48 pages • 1 hour read
Solar Storms
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Themes
Opposing Views of Nature
The central drama of Hogan’s novel is based on the conflicting views of nature between Native Americans and Caucasians. The Native Americans in the novel perceive Nature as sacred and animate, and possessing the same feelings as humanity. In her first winter at Adam’s Rib, Angel hears “the lake talking to the sky, revealing some part of itself or what lay inside its blue-green light,” with the lake “recalling the memory of last year’s ice, the jewelry lost in its waters, the fishermen who’d fallen through storms, and who lay inside it even now” (95).
In the above description, the lake’s human ability to communicate and remember links it intimately with humanity. Similarly, benign human actions, from the Native American perspective, are natural actions, and therefore part of nature. Angel’s ability to see inside water and communicate with it makes her take nature’s side when she opposes the dam construction and the re-routing of the river in the Land of the Fat-Eaters: “Water, [Angel] knew, had its own needs, its own speaking and desires. No one had asked the water what it wanted” (279). While to someone who has grown up with the Caucasian worldview, the act of asking water for its opinion might seem supernatural, for Angel, it is essential and entirely natural. Hogan’s narrative shows that when the will of water is opposed, the response is flooding, stagnation, and the disappearance of much of the land.
Whereas the Native-American attitude toward nature is shown as one of wonder and communion, the Caucasian settlers’ attitude is dominated by fear and exploitation. There is a need to separate humanity from nature and to rule over it. Angel considers that the Europeans set up enmity with nature when they “trapped themselves inside their own destruction of it” and removed “spirit from everything, from animals, trees, fishhooks and hammers” (180).Prior to this attitude of human superiority, “everything lived together well,” and there was communication between humans and other elements of nature. Now, there is only destruction and limitation (181). The Caucasians’ divergence from nature enables them to exploit it for the short-term goal of making money, regardless of the cost to animal life and future generations. Angel’s bleak view of the scale of destruction after the dams have been built is evidenced when she uses the biblical trope of Noah’s ark, to show how “in this flood, there would be no animals escaping two by two” (335). Arguably, the human war on nature has been so great that no deity will step in to rectify the situation.
While the Caucasian attitude to nature seems to have won in the short-term, as the river is ultimately re-directed, at the end of the novel, Angel holds the hope that the earth and humanity are just “starting to form,” meaning that there is time for humanity’s relationship with nature to evolve (351).
Late-20th-Century Colonialism
Prior to reading the novel, readers from outside the Native-American community may have believed that the colonization of Native American lands by Caucasians was not a phenomenon of the late-20th century. They may, like the Caucasians in the novel, have believed that Native American ways were a picturesque relic from America’s past, with no means or legitimacy to influence its future. They may have also imagined that the damage done to Native communities was also relegated to the distant past. This ignorance is demonstrated when Angel describes how “to others, we were an insignificant people […] They romanticized [our] past in fantasy, sometimes even wanted to bring it back for themselves, but they despised our real human presence […] now we were present, alive, a force to be reckoned with” (343).
Another type of colonialism begins when the Caucasian dam-builders demand that Natives “give up our way of life for theirs,” thus declaring the Anglo way of life superior (315). Angel is furious, judging that:
if they’d known what their decisions meant to our people, and if they continued with this building in spite of that knowing, then they were evil. They were the cannibals who consumed human flesh, set fire to worlds the gods had loved and asked the humans to care for (343).
This cannibalistic imagery conveys Angel’s disgust for this new type of colonialism, which devours the flesh of one tribe of humanity so that another can prosper, if only in the short term.
The destruction of the original type of colonialism (i.e. displacement from one’s original land) is also referenced in Hogan’s text. Both Dora-Rouge’s sister and Loretta Wing suffer on a personal level from Caucasian impositions on their lands; the scope of destruction is shown on a communal level in the example of the remaining Native people in the land of the Fat-Eaters. Owing to the expansion of the hydroelectric project, the Fat-Eaters’ lost “lands they’d lived on since before European time was invented,” and their territory is reduced to a settlement built around a little hill (225). The impact on Native Americans is that they “were despondent. In some cases, they had to be held back from killing themselves” (225). Angel considers that what has taken place is an inexcusable “murder of the soul,” where the killers went unpunished and were even rewarded, becoming rich as a result of their exploitation (226). Thus, the novel demonstrates that exploitation of land, culture and spirit is a continuing phenomenon. Hogan also shows that Native Americans and their culture are not irrelevant or moribund, and will continue to thrive and provide another view of humanity and nature.
Abundance and Pain in Native-American Femininity
The Native-American women in Hogan’s novel defy the ageist gender expectations put forth by mainstream Caucasian society. The white patriarchy that Angel has spent the greatest part of her life in values women primarily on their appearance and expects them to be cast aside and relinquish an interest in romance when they grow older. This doctrine influences Angel at the beginning of the novel. Deeply self-conscious about the scars that make her supposedly flawed, she hides the scarred half of her face, which “from below the eye to the jawline, looked something like the cratered moon” (33).
Her ugliness, as she perceives it, leaves her feeling lacking, and she goes looking for reassurance that she is acceptable by making herself available to every man she encounters. Importantly, at Bush’s house on Fur Island, there are no mirrors, and Angel begins to show her face, having stronger preoccupations than hiding. Further, while she is at Adam’s Rib, Angel’s precocious sexuality is dialed down, as she embarks on the slower, steadier trajectory to a more heartfelt relationship with Tommy. Also, the many older women in the novel—Bush, Frenchie, Agnes, and even Dora-Rouge, who is toothless “with sunken cheeks and a confusion of snowy hair”—have romantic relations of their own (31). The women’s independence, along with their continued engagement with nature and creativity, means that they possess a life energy that fuels their desire for connection and romance, long after patriarchal Caucasian society deems it acceptable for them to do so.
On the other hand, in the examples of Loretta Wing and Hannah Wing, the Native-American female body is less a cipher of healing and self-expression than a container of destruction and violence. Loretta Wing, who steals Agnes’s son, Harold, away from Bush, is configured as the typical femme fatale, with her red hair, “long brown fingers and red lips, [and] a too-tight blue dress,” embellishments that align with patriarchal society’s definition of female beauty (38). The local women do not possess such artificial attractions and the men at Adam’s Rib cannot resist Loretta, who awakens a desire akin to hunger in them. However, Loretta is haunted by a past of watching her tribal ancestors die and then being beaten and sold into prostitution. Though Agnes would wish to hate Loretta for the destruction she has wreaked on her family, and Loretta’s inability to love, Agnes never loses sight of the fact that “Loretta wasn’t the original sin. It was as though something inside her had up and walked away and left the rest behind” (39). Loretta is, therefore, less a predator and more a victim of what has been done to her. Though her daughter, Hannah, does terrible things, such as molesting children, stealing, killing animals, and biting her baby daughter’s face, she is possessed by the violence that has haunted her ancestors. Hannah and Loretta, therefore, belong less to themselves and more to a pained and victimized community.
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