Sexual awakening and maturation in Scott Momaday's The ancient child

Ancient Child -- Scott Momaday

Growing up in society means more than learning the rules and taking one's place at the table with the adult community. It also means passing certain tests, some of them pleasant and some very unpleasant. One of the key tests that helped Grey grow into a mature woman was her sexual awakening and later more mature sexual experiences. But during her transition from girl to woman she utilizes more than her comely physical charms and the inevitable male attraction to those charms. Part of her maturity comes through dealing with the meanness, the aggression, and the foul odor of others' bad behavior, lustfulness and thoughtlessness. In this sense, readers discover that Grey is up to the challenge in nearly every instance of testing that her emerging maturation has presented to her. In the end, she made it through the struggles and passed the tests.

1st Episode Leading to Grey's Emerging as a Mature Woman

Prior to Set coming into her life, Grey has growing up to do not only to become a medicine woman but also to become a mature adult female in physical and psychological ways. There is always a price to pay, even in stories that are a blend of historic and mythic. In fact Grey must overcome unpleasant and even brutally rude events that will happen in her life. In Chapter 19 ("She must serve her purpose") she is with Billy, asking him to have sex with her. "Her whole body had begun to express a profound hunger" and so she was bluntly plainspoken to Billy: "I mean, are we going to fuck or what?" Soon she has her wish and the two are deeply involved in sexual intercourse (p. 96). Momaday writes that she is being "fulfilled in a great, shuddering eruption of her being" (p. 96). Soon after she "squealed with pleasure" -- thanks to Momaday's manipulation of the story's dynamics -- her "intense pleasure was turned into pain" (p. 96). Billy's father (with a name reeking of evil, David Dicks) is raping her. It was an "unspeakable happening" and an anger that "would now be with her the rest of her life" (p. 97).

Readers know on page 97, Momaday has given Grey a chance to learn how to hate, which is just one of the steps in the real world that every maturing individual must experience. She became not just a person learning to hate, but in fact she became the "personification of hatred" (p. 97). She must have been delirious and deep in shock because she "could not remember how it happened that she came to this" (p. 97). Readers, too, do not know how she could be making love to her wild but sensitive lover Billy, and in the next second is being assaulted by his father. And what does a woman do who has just been assaulted sexually? Does she meekly roll off the bed, curse her attacker and run away? Does she lie crying on the floor in a pathetic scene of weakness?

In this instance, she does none of those things. She showed her maturing identity by teasing her attacker into believing she was going to continue giving him pleasure. When she asks him to massage her breasts, she quickly winds baling wire around his wrists, capturing him into the trap she quickly set. Give Momaday credit for the metaphor as he describes the baling wire event; "…she wound it around his wrists as quickly and as deftly as a calf roper winds a pigging string around the hocks of a calf. It happened in a second" (p. 99). Comparing Dwight Dicks with a calf -- or a pig -- was a perfect literary brushstroke on a canvas of otherwise brutal criminality. Readers know that this incident -- during which Grey cut the foreskin of Dicks' penis -- was not an easy one for Grey. She would have given anything to have a drink of water, or some fresh air; her whole body "ached" and yet she would not pass up this opportunity to achieve "this rite of retribution" (p. 100). The calf image comes into play again (p. 101) as she swabs some of that "calf dope" on his bleeding penis. She nearly castrated Dicks (the name Dicks is almost too appropriate to be effective, but it makes its point), and rides off naked under the orange moon, a more grown up woman albeit she did it the hard way. Some time later, acting very much like an adult female who learned to hate (hate makes a person want to rub it in and be confrontational, not let things go), Grey rides naked up to Dwight Dicks. She is no doubt looking stunningly sexy; he "coppery body glowing with sweat, her breasts heaving," she approached Dwight Dicks. "Say Dwight, how's your injured member?" she calls out. "Your cock, Dwight," she repeats. Dicks says he is fine and she rides off with "…her round buttocks jiggling above the sheen" of her horse's black tail (p. 200). Grown people who have been abused feel better when they can turn the tables, so readers know for sure that Grey is growing up.

Episode #3

When Grey emerges as a mature medicine person she carries a new attitude; it is an attitude of "deep propriety" and "dignity" (p. 290). Her language that she used "was made of rhythms and silences" that Set had never heard. Her long black hair was combed out, Momaday writes, "and fashioned in the old way"; when younger she was a "beautiful girl" but now, "in a wholly different context, she was a beautiful woman, endowed with purpose and grace" (pp. 290-91). That introduction to this chapter is referenced because a bit later in the book readers also relate to a more mature sexual bond between Set and Grey.

On page 296, Grey is very helpful to Set; she is in fact more helpful than sexual. He returns to the Hogan, stands naked, and instead of engaging in sweet sensual moves, Grey bathes his naked body. In the manner of "old Navajo men a hundred years ago," he wraps himself in a white cloth and lays down in the shade of a juniper tree. Instead of beginning the foreplay that they may have engaged in earlier she "slowly kneaded the muscles in his shoulders and back and legs." She then sat beside him, "singing softly, stirring the air over him with a grass broom" (p. 296). In this excerpt, her mature medicine woman attitude shows clearly that she has grown up. That doesn't mean that she isn't attracted sexually to Set, but there is a reverence now and an appreciation for his needs that perhaps readers didn't see previously. And on page 297 the desire that Set feels for Grey is a sweeter, more casual lead-in to sexual foreplay. "Their hands slipped over their bodies, describing desire, but yet discreetly." They both have grown by now.

As for the characters' achievement of modern American Indian identity, the way it interfaces the history of the Old West (to wit, Billy the Kid) with modern tends to bring the fictional aspect of the book into a brighter spotlight than Native American cultural reality. Grey's character, in particular, reveals some truth about medicine and how Indians understand that medicine comes to them. And as Karen Wallace writes in her book Liminality and Myth in Native American Fiction: Ceremony and The Ancient Child, Momaday avoids presenting the Native Americans as "the Noble Savage" that is part of a "dying race." In that sense, it is an enjoyable if not totally realistic story.