I, Jill Alexander, American Girl Revolutionary

Abstract

Analyzing the insider-outsider continuum in Remembrance of the Sun (1986, 2011) by Kate Gilmore, the purpose of this paper is to reveal different levels of being a female outsider protagonist moving along the insider-outsider continuum, maintaining an outsider voice, and at the same time developing an insider perspective. Remembrance of the Sun is a historical fiction authored by an outsider and set in 1978, one year before the Islamic revolution in Iran. After moving from New England to Tehran, Jill, a seventeen-year-old American girl, struggles to adjust to an unfamiliar lifestyle. However, her experience becomes a story of love and fascination when she meets Shaheen, the charismatic Iranian boy who is the first French horn player in the high school band. Frequently, Jill as an outsider to Persian culture is aligning herself with Shaheen’s culture and their romance acts as a bridge, between two seemingly disparate cultures. Remembrance of the Sun reinforces that insider-outsider status is not fixed but situated within a continuum in a state of flux. The innocence of Jill and Shaheen’s romance moves “Jill Alexander, American girl revolutionary” (p. 170) toward the insider position. At the end, Jill, crosses American-Iranian cultural gap with her own pace.