Frontiers of Gender in Children's Literature: Virginia Hamilton's Arilia Sun Down (1983)

Frontiers of Gender in Children's Literature:Virginia Hamilton's Arilia Sun Down Anita Moss At a conference devoted to the theme of "Frontiers in Children's Literature," perhaps no novel for children deserves discussion more than Virginia Hamilton's Arilla Sun Down. Arilia Sun Down is most certainly a courageous and aesthetically adventurous book, both in its innovative narrative technique and in its treatment of race and gender; Betsy Hearne has written that "Virginia Hamilton has heightened the standards for children's literature as few authors have." Hamilton writes most often about the black experience because, as she suggests in a comment quoted by Hearne, she feels that "the making of any fiction is foremost a self-viewing that becomes a force for life and living." In Arilla Sun Down the reader becomes immersed in the "self-viewing," questing, groping, first-person narrative of a Midwestern girl, black with some Amerindian blood, who must contend with an unusual family that pulls her in conflicting directions. In her award-winning novel M.C. Higgins, the Great, Hamilton had presented her young protagonist M.C. as living in the patriarchal shadow of his powerful but, in some respects, morally blind father, Jones. After he encounters both New Woman in the person of young Lurhetta Outlaw and the traditional matriarchal values on Killburn Mound, M.C. acquires a more balanced and integrated sense of self—what some feminist critics have called "the androgynous self." He seems content to make home safe for every member of the family through his humble act of building a wall, rather than attempting to dominate the entire mountain on his forty-foot pole in the difficult patriarchal role of "M.C. Higgins, the Great." It is this kind of aggressive patriarchy—M.C. the Hunter, the conqueror of the earth—that, in its most extreme form, has resulted in the rape of the mountain by strip mining. In Arilla Sun Down, Hamilton again reveals this "androgynous vision" of the self. In this novel she endorses liberation from excessively rigid gender norms that [End Page 25] have imprisoned both men and women in the past. She shows that her character need not settle for confinement and enclosure. She need not be the "moon," a looking-glass reflection of her brother, who sees himself as the sun, and she can create richer, newer fictions for herself than even her storytelling mentor, James False Face, had dreamed or imagined. Hamilton's character Arilla reveals that integrity of the self lies in a movement away from sexual and racial polarization toward a state in which individual roles and modes of conduct may be freely chosen. Bathed and obscured by the too-brilliant radiance of Jack Sun Run, her proud, self-defined brother, Arilla must uncover her own light and let it shine. Arilla's attempt to recover her past experience through memory, to transcend power struggles with her brother and mother, and to create an identity through her own literary talent as she breaks out of fixed images of race and gender, enable her to aspire toward a wholeness of being that may be called androgynous. Achieving identity, a true name, and a secure sense of self is perhaps more difficult for Arilla Adams than for most adolescents. She often feels overwhelmed and anxious. Her mother is a tall, beautiful, and powerful black dancer, who restricts and encloses Arilla excessively. Moreover, Lillian Adams forces her son, Jack Sun Run, to participate in restricting Arilla; a key scene in the novel shows Jack's tying Arilla to sumac trees. Jack in turn resents Arilla's presence since he sees her as an impediment to his freedom; he blames the mother for having wanted another baby, Arilla is quite literally blinded by her brother's presence. He calls her "Moon," the traditional symbol of the female among Native American peoples. Arilla firmly resists the attempts of Jack to fix her, to name and define her. Just as she has resisted dancing because she does not wish to be a shadow of her powerful mother, she also resists the names of "Moon Child" or "Moon Flower" because she does not wish to be a...