47 pages • 1-hour read
A Year Down Yonder
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Themes
The Challenges of Feeling Out of Place
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying and graphic violence.
Adjusting to a new home, school, and set of friends can be disorienting; Mary Alice, who has been uprooted from her close-knit family and city surroundings and dropped into a faraway “hick town” to live with her intimidating grandmother, feels as if she is moving and breathing in an entirely foreign element. Besides missing her family, friends, and amenities like movie theaters, in-house bathrooms, and radio stations, her citified appearance and manners put her out of step with her new classmates, one of whom calls her a “rich Chicago girl” and tries to extort a dollar from her on her first day of school (12). Unused to threats like this, Mary Alice reacts with fear and bewilderment, and it falls to her hard-as-nails grandmother to fight this first “battle” for her. As the months pass, however, Mary Alice adjusts to her new surroundings, exchanging her puff sleeves, open-toed Easter shoes, and finger-waved hairdo for more practical, country styles better suited to the diligent work of helping her tireless grandmother. Though the lack of modern plumbing and the town’s rudimentary idea of law and order at first appall her, she eventually adapts. In the end, Mary Alice comes to share her grandmother’s zeal for the country life, even asking to stay when her year is up, overcoming the challenges of feeling out of place, developing resilience and maturity.
Mary Alice’s transition is helped by befriending some other outsiders. Shortly before Valentine’s Day, Mary Alice is delighted to meet another recent transplant to the small town: handsome Royce McNabb, a new boy at school, whose corduroy pants and argyle sweater signify his relatively “citified” origins. As Royce says to her later on a study date, “We have something in common, you and me. […] We’re a couple of foreigners here” (105). Yet another “foreigner” in town, the Works Progress Administration-commissioned artist Arnold Green seems the most displaced of them all, having come from New York City only to find that the post office is too small to house the mural he has been sent to paint. A painter who trained in Paris, Arnold struggles to adapt, dividing his time between a greasy-spoon diner and his makeshift studio in Grandma’s attic. These two characters keep Mary Alice from feeling completely alone as she works to fit in at school and in the community.
Eventually, Mary Alice finds her way toward belonging in her new home. She develops a relationship with Royce, to the envy of the other girls, who now start to accept her. In addition, she gets the starring role in the Christmas pageant, highlighting how far she’s come. By the end of the year, Mary Alice has grown so used to the town, country life, and her newfound closeness with her grandmother that she longs to stay. Though Grandma sends her back to her family in Chicago, Mary Alice returns for her wedding to Royce seven years later, illustrating her enduring love for the town. In A Year Down Yonder, Mary Alice’s dramatic change of scene, though challenging and scary, reveals resilience, adaptability, and maturity she never knew she had, changing the trajectory of her life forever.
The Power of Intergenerational Relationships
Mary Alice’s parents, forced by the recession of 1937 to give up their apartment and move into a small room, make the painful decision to send their 15-year-old daughter to live with her paternal grandmother in southern Illinois. Hugging her goodbye, Mary Alice’s mother lets slip a pessimistic aside: “Better you than me” (3). Her dread, however, is misplaced: Throughout A Year Down Yonder, Mary Alice and Grandma Dowdel forge a loving bond that will endure, despite its lack of hugs and overt words of affection, illustrating the power of intergenerational relationships.
Developing her relationship with her grandmother isn’t the first thought in Mary Alice’s mind as she boards the train. Since her older brother, Joey, who usually accompanies her on her trips to Grandma’s house, is away, she looks forward grimly to a lonely year with little or no meaningful companionship. Her closest relationships have always been with people of her own age, and she sees little chance of making friends at the “hick-town school” she will be attending. As for Grandma, she has always seemed like a forbidding relic of a tougher, more stinting, emotionally reserved generation, with no “hug[s] in her” (5). Mary Alice is pessimistic, envisioning a lonely year.
