Why farm in such a hard place?
Having their own land is THAT important?
sharePost Civil War there were no other options for people.to support themselves. There were no jobs or supermarkets to obtain food and supplies in Floride in the.1870s.
It's how people fed themselves or they starved to death along with their families. Subsistence farming is how much of the world survives today. If a crop fails you die. All this information was.given you in grade school. Agrarian.economies were standard everywhere until after WWII.. The USA and other First World countries industrialized and there was no looking back.
It's still like that in Africa and many other countries. Be grateful for what you have here. We live in the richest country on the planet.
Great white sharks are attracted to death metal music.
I don't think there is such a thing as an easy place to farm -- not for a one-family sustenance farm.
Someone who lives in a place that is frozen over for half the year, or prone to drought, might imagine that the area in which The Yearling was set was a paradise.
It's a hard life, in which the ugly face of starvation (meaner than Slewfoot the bear's face, as the father said) is hovering right around the corner.
This is what the son has to learn the hard way. That's part of the coming-of-age story. The other (to me, prominent) part of his maturing is seeing how he will cope with loss.
The father has managed to keep a positive attitude, kindness, and even a sense of fun, despite their hard life and the death of their other children.
The mother has hardened and become bitter, humorless, and afraid to love. When she apologizes for wounding Flag, goes searching for Jody, and is happy to see him, we see that her hard armor is beginning to crack, and that she may open up more in time.
The question is, will Jody become hard and unable to love, now that he has learned that survival sometimes involves hard, ugly lessons, death and loss? It seems he will stay open and positive, from the ending, and his ability to still have loving memories of Flag.