Understanding The House Made of Dawn by Scott Momaday
In 1969, N. Scott Momaday became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize in the area of Letters, Drama, and Music for best Fiction. As Schubnell relates in N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background, Momaday initially could not believe that he had won a prize for a work that began as a poem (93). Schubnell cites one juror who explains his reasoning for selecting House Made of Dawn as being the work's 'eloquence and intensity of feeling, its freshness of vision and subject, [and] its immediacy of theme' (93). For these reasons and many more, House Made of Dawn hailed the arrival on the American literary scene of a "matured, sophisticated literary artist from the original Americans" (Schubnell, 93).
There are many elements influencing and incorporated into House Made of Dawn that the reader will better appreciate by gaining an understanding of their history or significance in Native tradition. Louis Owens's suggests in his work Mixedblood Messages that "before discussing any aspect of Native American literature, it is important to know what literature we are talking about" (15). Thus, before one evaluates or analyzes House Made of Dawn any further, one should attain knowledge of the author and culture. Also, it will be prudent for the reader to have background knowledge of such elements as stories and running.
Momaday's life greatly affects aspects of House Made of Dawn. Navarro Scotte Mammedaty, a mixedblood of Kiowa and Cherokee descent, (as well as European ancestry on his mother's side) was born on February 27, 1934. Numerous scholars and critics note that from the beginni...
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...seems the more one knows, about Momaday, the Kiowa, the Navajo, and people of Jemez, among other things, the more one grasps the full meaning of House Made of Dawn. It is a work full of possibility and revelations.
Works Cited:
Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. Harper & Row: New York, 1968.
The Man Made of Words. St. Martin's Press: New York, 1997.
Nabokov, Peter. Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition. Ancient City Press: Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1981.
Owens, Louis. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1998
Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1992,1994
Schubnell, Mattias. N. Scott Momaday, the Cultural and Literary Background. University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1985
McNickle, D'Arcy. "A Different World." Native American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology. Ed. Vizenor, Gerald. United States of America: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 1995, 111-119.
James Welch relies heavily on documented Blackfeet history and family stories, but he merges those actual events and people with his imagination and thus creates a tension between fiction and history, weaving a tapestry that reflects a vital tribal community under pressure from outside forces. Welch re-imagines the past in order to document history in a way that includes past and future generations, offers readers insight into the tribal world-views of the Blackfeet, examines women's roles in the tribe, and leads to a recovery of identity. Welch also creates a Blackfeet world of the late 1800s--a tribal culture in the process of economic and social change as a result of the introduction of the horse and gun and the encroachment of the white invaders or "seizers" as Welch identifies them.
In Momaday's work, the reader is on a journey through myth, past and present, as the author draws on oral traditions of Native American storytelling to align-in-parallel a personal journey for understanding of himself, and perhaps the nature of man. Through an inventive technique, Rainy Mountain serves as a way to collect, preserve and disseminate the oral storytelling traditions of Native American storytellers. Momaday has attempted to bridge the oral traditions to written form by weaving three continual strands as a single long braid throughout the text.
Banks, D., Erodes, R. (2004). Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement. Ojibwa Warrior. Retrieved January 20, 2005, from http://www.oupress.com/bookdetail.asp?isbn=0-8061-3580-8
The Impression of Life on her Works’ Leslie Marmon Silko for more than two decades has been enriching Native American literature through her poetry, novels, short stories, and essays. Her fertile imagination and vivid writing continues to impress both critics and readers alike. Influences in Silko's life are abundant in her work. She includes childhood memories, experiences with racism, Pueblo beliefs, family history, and traditional storytelling. Prominent in many of her works is the perspective of her mixed ethnicity. She explores ethnic identity and cultural values through her literature. Often the reader is taught about the lessons, values, and heritage of early cultures. Leslie Marmon grew up attaching herself, in memory and imagination, to the village and then to the land around it; and because this is Laguna land, many of the stories she grew up with were stories from the Keresan oral tradition, the stories of her father's people and their shared history. In her art as in her life, Silko has continued to maintain her identity with the story of the people of Kawaika, the People of the Beautiful Lake. The story of Laguna, like the biography of Silko and the fictional lives of her novels' protagonists, has always been a story of contact, departure, and recovery. “My father had wandered over all the hills and mesas around Laguna when he was a child; I started roaming those same mesas and hills when I was nine years old. At eleven I rode away on my horse, and explored places my father and uncle could not have reached on foot. I carried with me the feeling I'd acquired from listening to the old stories, that the land all around me was teeming with creatures that were related to human beings and to me.” ("Interior and Exterior Lan...
