Cross Creek: Rawlings's Transcendentalism

Potentiality of Meaning: Rawlings' Rhetoric of an Event

When Rawlings mentions Thoreau in the final chapter of Cross Creek, transcendentalism is woven into the text. Rawlings participates in American transcendentalism by appealing to a previous transcendentalist. At the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau says, "The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels" (303). Thoreau, like Emerson and Whitman, establishes a methodology in American literature in which one can gain meaning of the universal from studying the particular. The most easily drawn example of this process is the title of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The metaphor is immediate, i.e. a part-to-whole relationship is being revealed and then carefully studied. This construction is used to investigate any type of relationship, such as how one person relates to others or how I relate to society.

Rawlings positions herself in the transcendental tradition, not by simply evoking Thoreau, but through an active demonstration of subjective formulations. Cross Creek, the universal and analytic ideal, is not examined as an abstract object, but is deconstructed into its parts and restructured as an object comprised of particulars. In other words, the actual place of Cross Creek means nothing without the recognition of each one of its components. When Rawlings examines the caterpillar for its connection to the network of life, the important idea to be highlighted is the many different angles of approach utilized, which do not need to reach a definitive end. The metaphorical value of this becomes an imperative in understanding how Rawlings defines Cross Creek, because whether or not readers agree with her formulations is incidental. The notion of inducing the reader into a subjective mode of reflection should be highlighted, because Rawlings aims beyond meaning in a normative sense; she is examining an environment for how it relates to herself.

The overarching thread in the novel is the author herself; how she situates herself within the context of each chapter; how each incident is interpreted by her self; how each of the events culminates into meaning. The "residue" in prior chapters leads the reader towards this aim, because Rawlings is constantly searching for something beyond the given. The demonstration the author performs at the novel's close should guide the reader towards creating a subjective meaning in the novel. The meaning of Cross Creek is not pre-existing, but is posited by an individual. This act of appealing to the reader's involvement is not original, but it also reveals that it is in the transcendental tradition. The reader is drawn in with simple pronoun manipulation. Rawlings shifts to a collective "we" to include and also appeal to the reader. Now within the text, the reader is given a template for a thought process that forms the author's consciousness of Cross Creek.

The effect of importing different perspectives into the text culminates in an idea that to reach the essence of meaning one must approach it as an event. Cross Creek, in empirical terms, is a locale, a plot of land boxed in by other lands, but the meaning, its residue or essence, is only able to be understood as an experience. The individual must witness the event of the place to be able to comprise its meaning. In this context, meaning becomes infinitely mutable, because each person posits a different essence. Rawlings may only issue descriptions to the reader of how she gains its meaning after hundreds of pages, or how she experiences it.

The idea of meaning as an experience is another direct import from transcendentalism. For Thoreau, the earth is comprised of foot prints or the act of people going out and experiencing meaning. Within Whitman's "Song of Myself," there is a correlating theme: "All truths wait in all things, / They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, / they do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon." (Whitman 58; 648-650). When Rawlings says, "I suppose there are a hundred other places where I might have found what I found at Cross Creek," a particular stress should be placed on the act of finding (376). The parallel ideal with each author is the potential of meaning waiting to be experienced.

The idea of ownership that Rawlings employs in the final chapter should be investigated by the reader as a metaphorical structure. The trope of economic ownership is extrapolated by Rawlings into a means of exemplifying that one can own something, but only as a part of one's self. By disowning the economic side of ownership, Rawlings is opting for a different method of owning, one that is only capable of being valued by the individual who gives it value. In other words, before answering her own question, Rawlings examines the rhetoric involved in asking the question-she examines the particular and creates a unique universal as the thesis of the chapter contends.

--Patrick Henry

Works Cited

• Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
• Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973.