As the months pass, however, Mary Alice discovers in her grandmother hard-earned wisdom, courage, and practical knowledge that make her an ideal companion—especially for a young person adjusting to a new home and culture. Grandma’s thorough knowledge of her neighbors, along with the craftiness she’s honed over the years, saves Mary Alice from a bully on her first day of school; later, her handicraft skills and generosity help her dazzle the crowd at the nativity pageant and eventually woo the attractive Royce McNabb. In turn, Mary Alice gets a crash course in the rigors of rural life, helping her grandmother fight off vandals, catch foxes, shelter from tornados, and bake whole tables of pies and tarts. Along the way, she gains a deeper appreciation and empathy for how hard and selflessly her grandmother works. The skills, knowledge, and experience she gains could only be gotten from someone who has lived longer and experienced more than herself, emphasizing the unique advantages of their intergenerational relationship.
Mary Alice learns another important lesson from Grandma as well: Don’t judge by appearances. Although she has always considered Grandma Dowdel to be cold and standoffish, over the course of the novel, she discovers that beneath Grandma’s tough exterior hides a big heart. When a tornado strikes, Grandma risks her life to save Mary Alice’s pet cat and kitten, and on Armistice Day, she uses her fearsome reputation to wheedle hefty donations for an injured veteran’s family. From observing her grandmother’s hard work and minimal lifestyle, Mary Alice also becomes acutely aware of the hazards and precariousness of old age. By the end of the year, although her family in Chicago expects her to return, Mary Alice hesitates to leave the person who has become her best friend. However, Grandma, who has “eyes in the back of her heart” (128), also has the wisdom to know that Mary Alice must explore the world further, starting with returning to Chicago. Though she must now go back to her family, over her yearlong visit, Mary Alice has gained an unexpected new friend and a wealth of knowledge and experience that she could never have gotten from her peers.
The Effect of Societal Upheaval on Families
Although A Year Down Under takes place in a small rural town, it is also set within the larger event of one of the worst downturns of the Great Depression, the recession of 1937. Mary Alice’s family has been scattered by the Great Depression, which has forced her parents to take a tiny apartment, leading to Mary Alice’s relocation to southern Illinois for an entire year. Her brother, meanwhile, has been sent out West to plant trees for the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era program that provided work for unemployed young people. Though still better off than thousands of others, the Dowdels are bracing for the most difficult year of their lives. By focusing on Mary Alice’s coming-of-age experience in a small town while contextualizing it in the large-scale tragedy of the Great Depression, the novel shows the effect of world-changing events on individual lives.
The novel offers another example of how societal upheaval affects families with the example of Mrs. Abernathy and her son, a World War I veteran. In that war, over 50,000 Americans were killed, and more than 200,000 were wounded, some permanently injured by bullets, artillery, and poison gas. Many of the families struggling with these losses were further upended by the Great Depression and its soaring unemployment and poverty rates, which hit the nation just 11 years after the war’s end. A Year Down Yonder offers a reminder of this double blow to American domestic life in its Armistice Day sequence, when Mary Alice visits Mrs. Abernathy’s house and meets her son. Although Mary Alice is too young to remember World War I, meeting Mrs. Abernathy’s son, who was “gassed in the trenches […] and shot up” (53), brings home the reality of the war to her. The proceeds of the burgoo sale, which Grandma has done her best to maximize, are intended for Mrs. Abernathy to care for her son; without them, she would be destitute. As Grandma explains, Mrs. Abernathy could have put him in a veterans’ hospital, but that would be losing him for a second time.
At its end, the novel also nods toward the next upheaval: World War II, only four years away at the end of the book. When Mary Alice marries “[her] soldier,” Royce McNabb, back in the small rural town where they met, the proceedings are a “last-minute rush” because Royce is home on a three-day pass. Mary Alice and Royce are optimistic, and her comment that “[they] live[] happily ever after” foreshadows a happy outcome to their personal wartime experience (130). However, by moving ahead to this next world-changing event, the novel continues to highlight how such events affect families on a deeply personal and individual level.
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