From Childhood to the Underworld: Native American Birdman Iconography and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!

CHRISTOPHER RIEGER Southeast Missouri State University From Childhood to the Underworld: Native American Birdman Iconography and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! 1 KAREN RUSSELL’S DEBUT NOVEL, SWAMPLANDIA! (2011), TELLS THE STORY of the Bigtree family, transplants to South Florida who are attempting to save their once-prosperous family business, Swamplandia!, a “GatorThemed Park and Swamp Café” (6) in the Everglades. The Bigtree children are each making the transitional journey from childhood to adulthood in the wake of their mother’s death from cancer. Meanwhile, their father has largely left them alone as he tries to earn money to save the family home and business, which teeters on the brink of bankruptcy in the absence of the family matriarch and star alligator wrestler, Hilola. The novel centers on the coming-of-age exploits of the three siblings: seventeen-year-old Kiwi, who leaves the isolated family home to work at a rival theme park on the mainland; sixteen-year-old Osceola (or Ossie), who runs away with her boyfriend, who happens to be a ghost; and the protagonist and narrator, thirteen-year-old Ava, who goes after Ossie through the labyrinthine swamps of the Everglades in an attempt to retrieve her sister from the underworld. Russell layers the story of the journey from childhood to adulthood with the added passages (or attempted passages) between the worlds of life and death, leaving readers feeling unsure whether the interactions with ghosts and the underworld are just in the girls’ imaginations or if the novel is treading in the realm of magical realism, as in Russell’s short story collections St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. (2006) and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. (2013). Kiwi attempts to become the “man of the family” by getting a job at a rival theme park called “The World of Darkness,” which features such attractions as “escalator tours of the rings of Hell” (13). Osceola runs away “to the underworld to get 1 I must thank and recognize Kellie Brewington, a student in my southern literature class, who first pointed out the connections of the Bird Man in the novel to various birdmen of Native American belief systems. 400 Christopher Rieger married” (170) to the ghost of a young man killed during the Great Depression on board a ship that was dredging the Everglades. On her journey to rescue Ossie from her phantasm fiancé, Ava is accompanied by a mysterious figure known as the Bird Man, who appears to possess strange powers as well as the knowledge of how to reach the underworld. Allthreechildrenembarkontransformativejourneys,andtheswamp setting of their home is an especially appropriate landscape for their endeavors. Scholars like William Tynes Cowan and Anthony Wilson have shown how swamps in the literary and popular imagination are associatedwithoutsidersandwithpersonaltransformation.Thesecritics demonstrate how both runaway slaves and Native Americans are connected with southern swamps, entrenching this particular landscape as a space for the marginalized or those who are deemed not to belong to “proper” society. Cowan, in The Slave in the Swamp: Disrupting the Plantation Narrative, describes the swamplands of the South as a “psychological ‘Other’ to the nation’s cultivated, organized, ordered landscapes” (8). Wilson argues in Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture that well into the twentieth century “the swamp remained a space for those who did not fit the circle of honor, but it was no longer a hell of exile. It became a signifier of an alternative, more inclusive Southern culture” (xxiii). In Russell’s twenty-first-century novel, the swamp, the Bigtrees, and their Swamplandia! theme park, located “thirty-odd miles off the grid of mainland lights” (3), occupy a space “removed from mainstream culture, as essentially and fundamentally liminal” (Wilson xxii). As such, it is a perfect landscape from which outsiders can critique mainstream culture and values. In this sense, the swamp as symbolic landscape has changed very little from its antebellum designation as wild landscape outside the bounds of the pastoral garden that Cowan describes and analyzes: “The uncultivated regions at the margins of his [the plantation owner’s] ordered terrain, however, were beyond his control, as were the inhabitants of such regions” (11). The association of swamplands with...