Analysis concepts and methods

Solar Storms: A Character Analysis of its Protagonist Angela Jesnen

Solar Storms is a novel of a coming of age. Its central character is the adolescent protagonist, a young Native American woman named Angela Jesnen with a troubled family history and a troubled past. Jesnen is an outsider in almost all facets of her life, standing on the borderlines of existence on almost every facet of her being. For example, Angela is an outsider physically, as her face is scarred. During a time of life, late adolescence, where a young woman wishes most to appear to be beautiful and fit in with her peer group, Angela feels self-conscious about her ability to attract the opposite sex. This alone would be bad enough, but to make things worse, Angela is haunted by the knowledge that it was her troubled mother Hannah who injured her, as well as her knowledge that Hannah herself was abused. Angela feel rejected by the woman who ought to care for her the most, but guilty for blaming her mother for failing to care for her properly.

However, despite these obstacles, Angela learns to use her outsider status in a positive fashion. Angela only gains a sense of social belonging and connection with other members of her family and other women through her great-grandmother's willingness to allow the girl to spend time with her during the year detailed in the novel. This cross-generational connection suggests that by crossing the bounds of conventional family relationships, the outsider Angela can gain a better sense of herself as an adult.

Angela lives in a town that is itself kind of an outsider, upon the borderlines of the United States, remote and isolated from conventional popular culture and accepted societal norms. The town of Adam's Rib is located on a remote location, just on the cusp of Canada and Minnesota. The town is uncertain of its own identity on a 'map of the world' just as Angela stands betwixt and between childhood and womanhood. Much like the town, Angela is attempting to find her own sense of allegiance and loyalty, even while she is torn apart by different claims upon her status as a woman and a person.

The town's evolving political and social struggles are thus an excellent way to dramatize how Angela's primary relationships are those that transgress typical 'borderlines,' of conventional familial ties. Angela's closest ties span generations and she finds solace in friendships, particularly female friendships that are cross generational, rather than confined to an accepted, 'American' nuclear family structure of adolescent friendships.

Angela strives to upset the carefully contrived societal constructions of what constitutes a family, and also the nature of relationships between women. Angela is defined primarily by her relationships with women, despite her early difficulties with her mother. In fact, one could say that, failing to establish a satisfactory bond with her mother Hannah and because of the horrific physical abuse she endured at her mother's hands Angela is constantly searching for substitute mother figures throughout the text, and this quest fuels interest in the environment and the earth's ecology.

Hannah, driven in her quest to find herself and to define her role as a woman, even spends an entire winter with an outsider, hermit-like woman named Bush. From Bush, a woman of the earth, Angela gains a passion to save the remote local environment of Adam's Rib, and to keep the world pure and untouched by industrialization like the hydroelectric dam project proposed for the town that might economically enrich the area for the moment, but could prove environmentally damaging.