Prejudice, Intolerance, and Acceptance Theme Analysis

Delia Owens sets Where the Crawdads Sing against a backdrop of prejudice and intolerance. This is perhaps best illustrated by the social stratification of the area in which Kya grows up, a place in North Carolina divided not only by race, but by class, too. Although Kya—who’s white—doesn’t face racial discrimination like her African American friends, Jumpin’ and his wife, Mabel, she experiences unfair judgment based on her socioeconomic status, receiving harsh treatment from the townspeople simply because she lives in a shack in the marshlands. When Kya is forced to go to school, she only attends for one day because the other children ostracize her for being different, laughing at her lack of a formal education and refusing to interact with her because of her low status in society. It is this cruelty—this unwillingness to accept Kya simply because she’s different—that her lawyer, Tom Milton, reminds the townspeople of when Kya is accused of murdering Chase Andrews. Asking the jury to consider how unfairly people have treated Kya, he urges them to finally recognize her humanity instead of assuming the worst of her. To do this, he underlines the fact that the only thing that makes Kya different is that she was abandoned by her family as a child. By saying this, he forces the jury to reconsider prejudices they’ve come to take for granted. That Kya is then found not guilty suggests that this is a powerful, deeply affecting mental exercise, one that helps people examine the ways in which unfair biases influence the way they treat others.

The geographical landscape of Where the Crawdads Sing is significant, since its various divisions very clearly indicate the biases of Kya’s surrounding community. The coastal region where Kya lives is broken up into three primary sections: the “Colored Town,” the comparatively affluent village known as Barkley Cove, and the swampy wilderness that is sparsely populated by “squatters” like Kya and—before they leave—her family. To put it simply, only people from Barkley Cove receive any respect from the average white person in the area. In terms of race relations, this is unfortunately not surprising for a southern state in the 1940s. What’s interesting, though, is that white people like Kya and her family also face discrimination (albeit of a different kind). This is because the areas in the marsh where people like Kya and her family live have historically attracted “mutinous sailors, castaways, debtors, and fugitives.” Since these groups of people don’t typically command much respect in society, people looking for “serious land” when the area was first colonized avoided the swamps. Consequently, the very fact that Kya lives in this marshy area makes her a target of the surrounding community’s firmly established, classist belief that anyone who doesn’t conform to the lifestyle of their wealthy society ought to be avoided and scorned.

Although she rarely ventures into Barkley Cove, Kya is quite aware of the townspeople’s unwillingness to accept her. When she and her father do decide to eat in town one night, a woman screams at her for getting too close to her daughter. Without caring if Kya hears, she talks about how she wishes “those people” wouldn’t come into town at all, calling Kya “filthy” and claiming that people from the marsh carry serious diseases. Later, this intense ostracization turns Kya into something of a legend, since boys her age refer to her as the “Marsh Girl” and dare each other to run out to her shack in the middle of the night and bang the door. The first time this happens is several years after Kya’s father leaves, and Kya huddles in her shack and listens to the boys laugh and talk about how she failed to spell “dog” correctly on the one day she attended school. And though she feels fear when the boys approach her house, what she mainly feels is a prevailing sense of shame, as if she is less than human. In this way, readers see the harrowing effects that such ostracization and intolerance can have on a person’s sense of self, regardless of the kind of prejudice that motivates the intolerance.

As an adult, Kya continues to face classist, judgmental notions about who she is and whether or not she deserves respect. This dynamic is especially amplified by Chase Andrews’s murder trial, since the vast majority of the townspeople immediately assume she must have been the one who killed him. And while there actually is good reason for them to think this, it’s worth noting that their assumptions are just that—assumptions. Before people even learn about any of the evidence in the case, they jump to conclusions simply because Kya looms large in the town’s social consciousness as the wild “Marsh Girl.” Having forced this mysterious identity upon Kya ever since she was a child, the townspeople unquestioningly decide that she must have killed Chase, since this would align with their preconceived—but entirely uninformed—image of who she is. Thankfully, Tom Milton places this very image under scrutiny in his closing remarks while representing Kya in court, imploring the jury members to ignore hearsay and focus only on the evidence that has been presented in the trial. He points out that none of the town’s social institutions reached out to help Kya when her family abandoned her. “Instead we labeled and rejected her because we thought she was different,” he says, trying to get the jurors to see that Kya isn’t the depraved and disreputable person they’ve always thought her to be, but simply a young woman who has been unfairly excluded from society for her entire life. This argument is so powerful that the jury ultimately acquits her, allowing her to go free and finally enjoy a life in which nobody makes unfair assumptions about her. This reveals how useful it can be to remind people of their various social intolerances, inviting them to reexamine their biases in order to treat others with the compassion they deserve.