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One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash

Page history last edited by Kailey Parker 8 years, 9 months ago

 

Author

Ron Rash

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biography

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ron-rash

 

Published Books

 

Ron Rash answers Five Questions

https://youtu.be/sKugvkH7Rz0

 

Southern Scribe….Language Can Be Magical…An Interview with Ron Rash

http://www.southernscribe.com/zine/authors/Rash_Ron.htm

 

“But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.” 
― 
Ron RashOne Foot in Eden

 

Figurative Language

 

In “One Foot In Eden” Ron Rash proves himself as a master of scenery and storytelling. His use of figurative language is seamless. Rash blends metaphor and simile right within dialogue and thought. It never seems forced or heavy-handed. It is so artfully natural and blended within the storyline that it could go unnoticed.

 

His preference in figurative language is laden with simile, metaphor, and imagery. Take for instance,

“No light shone from the few farmhouse windows, not even a hangnail moon. Darkness presses against the car windows, deep and silent” (Rash 4).

Just in that one sentence Rash utilizes alliteration, personification, and metaphor which all work together to create powerful, yet simple imagery. In this moment we, as readers, can effortlessly imagine that we are completely this in moment with the characters. .

 

Below are three more examples of how he uses figurative language in beautiful simplicity. In the latter two, he blends several types of figurative language within one thought.

 

“His body was nothing more than a husk now” (53).

 

“Wind had been whipping through the gorge and the limbs of the big beech scratching the tin roof like something trying to get in” (68).

 

“On a January morning when snow laid on the path that followed the river upstream, the river getting faster and skinny, beech trees and rocks looming on each side of the trail as the gorge go narrower like a giant book that’s slow getting shut. Or maybe more like a steel leg-hold trap, I thought, looking up at the big rocks that jagged out over me like teeth” (67).

 

As you read a Ron Rash novel, this one in particular, it’s hard to not start stringing together common threads that are interwoven throughout the story. Some act simply as extended metaphors and some are so common that they become symbolic. Below I have included three quotes from throughout the text that all utilize the metaphor of a quilt. Each gives the metaphor a slightly different spin but they connect the same underlying ideas throughout the unravelling of the entire novel.

 

“The heat lay over me thick and still as a quilt. The only thing stirring was my mind, remembering that first year Janice and I had been married, remembering the nights Janice reached out for me” (22).

 

“It was a good, pure feeling to be out in the river on a warm spring day, knowing that come cold weather months later you’d  lift quilts up to your chin and smell the washing powders and the damp of the river. But it was more than that. It was knowing something could be made clean no matter how soiled and dirty it got” (85).

 

“It suddenly seemed stupid to be fighting the current when I could just lay down and let it cover me like a warm blanket. I leaned back the same way I’d lean back in a bed. I felt the water cover me and for a few moments everything became dark and peaceful” (200).

 

Ron Rash is a writer but he is also an artist in the way that the is able to paint with words and interconnect ideas.

 

Symbolism and Biblical Allusions

 

Symbolism weaves depth and unity into Rash's novel.  The author uses three specific objects to reveal his characters and add meaning to the plot.

 

BIRDS

Bird imagery recurs throughout the novel from the crows that can't find food on page twelve to the "winged" corpse on page 213 that glides down to her watery grave. Early in Amy's section of the novel she remembers that "Not a sparrow falls from the sky without His knowledge…" (p. 66-67).  While she tries to compare herself to the sparrow in its innocence, the reader sees Amy's acknowledgement that God knows her deeds.  After he kills Holland, Billy's thoughts "swirl…like bats in a cave" and he says bad thoughts are "trying to roost" in his mind (p. 128). Then he attempts to empty his mind "like you'd flush doves from a September corn field" (p. 129). The strongest bird imagery--that of buzzards--is originally connected with Holland's death as Billy says "they came down slow, tightening their circle the way you'd tighten the lid on a mason jar, or a noose around a neck…" (p. 144). However, the buzzards reappear through the deputy's speculation in the final pages; now they search for Billy and Amy Holcombe.

 

SNAKES

In a novel entitled One Foot in Eden, one expects to find an evil snake.  The first mentioned snakes are dead (p. 9) representing the loss and death that will overshadow the rest of the novel. Billy's section begins with a comparison.  He tells the reader how snakes go crazy in the heat of deep summer and then states that men are no different (p. 115). He kills a black snake because "it was something I could hurt that couldn't hurt me back" (p. 124).  After Holland is dead and Billy has crossed the river with his body, he sees the Widow Glendower (whom he believes to be a witch) and warns her not to come any farther downriver.  His reason?  He claims to have seen a huge satinback rattle snake "sunning on the rocks" (p. 133).  This deception turns her around and allows him to hide Holland's body. 

