Where the crawdads sing as an eco-Künstlerinroman.

Abstract

This dissertation situates Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) as an eco-Künstlerinroman: a contemporary reconfiguration of the artist’s novel in which female artistic formation emerges through intimacy with nature. While previous scholars classify the novel as a murder mystery and coming-of-age novel, I argue it inherits and revises the Künstlerroman tradition by situating the protagonist Catherine “Kya” Clark’s artistic apprenticeship within the North Carolina marshland. I explore how the marsh functions as a maternal refuge, teacher, moral guide, and artistic muse. As the marsh meets Kya’s physical and psychological needs, it enables her development as an artist, while her recognition of nature’s own artistry becomes a catalyst for self-discovery. The novel’s central concern is the formation of Kya’s artistic subjectivity under conditions of precarity: parental neglect, gender-based abuse, social exclusion, and environmental degradation. This dissertation thus reads Kya’s development — especially her emergence as a nature artist — as the narrative’s organising arc, one that invites analysis through the genre lens of the eco-Künstlerinroman. The analytical chapters follow Kya’s development across three stages: her childhood formation through the marsh’s tutelage and nurturing presence; her adolescence and young adulthood, during which sexual awakening and romantic betrayal deepen her commitment to artistic creation, authorship, and ecological responsibility; and her maturity, where she embraces her identity as nature artist, poet, and public authority on the marsh. This study builds on Jerome Buckley’s (1974) account of the Künstlerroman, while extending feminist approaches to the genre developed by Linda Huf (1985), Kathleen Hankins (1991), and Evy Varsamopoulou (2019). It also draws on Bracha Ettinger’s (2006a) feminist theories of the maternal nexus and matrixial borderspace to interpret Kya’s development as a motherless daughter and emerging artist, and on Cathy Caruth’s (1996) literary trauma theory to elucidate how Kya’s poetry becomes a medium through which the unspeakability of trauma is translated. Through this composite framework, the study makes a unique contribution to genre theory, arguing for an ecological and feminist variant of the artist’s novel in which nature and art are mutually constitutive forces: while nature serves as a catalyst for aesthetic education, artistic creation in turn becomes a means of healing and flourishing and eco-consciousness.