Voice, Agency, and Urgency : Three Ecocritical Readings of Nature and the Protagonist in Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Abstract: The female protagonist Catherine Danielle Clark (Kya) in Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing is abandoned by her family at a young age and grows up alone in a marshland environment in 1950s North Carolina. Shunned by the local community, Kya relies on nature to help her survive and to teach her about life and love—until one day she finds herself accused of murder. The purpose of this essay is to examine how the author uses nature and the protagonist Kya in order to promote environmental consciousness in the novel, interlinking them in ways that advance identifiable environmental concepts. Therefore, the essay carries out a close reading of the text using three different ecocritical lenses—postcolonial ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and climate change criticism—and with a focus on three themes, respectively—voice, agency, and urgency. It finds first, through an exploration of voice and a postcolonial ecocritical lens, that both nature and Kya are othered in the novel but come to be heard and respected over time; second, through an exploration of agency and an ecofeminist lens, that activity rather than passivity is ascribed to nature and Kya, and their interconnectedness acts as a positive force for change; and third, through an exploration of urgency and a climate change criticism lens, that the interconnectedness of nature and Kya persuades readers to care about the natural world and appreciate the need to respect and protect it, using a subtle rather than overtly political message. Overall, Delia Owens’ use of nature and the protagonist promotes three key environmental concepts: the voice of nature, the agency of nature, and the urgency of respecting nature. This essay concludes that Where the Crawdads Sing speaks to the environmental consciousness of readers in these times of troubling climatic change, lending itself to a variety of ecocritical readings and offering a glimmer of hope.