Love, Stargirl

The mockingbird, Archie suggests in Stargirl, sings songs that may have been passed down from ancient birds. As such, the mockingbird represents the continuance of nature across time. In Love, Stargirl, the mockingbird reflects both Stargirl’s moods and the uplifting power of nature.

Stargirl’s description of the mockingbird’s song varies depending on her feelings when she is writing. She remembers Archie’s comment when she is unhappy and thinking of bittersweet memories. When a mockingbird moves into the neighborhood, its song lifts her spirits, saying, “It is impossible to be unhappy when listening to a mockingbird” (124). Stargirl’s excitement and confusion about Perry make her feel that the mockingbird’s song is a chaotic mix. After learning about Perry’s harem, Stargirl appreciates that the mockingbird, unlike Leo or Perry, does not reject her or demand things from her; rather it gives unconditionally. The mockingbird mirrors Stargirl’s feelings.

The bird also illustrates Stargirl’s altruism. Despite enjoying its song, Stargirl lures the mockingbird away from her neighborhood to Betty Lou’s house. She gives the bird, and the joy it brings, to Betty Lou. The mockingbird’s song connects Betty Lou to the natural world in a way she lost to her agoraphobia and makes her happy.

The ability of nature to bring, joy, peace, and connection is a powerful motif in Love, Stargirl, informing themes of identity and community. Stargirl has a deep appreciation for nature. Through her meditation, her “mind wash,” she loses her sense of self and becomes one with everything, “I am tree. Wind. Earth” (4). Her connection to nature is one way she lives in the present, and an important part of her identity. Her solar, Stonehenge-like calendar is another way Stargirl connects to nature across time.

Stargirl values all life, and even as a gardener, tries “not to hear the tiny, anguished cry” when she pulls a weed from the earth (137). Like the poet Mary Oliver whose writing she reads, Stargirl finds hope and awe in the natural world. Stargirl intuitively understands that the wonder of nature wants, and requires, to be shared. After Dootsie’s awestruck response to the Summer Solstice, Stargirl believes that same wonder is “haunting the hill, hungry for more eyes” (78). When she wakes Betty Lou to see the cereus bloom, the shared experience deepens their relationship and nature helps them to connect on a deeper level.

Archie helps Stargirl realize that nature does not need human assistance to be magnificent. Regarding the Solstice celebration, Stargirl decides, “I would let nature speak for itself” (268), and nature proves to be a powerful communicator, affecting everyone at the gathering. Archie, and especially Stargirl, are sensitive to the difference between natural time, and human-made time. Both consider the solar clock, nature’s time, to be “real time” in which people live in “kinship” with the sun. Human-created constructs like “minutes and schedules and calendars” (168) are divisive and limiting. Natural time allows people to live closer to nature and each other.

Stargirl’s Winter Solstice observance represents new beginnings and community. Stargirl knows that the solstice “was how prehistoric people located themselves in time, in the eternal cycle of the seasons” (230). Historically, the Winter Solstice celebrates the symbolic death and rebirth of the sun, the shortest day of the year after which the sun returns more and more as the days lengthen. In Love, Stargirl, the Winter Solstice marks not only the rebirth of the sun, but Stargirl and Leo’s new commitment to each other. She writes to Leo, “Your answer has been a new sunrise for me, my own personal Solstice…” (274). Stargirl experiences an emotional renaissance and is eager to live her life to the fullest, in the moment, with hope for the future.

The Solstice marks other new beginnings. Perry holds his baby sister in the golden Solstice sunbeam, celebrating her birth. Betty Lou gains the confidence to battle her agoraphobia. The town is united in its connection to past civilizations, time, and the natural world. Stargirl notes, “Suddenly the simple phrase ‘another day’ had new meaning” (269).