Education, Coming of Age, and Adulthood Theme Analysis

In Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens presents the process of growing up as an accumulation of knowledge and experience. Although Kya doesn’t attend school, she stitches together an understanding of the world, one that isn’t confined to textbooks, classrooms, or standard courses of study. In fact, her alternative education is more holistic than it would be if she went to school, and her intellectual growth ultimately charts her path from childhood to adulthood. That she has to cobble together her own education helps her value everything she learns, appreciating the process of learning because it helps her mature in a way that nothing else can, since she doesn’t have any role models or parental figures to turn to when she wants to understand life’s complexities. Indeed, Tate is the only person who goes out of his way to help Kya, showing her how to read and—in doing so—helping her unlock a whole new world of knowledge. Interestingly enough, Kya’s relationship with Tate is also what teaches her to navigate the sexual and romantic desires that come along with adulthood. By associating Kya’s intellectual education with her overall development, then, Owens frames the very process of coming of age as directly linked to learning.

Because Kya’s family members abandon her and she doesn’t attend school, her life as a young girl is confined to a rather narrow existence. She’s a curious child but doesn’t know how to read, nor does she know how to interact with others, since she almost never ventures into town or has conversations with strangers. During this period, her lack of knowledge is a product of her lack of life experience, an indication that she hasn’t been exposed to the things that most people encounter as children. More importantly, though, it’s worth noting that this kind of exposure is generally what helps people grow up and learn how to move through the world—holding conversations, watching adults interact, attending school, and learning to read are all experiences that contribute to a child’s overall understanding of life. Without these experiences, Kya not only remains uneducated, but finds herself stalled at an early developmental stage. As a result, readers see that education is closely related to the process of coming of age.

Despite her lack of a formal education, though, Kya manages to interface with the world in an inquisitive way that fosters growth. Of course, this is largely tied to her instinctual survival skills, since she realizes at an early age that she’ll have to learn to provide for herself if she wants to stay alive. All the same, she gains worldly experience by learning about the fishing trade, digging up mussels each morning so she can sell them and use the money to buy what she needs. This is an education in and of itself, since it gives Kya experience and exposes her to elements of life she hasn’t previously encountered. But still, Kya’s education is limited to life in the marsh, and though she becomes adept at skills like identifying animals, she lacks certain basic abilities that most children her age have already mastered—that is, until Tate teaches her how to read. As Tate does this, he tells Kya that now she will be able to “learn everything, and she finds this to be true, since reading opens new worlds for her and helps her better understand her own existence. For instance, she’s finally able to read the names and birthdates that her mother wrote in the back of the family Bible, thereby giving her a sense of her family history that she never would have gained if she couldn’t read. Combining Kya’s naturally curious disposition and informal education with the skills Tate teaches her, she becomes more aware of the world around her and—more importantly—her place in it.

But reading and writing aren’t the only things Kya learns as a teenager. She also learns what it’s like to navigate the changes that young women experience as their bodies transition into adulthood. Like her intellectual education, this process of maturing is unique, since she doesn’t have women in her life to tell her about periods or sexual desire. In fact, Tate is the person who tells Kya about menstruation and brings her information on the subject, meaning that he’s involved in several different aspects of her process of coming of age—he not only helps her increase her intellectual knowledge, but also provides crucial emotional support when she has her first period, an experience that would possibly be even more daunting if she had no idea what was happening. Furthermore, Tate is the first person Kya loves and desires, and though they don’t have sex as teenagers, her relationship with him shows her what it’s like to have a meaningful romantic connection with another person.

It’s worth acknowledging that, although Tate is an important figure in Kya’s life, it would be reductive (and even a bit patriarchal) to give him credit for all of her intellectual and emotional growth. While it’s true that Kya didn’t have a traditional education or any female role models, this doesn’t mean she couldn’t have achieved the same amount of progress in life if left to her own devices. After all, conventional forms of education aren’t the only means by which people develop and flourish, and she may well have prospered even without Tate’s help. In fact, this is the very point that Owens makes in Where the Crawdads Sing: coming of age is a kind of education in and of itself, regardless of what that process looks like. For Kya, maturing means having new intellectual and emotional experiences, which happen to be related to her relationship with Tate. Regardless, though, what’s important to grasp is that Kya’s path to womanhood is laid out not by the steppingstones of a conventional upbringing, but by an unsystematic accumulation of knowledge, a beautifully chaotic education that combines personal experience with intellectual exploration and discovery.