...744,” in The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994), 101
Women play an influential role in The Odyssey. Women appear throughout the story, as goddesses, wives, princesses, or servants. The women in “The Odyssey” dictate the direction of the epic. Homer the blind creator may have contrived the story with the aim to depict a story of a male heroism; but the story if looked at from a different angles shows the power women have over men. The Sirens and women that posses the power of seduction when ever they are encountered take the men off their course, and lead many to their death. The power women in the Epic pose can be seen from the goddess all to the wives. From The nymph Calypso who enslaves Odysseus for many years posses all the way back to Penelope who many argue is of equal importance to
House Made of Dawn, the novel that began the AMERICAN INDIAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE, is Scott Momaday's masterpiece. He originally conceived the work as a series of poems, but under the tutelage of Wallace Stegner at Stanford, Momaday reconceived the work first as a set of stories, then as a novel. House is the story of Abel, an Indian from the Pueblo Momaday calls "Walatowa," a fictionalized version of Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, where Momaday grew up. Abel returns from World War II a victim of what we would call today "post-traumatic stress syndrome." He is unable to speak, even to his grandfather, Francisco, who raised him.
Homer's great epic, "The Odyssey" was written several thousands of years ago, a time in human history when men played the dominant role in society. The entire structure of civilization was organized and controlled by men; It was an accepted fact that women held an inferior position in society. Society was constructed as if women were around only to serve the men. The involvement of women in any circumstance was almost completely dominated by what the men allowed. The women were valued in society, only they were not given important roles or any decision making power. It is as if they held no power in the ancient Greek society. This is why Homer's Odyssey is very unique, Homer put women into roles that were previously unheard of for women to possess. Unlike in The Iliad, where women served merely as an object to men; female characters of Odyssey are distinctive because they possess personality, and have intricate relationships with the male characters of the Odyssey. By characterizing the women in "The Odyssey", a reader may come to some conclusions about the role of women in this epic. Along with the belief that women played a secondary role to men in society, the female characters displayed certain traits that could not be exhibited by the men. Athena demonstrated the most intelligence and valor out of all the characters in "The Odyssey." The male characters play the most significant roles in this epic, but without the support of the females in "The Odyssey", Odysseus would not have made it through his journey.
“A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view” (Ibsen). This saying also applied to the times of the Odyssey, an epic constructed by the blind, eight century B.C.E. poet, Homer. As one of the few representatives of ancient Greek social order, the blind, Homer witnessed women as substandard to men, regardless of their actions; many of them existed as seductresses, prostitutes, or slaves. He engraved into his poem women’s roles; the roles of women, as mothers, wives, seductresses, and goddesses are exemplified in this epic, when shown in comparison to the men of that era.
One does not need to go into deep, critical analysis to see that women are portrayed as very weak and servile in the Iliad. We have seen them being humiliated by their husbands, brothers, and even owners. They are often charged with tasks others would find demeaning if left to someone else. The chauvinism is everywhere and it is very clear that the role of women in the Iliad was that of a woman who needs a man to take care of her and keep her lying, twisted heart in check.
Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
The prologue of House Made of Dawn begins with the word 'Dypaloh'. This word signals a shift into the Native American oral tradition. Traditionally, storytelling have definite responsibilities. According to Louis Owens in Other Destinies, the responsibilities are: "to tell us who we are and where we come from, make us whole and heal us, to integrate us fully within the world in which we live and make that world inhabitable, to compel order and reality" (93). In defining the responsibilities of storytelling, Owens also gives a description of the 'identified individual', one who has a strong sense of identity and is fully self-imagined. The identified individual knows were he is from and where he is going. He is not fragmented, and k...
Throughout House Made of Dawn Momaday forces the reader to see a clear distinction between how white people and Native Americans use language. Momaday calls it the written word, the white people’s word, and the spoken word, the Native American word. The white people’s spoken word is so rigidly focused on the fundamental meaning of each word that is lacks the imagery of the Native American word. It is like listening to a contract being read aloud.
The poem “Iliad,” by Homer, is known for its violence between men during a war, but under that violence, is the different type of women who play a significant role in the poem (Homer 189). This poem’s narrative seems to show a male dominated world between the Greek commanders. This male dominated world cannot happen on its own, thus the different background roles of women are needed in order to make sense of all this rage. As the University of Michigan article How Do Women Make Their Way Into This Cycle states, “They are seen as the objects of both lust and domesticity, yet they are also used to excuse war, cause conflict, and display the power of men” (www.umich.edu). The focus in this poem steers towards the rage between the men, but this rage most of the time is inspired and initiated by a woman. The women of Iliad play a significant role in the poem such as war prizes, male hero partners, and women gods.