35 pages • 1 hour read
Margaret CravenI Heard The Owl Call My Name
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Ordinariness of Death
From his first moments in Kingcome, Mark Brian is confronted with the physicality of death. When he enters his new home for the first time, he finds that the decomposing body of a drowned boy is being stored there until burial. There is a steady stream of deaths throughout the novel, but they are often easy-to-miss, at times even marginal events. For example, three children in a neighboring village die in a fire in Chapter 7, but Craven summarizes this fact in a few lines and quickly moves on to the next event, i.e. the boat engine dying on the way back from the funeral. Even the deaths of people from the village are rendered flatly and quickly. When Gordon’s mother dies in Chapter 11, there is little emotional fanfare in the text. The death itself occurs in a single sentence: “He held her hand until she died, and she died quietly and quickly” (82). Craven immediately moves on to the practicalities of the aftermath: “Then Marta cleared the front room of relatives, and gathered the woman’s children to the bedside where Mark said the Lord’s Prayer” (82). Marta and Mark must prepare the body, and Craven omits any reflection or display of emotions, instead detailing their actions: “Mark closed the eyes, straightened the limbs and packed the orifices of the body against further seepage. He and the men of the family carried the body into the tiny vestry of the church, and Marta and the women bathed it, powdered it, and dressed it in its best clothes” (83). After her death, the body of Gordon’s mother becomes an “it” that impels a set of rote actions. Like the salmon who live and die in unwavering cycles, the un-extraordinary deaths throughout the novel are only beats in the cadence of life. Mark’s training as a clergyman in the Anglican Church likely has prepared him for the spiritual considerations of death, but Kingcome gives him an opportunity to become unafraid of the material ugliness of it.
The Importance of Place to Individual Identity
Craven uses the young-adult characters of Gordon, Keetah, Keetah’s sister, and Jim to compare the degrees to which their identities are linked to their community. Jim, the eldest of the group, left Kingcome to work in a mill but returned after a year, seemingly unchanged. Jim is a traditionalist; he loves his village and of all the young people appears to be the most well-versed in its traditions. His characterization of dancing the hamatsa as “the greatest moment of [his] life” (71)indicates that his ambitions and values are all contained within his tribe. Although she is betrothed to Gordon, Jim recognizes Keetah as a kindred spirit, calling her “the pool” in opposition to Gordon’s “fast moving water”(48). Keetah follows Gordon to Vancouver and like Jim elects to return to Kingcome, explaining that it is too much a part of her for her to live away from it. However, unlike Jim, Keetah admits to being changed by her experience outside the village. Her dislike of Jim’s traditional, patriarchal habits is intensified when she witnesses the relative egalitarianism of white marriages. Keetah’s identity, in other words, is not wholly dictated by the culture she grew up in. Instead, she develops a greater sense of herself as an individual, learning to value her private likes and dislikes and ask for change. Jim and Keetah together occupy a middle-ground by the end of the book, with Mark recognizing that they both must continue revising their identities as the village declines. Gordon and Keetah’s sister, on the other hand, occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. Gordon has a strong sense of himself as an individual. When he discovers that his aptitudes and ambitions best align with those of white society, he resolves to leave the village and its customs behind completely, and it seems he will survive and thrive in his new life.
Cultural Preservation Versus Conservation
When the English anthropologist arrives in Kingcome, she chastises Mark for altering the church by adding insulation and goes on to lament white Christianity’s arrival in Kingcome. She believes that without the arrival of the white man, the disappearing indigenous culture would have been preserved in Kingcome. Mark tries to argue that no culture can remain static and that when it has disappeared, the true stewards of the land, the birds and the fish, would reclaim the land. In this scene, Mark reveals a method for coping with the death of a civilization, as well as the death of an individual; he sees the decline of Kingcome as part of a larger cycle of death and renewal, not merely as the end of something. As a spiritual leader in the village, he does not see his role as that of a museum curator, trying to freeze the village as he found it. Instead, he attempts to conserve, i.e., respectfully manage what is left of the village—honoring its customs but also the shifting desires of its population. It’s this attitude that informs Mark’s refusal to convince Gordon to stay in Kingcome, and also his insistence that Jim treat Keetah more respectfully than a traditional marriage would demand. The hamatsa myth and dance is another example of Mark’s refusal to idolize the past. Government regulations banning the use of real corpses signified the decline of the ritual, but Peter, describing the dance, told of the suffering of women who feared the body used in the ritual would be one of their relatives. When Peter is finished recounting the ritual, Mark reflects that it is for the best, signaling that there is harm in the past as well as good.
