Solar Storms

Fathers are scarcely mentioned in Hogan’s novel. The reader never finds out who Angel’s father is, and his identity never forms any part of her journey of self-discovery. Aligned with this lack of emphasis on fatherhood is a disengagement with the patriarchal written history that is of paramount importance in Caucasian cultures. Instead, knowledge and a sense of the past is passed down the maternal line through storytelling, which is a crucial motif in the novel. 

Though the book is mainly told through 17-year-old Angel’s first-person narrative, her story is also illuminated through the first-person accounts of Agnes, Bush, and Dora Rouge. It is through these women’s tales that Angel gains a sense of her origins and her place in the world, saying that the women’s stories “called [Angel] home” (48). Indeed, the motif of matriarchal storytelling is so important that the novel begins with Angel remembering Agnes’s account of the going-away ceremony Bush hosted for baby Angel’s departure: “Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great-grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze through an open window” (11). The idea that Angel is an “open window” for the stories of her grandmothers indicates that she is always receptive to their wisdom, and that her experience of herself and the world becomes inseparable from their lessons. Angel’s receptiveness to her grandmothers’ storytelling creates the impression of porous boundaries of the self; the idea of an autonomous European self, with its singular experiences and ideas, is relinquished in favor of one that is in communion with its ancestors and nature.