108
PARTISAN REVIEW
watermelon smiles, the Ku Klux Klan with its wild night raids against
the bad niggers who are making the country unsafe for their betters;
but against
this
backdrop the people in the novel are leading just
such dull, vegetable, loveless, pointless lives as the readers of best–
sellers are supposed to be looking for a vicarious escape from. The
characters are as lacking in vitality and in definition as is the plot.
The women are actually indistinguishable from each other, and the
men nearly so. Miss Krey has a singular weakness
in
the sensory de–
partment which makes it impossible for her to give a clear impression
of such a simple thing as a woman's physical beauty. There is mar–
riage in the book, but no sex, illness but no symptoms, farming but
no crops growing. Everything is vague, generalized, unpictoriaL
Out of the haze of Miss Krey's narrative only the theme emerges
sharply. There are really two themes, but one of them makes its point
so badly that the reader is likely to miss its significance. This is the
theme that says that a woman will do much better
if
she resigns her–
self to her husband's way of life than
if
she holds out for her own.
Unfortunately, both the hero and the heroine have such a dreary life,
whether they work at cross-purposes or in unison, that the moral
lacks conviction. The other theme, which is more successfully drama–
.tized, declares that a man had a hard time getting along back in the
Reconstruction period in the Brazos country
iri
Texas because the
Federal government kept trying to tell
him
how to run his life,
and
oruy when he got rid of government interference could he manage
his affairs successfully. The more stirring episodes of the novel are
all
concerned with the glorious battle to cheat the Negro of his legal
rights, and the indomitable spirit of the Southern gentlemen who
drove the Yankee meddlers and Freedmen's Bureaus out of the free,
white state of Texas.
To this "escapist" novel which provides no escape, this tale of the
past whose most effective passages deliberately echo a contemporary
political struggle,
this
popular story which contains none of the ele–
ments of popularity,
The Yearling
makes an interesting contrast.
Mrs. Rawlings' novel, though it coincides in some respects with the
current publishers' formula, is actually a "natural." Its setting is Flo–
rida of the post-bellum period, but the tropical forest in wlYch it
is
centered is not truly moored in time or geography; it
is
the Garden
of Eden of a child's imagination.
The Yearling
has had a wide sale
among adults; it is, however, a child's story, and it may even become
a child's classic. .Unlike Miss Krey's book, it has an extraordinary
acuteness of sensory perception. The taste and smell of food, the look
and feel of animals, the color of foliage, flowers, and crops, all appear
to be brand-new. The twelve-year-old hero of the story, inhabits a
universe of wonder in which each fresh sensation is a discovery that
must be weighed, examined, and laboriously charted. To her obser–
vation of the natural world, Mrs. Rawlings adds a good, simple plot
involving a fearful bear who is to be hated and hunted down and a
