred years earlier, believing as they did that the best approach to the universal is through the particular and personal.”[16] As Rebecca Kneale-Gould notes:
[T]he Transcendentalists borrowed from the European Romantics the notion that a regular contact with nature [by which they generally meant: living in or visiting rural and pastoral settings] was essential for regaining human innocence and originality that was corrupted by civilization. Intimacy with nature could return the individual [especially the writer] to a state of childlike openness and wonder. Such a state was crucial to developing what Emerson famously termed an ‘original response to the universe.’[17]
By surrounding herself in nature at Cross Creek, Rawlings followed the Transcendentalist authorial tradition, discovered her muse, and once again began to see the world as suffused with meaning and significance beyond its material utility.
Although regular exposure to nature is a vital element of Rawlings’s concept of enchantment, in Cross Creek she makes it clear that a sense of connection and commitment to a particular place is also of fundamental importance in order to sustain a life characterized by enchantment. As Christopher Rieger notes, there are instances in Cross Creek:
When the connections she feels to the vitality in nature around her are particularly strong, it becomes difficult to say where she ends and the world begins. Rather than feeling frightened at the prospect of negation of her individual identity, Rawlings feels comforted by the almost tangible connection she experiences with an eternal natural world.[18]
Rieger cites the following passage from Cross Creek to illustrate this point:
The jungle hammock breathed. Life went through the moss-hung forest, the swamp, the cypresses, through the wild sow and her young, through me, in its continuous chain. We were all one with the silent pulsing. This was the thing that was important, the cycle of life, with birth and death merging one into the other in an imperceptible twilight and an insubstantial dawn. The universe breathed, and the world inside it breathed the same breath. This was the cosmic life, with suns and moons to make it lovely. It was important only to keep close enough to the pulse to feel its rhythm, to be comforted by its steadiness, to know that Life is vital, and one’s own minute living a torn fragment of the larger cloth.[19]
Rawlings’s palpable sense of connection with the land she loved and chose to call home led to an earnest respect for other creatures that was complemented by a deep humility.
Rawlings’s openness to beauty, amazement, mystery, and stories suffused her adopted rural home with meaning and grandeur that made her “cling to it contentedly, lovingly and often in exasperation through the vicissitudes that have driven others away.”[20] Her humility and respect is clearly evident in the last chapter of Cross Creek where she notes, “The individual man is transitory, but the pulse of life and of growth goes on after he is gone, buried under a wreath of magnolia leaves.”[21] Recognizing the brevity of her own existence in contrast to the enduring nature of life on earth gives Rawlings a perspective that leads to personal modesty and reverence for nature.
Although her autobiographical account in Cross Creek is loosely organized with the exception of the chapters on the seasons in Florida, the first chapter (“For this is an enchanted land”) and the last chapter (“Who owns Cross Creek?”) serve as bookends that philosophically bind all the other parts together, tying enchantment together with environmental stewardship. In closing her narrative she notes:
It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.[22]
Although she had paid for and held title to the orange grove and the humble house that sat near it at Cross Creek, Rawlings viewed herself as a steward rather than as an owner of the place on earth that she loved. Despite her ostensible legal rights, she viewed herself as a trustee rather than as a privileged proprietor. Therefore, her emphasis was on her responsibilities rather than her rights. Ultimately, the land would be passed on to future generations of people, birds, and other wildlife. Thus, enjoying the goodness of the land and all that it contained was a privilege, but also a sacred trust. Under such circumstances, Rawlings viewed caring for and loving her adopted place on earth as the only proper response.
Through her personal stories of the people and place that make up Cross Creek, Rawlings points to a better way of living on earth that is an antidote to disenchantment and the environmental degradation that is often spawns. The practical significance of her views in terms of stewardship of the earth might be summarized as follows: “We care for only what we love. We love only what we know. We truly know only what we experience. If we do not know our place—know it intimately and personally—then we are destined to use and abuse it.”[23] In Cross Creek Rawlings reflects that she considered it a duty to “take care of the land lovingly … to nourish and cultivate it.”[24] She noted that no individual has the prerogative to privately intrude on “the right of all mankind to enjoy a universal beauty.”[25] In her writing and in her life, Rawlings exemplifies the importance of enchantment as a basis for preserving and protecting the earth and one’s particular place in it. As she rapturously dances among her orange grove in Cross Creek, she reminds her readers that they should strive to live life in “radical amazement”[26] and bids them join in the cosmic cotillion.
Notes
1. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, “Having Left Cities Behind Me,” Scribner’s Magazine, XCVIII (October, 1935), 246 quoted in Samuel Irving Bellman, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974), 136.
2. Christopher Rieger, "Cross Creek Culture," in Clear-cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern Literature (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 63.
3. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 11.
4. Ibid., 15.
5. Ibid., 16.
6. Anne E Rowe, "An Enchantment Slightly Sinister," in The Idea of Florida in the American Literary Imagination (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 108.
7. Rieger, Clear-cutting Eden, 72-73.
8. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling (New York: Alladin Paperbacks, 2001), 17-18.
9. Bellman, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, 70.
10. Rawlings, The Yearling, 112.
11. Ibid., 114.
12. Rawlings, Cross Creek, 45.
13. Ibid., 15-16.
14. Ibid., 14.
15. Ibid., 371.
16. Bellman, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, 113.
17. Rebecca Kneale-Gould, “Transcendentalism” in The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Vol. 2, ed. Bron Taylor (London: Continuum, 2006), 1653.
18. Rieger, Clear-cutting Eden, 87.
19. Rawlings, Cross Creek, 46-47.
20. Ibid., 10.
21. Ibid., 379.
22. Ibid., 380.
23. Steven Bouma-Prediger, For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2010), 21.
24. Rawlings, Cross Creek, 379.
25. Ibid., 378.
26. Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005), 286.
Bibliography
Bellman, Samuel I.. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1974.
Bouma-Prediger, Steven. For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian View of Creation Care. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010.
Dickerson, Matthew and David O'Hara. Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2009.
Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005.
Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan. Cross Creek. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
---------------------------------. The Yearling. New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, 2001.
Rieger, Christopher. Clear-cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern Literature. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2009.
Rowe, Anne E. The Idea of Florida in the American LIterary Imagination. Baton Rouge: Louisianna State University Press, 1986.
Taylor, Bron, ed. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Vol. 2. London: Continuum, 2006.
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