49 pages • 1 hour read
Rick BraggAva's Man
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Economic Effects of the Great Depression
While the book is about Charlie, it’s also about how Charlie and his family navigate life during the Great Depression, and about how he responds to the transition from the old South to the new South. In this way, the book is a character study that is shaped by the changing socioeconomic landscape.
The Great Depression hits shortly after Charlie and Ava are married. While they had always lived in poverty, they experience a brief glimmer of wealth when Charlie lands a job at a steel mill shortly after WWI. At this time, everyone is banking on steel, and it seems like an industry that was built to last. Charlie and Ava move out of the woods and closer to town. However, shortly after Charlie gets this job, he is laid off. In fact, most of the workers at the steel mill are laid off, and the Depression begins. Charlie and Ava move back to the woods, and Bragg points out that life in the woods during the Depression was in some ways easier than life in the city: People in the woods were used to hunting and fishing for sustenance, so they didn’t have to beg for food like people in the city. However, they were so poor that they couldn’t afford medicine or doctors, and their infant mortality rates were incredibly high as a result.
While illegal whiskey stills had always existed, they became even more integral and pronounced during the Depression. For Charlie and men like him, distilling whiskey was a way to make extra money or to trade for services. This can be seen in Chapter 13 when Margaret is born. Instead of paying money for a doctor, which Charlie didn’t have, he gave the doctor a quart of whiskey for his services. While jobs were scarce during the Depression, alcohol was always in demand, albeit secretly, and this provided whiskey distillers like Charlie a means to provide for his family.
Familial Expectations of Masculinity and Manhood
A major theme throughout the novel is the idea of what it means to be a man. For Charlie, masculinity was a dynamic idea. On the one hand, being a man meant working hard to earn a living and prove oneself. Ever since Charlie was a young man, he worked hard physical labor to provide food and shelter for his family. On the other hand, masculinity was also proved through strength. Charlie never shied away from a fight if it was a fight for integrity or to defend what was right. This is something that Charlie learned from his father, and something he taught his own sons. This can best be seen when James is little and being bullied by a bigger boy. Charlie tells him to beat the bully up, which he does. For Charlie, this fight is justified because James is defending himself, and he’s learning to be a man.
This moment can be contrasted against the time when James is older, and he wants to kill a man for calling him a liar. While the younger Charlie might have encouraged James to defend his honor, in this moment, he teaches James that being a man means laying down his anger and the gun because he has a wife and baby to care for. The idea of being a man is an ideology that evolves according to context. While defending one’s honor is one part of being a man for Charlie, taking care of one’s family trumps that pursuit.
This idea of taking care of one’s family was the ultimate way that Charlie proved himself as a man. He found is to be of the utmost virtue to never let his family down. Throughout the book, similar to the advice he gave James, he puts his family above everything else, including his own feelings. When Jerry Rearden shoots Charlie but misses, Charlie could have easily killed Jerry. Although doing so might have been justified, he could never risk going away to jail and leaving his family unattended.
The “New South” in 1920s Southern US
Another major theme throughout the book is the transition from an old South to a new South. While this transition is historically defined as a shift from agriculture to industry, the book focuses on the personal implications of this change as seen through Charlie. For most of Charlie’s life, he is a river man: He lives in the deep woods, fishes and hunts for food, and makes whiskey at night under the stars. He gets drunk and drives home without fear of crashing because the dirt roads aren’t populated, especially at night. Men fight each other when they deserve it, and in this way, they take the law into their own hands without much fear of retribution from law enforcement. This is the old South, a place where poor men living in the woods don’t live in shame. Charlie never cares about his tattered clothes nor the nature of his physically demanding jobs. Rather, he embraces what he has and the thrives at the chance to do more.
However, as Charlie gets older, the push for industry moves men from the woods and into the city to obtain work. Things are becoming more civilized. No longer can men drive drunk; they will get arrested. No longer can whiskey stills be hidden because the revenuers have planes and can spot the sites from above. And no longer can men be proud and poor: Cops arrest men who look poor on the grounds of vagrancy. This is the new South, a place that feels increasingly foreign to Charlie. While Charlie never adapts to the changing societal landscape, his children live the changes: They go to school in town, go to the movies, and even eat ice cream. The way Charlie lived versus the way his own children lived reveals the dramatic shift from the old South to the new South.
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