Analysis Of Agnes Dewitt 's ' The Miracles At Little No Horse '

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While many people are born as “border dwellers”, Agnes DeWitt seizes an opportunity to forge a new identity for herself in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Born as and identifying as an average woman for a large part of her life, she takes on the persona of a priest, Father Damien Modeste, and plays this part for the remainder of her life. However, even though she takes on the role of Father Damien, Agnes still retains her female identity, and she never sacrifices one for the other. She takes on male attributes without sacrificing her female attributes and takes on attributes of a priest without sacrificing the natural human tendency to “sin”, especially when she engages in a sexual relationship with Father Wekkle. Agnes DeWitt maintains the characteristics of a border dweller by straddling the rigid divisions between gender, religion, and identity as she simultaneously plays the role of both Agnes and Father Damien. Before Father Damien’s death, Agnes lived as Sister Cecilia, a nun who taught music. However, Agnes only lived as Cecilia for six months before she decided to take on the persona of Father Damien, a persona that she inhabited for the rest of her life. Therefore, Agnes technically lived as three separate identities, yet she rarely referred to herself as “Cecilia” when she became Father Damien. This calls into question how important an identity Sister Cecilia is to Agnes if she could switch into the priestly role of Damien so quickly. Agnes herself describes Cecilia as “…emptied. Thinned…” (Erdrich 14). However, when Agnes becomes Father Damien, she claims, “She transformed herself each morning with a feeling of loss that finally defined as the loss of Agnes” (Erdri... ... middle of paper ... ...weller by his refusal to link any gender to any religion; he determines that a person is an amalgamation of genders and religions. Although these people known as border dwellers are not typically accepted in their societies, Father Damien finds Little No Horse to be a safe haven for him as he questions his identity. As Agnes states near the end of her journey, “Here it was –the reason she’d been called here in the first place” (Erdrich 309). She equates her time on the reservation to a spiritual self-discovery that absolutely needed to take place for her to determine that she was in fact a border dweller. This awakening is crucial to her character development because despite entering the reservation as a priest intent on reforming the Ojibwe, Agnes learns more from their religion and enacts certain aspects of it in her everyday life until her death.

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