26 pages • 52 minutes read
Marjorie Kinnan RawlingsA Mother In Mannville
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Rawlings was born on August 8, 1896, in Washington, DC. Her mother was a social climber and planned to use her daughter to elevate her societal position, which Rawlings resisted. Rawlings was closer to her father, a farmer who taught her about growing crops and animal husbandry, and his influence appears throughout her writing. Ann McCutchan writes in her biography of Rawlings:
Arthur Sr. surprised Ida, and probably himself, with a deep fondness for Marjorie. He adored her. When he left the house before she awoke, he might leave her a message or a verse: I love my little daughter / from her head clear to her toes / I even love the little bit / of turkey’s egg nose (McCutchan, Ann. The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of The Yearling. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021, p. 17).
Perhaps Rawlings got her talent for writing verses from her father. As early as age six, she showed an interest in writing. At age 16, she won second place in a contest for McCall’s magazine. That same year, 1912, she published her first poems, which showed her talent for writing dialects.
After Rawlings’s father’s death in her senior year of high school, the family moved to Wisconsin, where Rawlings’s attended the University of Wisconsin. She wrote for the university’s literary magazine and met her first husband, Charles Rawlings, at college. Like Rawlings, Charles wanted to be a writer, but the onset of World War I complicated his career path. Charles and Rawlings moved to New York together, where Rawlings continued to write and publish while Charles enlisted in the army. They lived together before marriage, which was unusual at the time.
After several moves, the couple went to Florida and purchased an orange grove. There, Rawlings wrote many of her acclaimed stories and novels, including South Moon Under and the Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Yearling. At Cross Creek, she lived among the “Cracker”—poor, rural white people—of south Florida, developing an ear for their dialect, as well as a deep knowledge of the region’s culture, flora, and fauna.
Rawlings is celebrated for her lyrical writing style, full of detailed descriptions, and her uniquely drawn characters and regionalism, which she honed during her time in Florida. Her stories have a strong autobiographical connection, including “A Mother in Mannville,” which is based on Rawlings’s time renting a cabin in the Carolina mountains. While there, she met Dale Wills, a 12-year-old resident of a nearby orphanage. She developed a strong friendship with Wills and even inquired about adopting him but learned that his parents were living. Nevertheless, Rawlings maintained periodic contact with Wills throughout her life.
In 1949, MGM Studios commissioned Rawlings to write an expanded version of “A Mother in Mannville” for a movie based on the Lassie series. Many changes were made to this version’s plot, including recasting the female narrator as a singer. The episode evokes a similar mood and tone to Rawlings’s story; however, the woman adopts the boy in the Lassie tale.
Ideological Context: First-Wave Feminism and Its Aftermath
Although calls for improvements to women’s societal standing preceded it by decades (if not centuries), the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention is generally viewed as the beginning of organized first-wave feminism in the US. At this meeting, Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented her “Declaration of Sentiments” outlining women’s rights, including the right to own property, the right to meaningful employment, and the right to vote. Feminist activism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries would especially coalesce around the latter demand, which was achieved in 1920. The extension of suffrage to women expedited societal changes that were already underway as a result of World War I, when women increasingly began to work outside the home as men served overseas. By the 1920s, mores surrounding women’s independence and sexual freedom were comparatively relaxed, but only in relation to their former rigidity: The ideal woman was still a homemaker, wife, and mother.
Rawlings lived during this period of upheaval and change. She was 24 years old when women obtained the right to vote and lived through the Great Depression and both World Wars. She was an unusually independent woman and didn’t conform to societal norms, smoking in public at a time when most women did so in secret and being open about her affinity for liquor. She also stood up to editors who wished to censor or tone down her work. Though she married, Rawlings did not fit the social construct of what a wife should be in her day, often staying alone for long periods at Cross Creek rather than joining her husband on various business trips. She was financially independent, strong-willed, and opinionated. The narrator of “A Mother in Manville” is implied to share many of these qualities, as she has sought out isolation to pursue her writing. Her implied regret about the missed opportunity to mother Jerry hints that her independence has come at a cost; where a man of the era could relatively easily balance work and family, a woman determined to pursue a career might have to forgo marriage or motherhood.
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By Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
