There, There: Spiders and Spider Legs

 

In There, There, spiders and spider legs represent the contrast of homes and traps, and the idea of coming of age. The symbol of spiders is introduced in the story when Jacquie remembers her mother telling her that, “The spider web is a home and a trap” (Orange 101). The contrast of these ideas reveals the difficulties faced by Native Americans in their attempt to find comfort. To Jacquie, “Home was to drink. To drink was the trap” (Orange 101). Jacquie seeks the homey feeling of comfort through a harmful addiction. Like Jacquie, Opal recalls her mother saying how “spiders carry miles of web in their bodies, miles of story, miles of potential home and trap” (Orange 163). As shown in this novel, natives’ lives are full of ups and downs, as shown by the hardships, such as addictions and violence, faced by the characters in their comfort-seeking lives.

After Orvil reveals that he pulled spider legs from his leg, Opal “wasn’t surprised, not as much as she would have been had this not happened to her when she was around the same age Orvil is now” (Orange 163). Opal had pulled spider legs from her leg “before she and Jacquie left the home, the house, the man they’d been left with after their mother left this world” (Orange 165). These spider legs also came to Opal after, “There’d recently been blood from her first moon” (Orange 165). Opal’s discovery of spider legs came at a time in which she both managed to escape the home which had turned into a trap and had begun to develop into adulthood.

Like Opal, Orvil is going through a crucial period in his adolescence, in which he is coming to terms with his identity. His coming of age, as symbolized by the spider legs, is marked by his participation in the powwow. For Orvil, coming to age means finding comfort by assimilating into his native identity. However, much like Jacquie, Orvil’s attempt to find comfort through his native identity leads him into a trap, which puts his life on the line. Unlike Jacquie’s addiction, Orvil is not at fault of the situation that he is put in. However, this only goes on to show the cruel, unfair history of natives, in which even those seeking comfort through positive means end up falling victim to the system of violence imposed on them.