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Where the Crawdads SingChap 1-3: Ma, Jodie, Chase

The North Carolina marsh where Kya lives has long been a sanctuary for outsiders. How does this setting shape the novel?
How does growing up in this isolation affect Kya?
In what ways does her status as an "outsider" change how others see her?

Feel free to answer what you would like, ask questions, make comments, and share quotes.

I love the imagery that is used to introduce the landscape of a wasteland bog. The author is very careful to make the whole scene feel sluggish, slimy, stuck in the mud. The people are resourceful and gruff, almost reduced to creatures of the marshland. I really enjoy the following description:

"When cornered, desperate, or isolated, man reverts to those instincts that aim straight at survival. Quick and just. They will always be the trump cards because they are passed on more frequently from one generation to the next than the gentler genes. It is not a morality, but simple math. Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks."

That last line: "Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks." I really like that! It hits me deeper than just in the context of the novel. In work settings, relationships, with our own ambitions--we confide in competition like passing a note in class. It's a game. We can be fierce and vicious to those closest to us--within the circle of our own we compete. But, when threatened from the outside, protection of that with in the circle's borders is paramount. Perfect example of interspecific competition versus intraspecific competition.
I think that this is foreshadowing. Kya is outcasted, marooned. She knows nothing but competition with the outside, interspecific competition with the marsh, with the past, with a world that turns without her. To have no tribe means there is no tribe to compete with and no tribe to protect you. I can't think of a better way to define what it means to be an "outsider". Kya embodies this definition, without any connection to the "inside" of anything except the marsh, acting as her mother and siblings in their absence. The radio--gone. The remnants of Ma's things--burned to ash. Pa--a figure best avoided and receded from like the hairline on a man in his early thirties, the line pushing further and further back as time goes on. Swamp trash and raised to believe it.

I like the way that the author described the setting, overall a wasteland of sludge and unkept land. It made me feel like I was there, in a muddy, hot, unsettled marsh.

Kya has to grow up quickly. After her siblings leave, it is just her fending for herself with Pa. She's just a 6 year old girl who is now in charge of everything: laundry, cooking, buying groceries. She probably has minimal to no people skills as time goes on and is looked at as a dirty swamp person when she first ventures into town. She has no one to communicate with; at one point she tells a seagull it is her birthday.

She is an outsider in the most complete sense: an outsider in her family, who all left her with Pa, and an outsider in society. She is called "swamp trash" when she comes into town to buy her groceries. She really has no control over herself being an outsider. Her mother left, her siblings left, and she was too young to leave along with them. She had to stay because she was given no other choice and in staying, she becomes a single outsider from society.

The description of the setting was very vivid and thick. That's all I could think of the whole time -- how thick the air must feel in this swamp. Even more intriguing to me is the way that the author describes the people of the swamp. The same page stuck out to me as the passage you posted about, Ashley. Something about the way she describes these swamp dwellers. as though generations in the swamp has boiled them down to something more primal than typical human nature.

I think this setting and history of people really play into how Kya grows up in a huge way. While for most it would be unthinkable for a mother to leave her children with an abusive father, or for older siblings to leave younger siblings, but for this family it was all about survival. In a way, it doesn't seem that strange because we know that the people of the marsh are survivalists to their very core. This also shapes the isolation that Kya grows up in, too. She learns vey quickly what she has to do to survive -- cook, clean, and stay out of her father's way. She is born and bred with the old, primal instincts of the marsh coursing through her. I believe that is why she does survive alone with her father, alone in the swamp. She was born to survive.

I agree that the abandonment by Kya's family members is unfathomable. I like what you said about their survivalist instincts being reason for that reaction.

I imagine that Kya's appreciation for the marsh is more unique than is her relatives obvious feelings of suffocation from their life, as it were. It's a tough question to ask: Would you stay and live in a life of struggle together, or would you leave and maybe make something of yourself alone? How selfish and selfless are we allowed to be, and can we forgive ourselves if we cross the line on either side?

I wonder so many things about Kya and the family dynamics that she knows. She's the youngest, the baby. I think that is one of the hardest things, for me, to grasp understanding of. I think of my little sister, and how I've always taken care of and looked after her. It's both a responsibility and a duty. I don't think that it is reciprocal, however. The way I love and care for my sister is not the way my sister loves and cares for me.

If the oldest of Kya's siblings took off, it's not so unreasonable. If Ma were to take Kya and leave Jodie, I think I could rationalized that too. Being that it was Kya left all alone, that is the what leads me to believe that marsh life must be about sheer survivalist instincts. She can count to 29, right?