50 pages • 1 hour read
Karen RussellSwamplandia
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Ghosts
Ghosts are the novel’s most frequently used motif. Their presence speaks to the theme of Grief and Loss because they represent how fixated each of the Bigtree siblings, but Ava and Osceola in particular, are on their mother’s death. Hilola has only recently died when the narrative begins, and Ava recalls how terrible it had been to watch their mother succumb to cancer, especially at such a young age. She and her sister Osceola, when exploring the abandoned library boat, find a book called The Spiritist’s Telegraph, which is an instruction manual of sorts on spiritualism, the occult, and contacting the dead. The children fashion a homemade Ouija board and attempt to communicate with their mother’s spirit. When they are unsuccessful, Osceola begins to commune with the spirits of other ghosts and becomes convinced that she is engaged to be married to Louis, a long-dead teenager who had once worked aboard the ghostly dredging vessel that she and Ava happen upon.
Osceola thinks herself visited, and even possessed by ghosts, and Ava too thinks that she sees evidence of Osceola’s otherworldly, spiritual possession. The Chief and Kiwi are certain that Osceola’s ghosts are a sign of a deep melancholy over her mother’s death, and Ava’s willingness to believe her sister can also be read as a sign of grief. For each girl, Coming of Age becomes, at least in part, a task of reframing their understanding of ghosts: Osceola will have to come to the realization that she is not engaged to marry a ghost, and this will happen in part through her pursuit of the dead dredge man Louis, and in part by visiting a psychologist once her family moves to the mainland. For Ava, both emotional development and grief management happen when she is able to make use of her mother’s many teachings and think of her not only in terms of loss but also as a figure still capable of guiding her future decisions.
Melaleuca Trees
The melaleuca, or paperbark tree, was introduced into the Everglades in order to help drain the swampy region so that it would be better suited to farmland. Ava describes it as “an exotic invasive, an Australian tree imported to suck the Florida swamp dry” (96). This “strangler species” became a real threat to the natural landscapes of the Ten Thousand Islands and the Everglades, and the Bigtree family must constantly work to clear the trees from their land. After Kiwi moves to the mainland and gets a job at rival park World of Darkness, he sets his sights on a position as a pilot for a new tourist attraction, a tour of the environmental destruction wrought by the ever-increasing progress of the invasive trees throughout the whole of southwest Florida. These trees are emblematic of the theme of Environmental Destruction, and they show the damage that has been done to so much of Florida’s fragile ecosystems since colonization. This theme runs through much of Florida’s very substantial canon of literary works, and Russell’s engagement with it grounds her novel within a long tradition of Florida-authored texts that showcase the destructive impact that settlement and colonization have had on the landscape. This is a common theme also in many of Russell’s short stories, and it connects Swamplandia! to the rest of her oeuvre.
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
The Spiritist’s Telegraph is the book on spiritualism, the occult, and contacting the dead that Osceola and Ava find on their mission to the library boat at the beginning of the narrative. It symbolizes Osceola’s unresolved grief. Although not typically a bookish girl, Osceola is drawn to the text because she is still struggling with her mother’s death and she hopes to find a way to contact her mother’s ghost. In this way, the book speaks to the theme of Grief and Loss. Osceola makes a Ouija board and stages a series of seances with her sister Ava, hoping that their mother will make an appearance. The death of Hilola, coupled with the girls’ finding The Spiritist’s Telegraph serve as an inciting incident for much of the action within the narrative: Osceola will turn her grief into an obsessive fixation with the book, with ghosts, and with contacting the dead, all of which lead to her journey into the underworld to marry Louis, the ghost of a boy very close to her age who died many years before while working on a dredging boat in the area. Although Osceola is convinced that her visions of ghosts are real and that the book can help her communicate with them, her family understands her ghostly visions to be a manifestation of her melancholia, and Osceola will have to move past the loss of her mother in order to return to equilibrium and move past her mother’s death.
Carnival Darwinism
Carnival Darwinism, the Chief’s plan to save Swamplandia!, is a mixture of modernization, new investments, and changes in direction for the park. It symbolizes the Chief’s disconnect with reality, his inability to accept the inevitable closure of Swamplandia!, and his own unresolved grief over the death of his wife Hilola. She had been the park’s star performer, and the tourist attraction suffers without its headliner. While even Kiwi can see that there is no future for them in the entertainment industry, the Chief is incapable (and unwilling) to accept defeat. Rather than focusing on parenting his children and on performing the household duties that were once Hilola’s responsibility, he becomes obsessed with “Carnival Darwinism.” This plan for reinvention of the park becomes a fixation for the Chief in the same way that The Spiritist’s Telegraph functions for Osceola: Both members of the Bigtree family channel their grief into an unhealthy coping mechanism rather than facing it head on. Similarly to the way that Osceola will have to admit to herself that her ghosts are not real, the Chief will have to admit to himself that Carnival Darwinism will not save Swampandia!, and that he should focus his energy on moving his family to the mainland and forging a new life in a new industry.
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By Karen Russell
