Be a Man, Be a Woman: Androgyny in "House Made of Dawn"

Abstract

Scott Momaday's House Made of Dan,' winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, the first major work of fiction by an American Indian, has become a classic of the American Indian literature. In spite of its acceptance, however, the novel has not been given the critical attention one might expect it to receive. It remains a difficult book, a complex, mosaic work of fiction, as much in the tradition of Joyce and Faulkner as in that of the Indian tale. Momaday, a Kiowa/Cherokee with a Ph.D. in American literature from Stanford, has drawn on his Indian heritage and his white education in creating this book about the bicultural dilemma of the contemporary Indian. Briefly, it is the story of Abel, a young Pueblo Indian who returns to his village after serving in World War II and is unable to integrate himself into the village after his encounter with the white world. He lives with his grandfather and turns to alcohol in his malaise. After killing an albino villager in a fight outside a bar, he is sent to prison. Seven years later, in 1952, he is released and relocated in Los Angeles, where he finds assimilation into white society even more difficult than returning to the world of his grandfather Francisco. After losing his job and suffering a nearly fatal beating by a Chicano policeman, he returns to the village, where he attends his grandfather's final delirium and death. Through his sufferings and through the fragments of wisdom he learns in this last meeting with the old man, Abel begins the road back to spiritual peace, and his triumph is signaled by his joining the ceremonial dawn runners on the morning after Francisco's death and attempting, in spite of his injuries, to run with them. A bare outline of the plot is inadequate to the richness of this novel, with its complex of nearly allegorical characters and its evocation of the geography of New Mexico and the character of contemporary Indian life, both on the reservation and in the urban centers. The basic conflicts of the white/Indian dilemma are central to the novel's meaning, the religious, political, economic and cultural differences which have separated the two races since their earliest contact.