 

WATER

Throughout the novel, the characters each suffer from a literal and figurative thirst.  Rain won't come, but the water is on its way.  Rash foreshadows Amy's and Billy's drowning on page ten when he describes Princess Jocassee's death.  The valley of the lost, too dry through the main conflicts of the novel, will soon be dammed to form Lake Jocassee.  Water is both life and death.  When Amy knows she is pregnant, she describes the feeling as "spring water when it bubbles out of the ground" (p. 88). Later, the water of Lake Jocassee will be her grave.

From the earliest moments when the drought is emphasized to the moments before Billy's death when Sheriff Alexander encourages Billy to "let the water cover it up" (p. 193), water is also symbolic of the cleansing for which these characters long.  Amy lures Holland to her by bathing in front of him and then recalls images of cleaning quilts with her mother to try to avoid feelings of guilt and shame over her adultery (p. 84-85). Later, Billy admires her as she stands from her bath and he realizes that she is pregnant.  They believe their redemption is in the rain and in the river, but in fact, the water holds their punishment. 




Psalm 37:7

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.

 

The plot of the novel parallels the bible story in Genesis (specifically chapter 16) outlining Abram and Sarai’s own struggle with infertility.

Parallels

Description, Evidence, Quotes

Abram and Billy’s passivity

Even though Abram had a covenant with the Lord and trusted His promise he allowed Sarai to convince him that she could bring the Lord’s promise of children (descendents) on her own terms  

- “And Abram agreed with Sarai’s proposal.”


Billy is passive in Amy’s scheme and chooses to turn a check to her deceiving ways to solve their infertility problem.

- “Billy couldn’t help but see the mark on my neck and he let me know in a roundabout way he’d sighted Holland up here at least once.  Billy didn’t say anything else though it was clear he had his suspicions.”

Amy and Sarai’s autonomy

(The need to fulfill their dreams using their own schemes.)

“The Lord has prevented me from having children. go and sleep with my servant.  Perhaps I can have children through her.”

- Sarai says this to Abram as she has decided to take her infertility issues into her own hands.


“You ain’t decided nothing yet, I told myself as I walked on into the yard.  I can do or not do anything.  But I knew the moment I stepped back in the house that was a lie.”  

- Amy has decided she will take her infertility in her own hands and sleep with a man outside her marriage in order to obtain her motherhood desires


Using the end to justify the means

Just as Sarai feels justified in spurring an immoral deed with the intentions of fulfilling God’s promise on her own terms - Amy’s mind moves to a memory from her childhood while laying with Holland for the first time. While reflecting on her love for a freshly

river-washed quilt, Amy says..

“It was knowing something could be made clean no matter how soiled and dirty it got.”

 

 

“..the food always seemed cold and leftover though I’d just spooned it off the stove.”

This quote from the novel speaks to me as a christian.  When we are not patient for the Lord and succumb to our own schemes, life can lack the luster He plans for it.

 

Sense of Place and Environmental Activism

Many of Ron Rash’s writings deal with changes occurring over time in the Carolina highlands due to the development and the incursion of tourism with a particular focus on the destruction of the environment. He reminds the reader through his works that ignoring environmental issues such as wildlife preservation, will ultimately led to loss and possibly extinction (i.e. American chestnut and the Carolina panther). Rash weaves such complex issues into his fiction without sounding moralistic. In his words, “I expect a reader would suspect that I have pretty strong environmental leanings. My role is to witness and leave it to the reader to decide. It’s much easier for someone such as myself to say we shouldn’t be logging anywhere in the Appalachian mountains, or digging coal, but –and I’m very much against mountaintop removal- if I were a miner with a 10th –grade education and three children at home, and that’s the one well-paying job, we have to acknowledge that.                                   (www.tingemagazine.org/an-interview-with-ron-rash/)

 

One Foot in Eden – Set in the Jocassee Valley, it’s characters know that their farmland will eventually be submerged by the hydroelectric project planned by Carolina Power (as Duke Power is named in this book) flooding the Jocassee Valley…

 

 

 

Saints at the River – A young girl drowns in the Tamassee River, an environmentally protected river. The girl’s mother feels that her body must be recovered so that her soul and body can be reunited. A debate ensues as to whether a temporary dam should be built to divert the water

 

 

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Serena- Set in the mountains of North Carolina, characters are fighting against the establishment of the Smoky Mountains National Park. Serena, a women married to a powerful business man that owns a logging company, eventually takes control of the timber camp.

 

 

 

The Cove- As in all of Rash’s works the characters in this novel are tied to the land, specifically Appalachia.  The land is in itself can be considered a character because not only does it create a sense of place I the novel, but it is also defines the characters who in many ways like the land – starkly beautiful but harsh.

 
      

 

 

WCS.org - Wildlife Conservation Society

Home - National Wildlife Federation

http://carolinawildlife.org/favicon.ico

South Carolina Wildlife Federation

http://sccbank.sc.gov/favicon.ico

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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