Stargirl

The desert setting reflects Leo’s own emotional contrasts. While the desert seems like a one-note “dry wasteland” to newcomers, Leo knows that once you really look and learn about the desert, it is full of life and subtle color. Leo is much the same way: outwardly shy and dependent on group approval, but inside, craving the freedom Stargirl offers.

Outwardly, the desert resembles the unvarying conformity of the students at Mica High. The desert isolates the town, reinforcing its insular mindset. Leo, however, sees the desert’s hidden beauty. Even the hard desert dirt glints with the magical shimmer of mica. Leo’s narrative is filled with expressive descriptions and figurative language about desert life. He appreciates the beauty of the “dusky lavender” Maricopa mountains and the way the saguaros “flung shadows of giants” (18). Stargirl inspires many of Leo’s desert comparisons. He calls her “The faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl,” (15) elusive and beautiful, and impossible to pin down. Leo sees Stargirl’s vivacity echoed in the desert, but he also recognizes the desert’s isolation. When he is shunned, Leo feels “a second desert imposed upon the one I already lived in” (131). 

Kevin and Leo’s television program embodies the othering culture of the Mica High. The show is the school’s “most popular thing” (14) because it is a leveling force, bringing everyone into line with the school’s social expectations. Leo uses court-related language to describe the show. The guest is a “victim” interrogated by “jurors.” The jury asks questions designed to make the guest uncomfortable, judging and condemning individuality and any digressions from conformity. Leo calls the show a “mock inquisition” (55). Historically, inquisitions were judicial procedures held to root out and expose differences, from witch trials to religious heresy. Victims were tortured and punished for expressing differing opinions and beliefs. Although the jury in Hot Seat is not supposed to render a verdict or make comments, in Stargirl’s case, her differences—or crimes—are so egregious to the student body that the session becomes a true inquisition. The chair the victim sits on is even painted red with flames, signifying the burning of the witch or dissident whose opinions are contrary to cultural norms.  

Bones symbolize peoples’ connections to the earth, to the past, and to each other. Archie uses the skull of Barney, the Paleocene rodent, to teach his informal students about how history informs the present and how all life has the same origins. Leo internalizes these lessons, even if he does not understand them at the time. Looking at an Eocene skull after the basketball playoff defeat, Leo envisions the “tens of millions of years of faces in a living room in a place called Arizona” (75). Life on earth continues long after one becomes bones. Archie wants his Loyal Order of the Stone Bone students to remember that message. Stargirl echoes it when she shares Archie’s belief that mockingbirds may pass down sounds of extinct species from generation to generation. The past and its lessons are ever-present. 

Archie buries Barney, returning him to the earth. Leo notes that Archie himself is not long for the world, looking “as if his body were preparing itself to rejoin the earth” (182). Returning to the earth is a returning to one’s origins, recalling Genesis 3:19: “Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Similarly, Archie knows that the earth and its inhabitants are made from “star stuff” (177), or the building blocks of life on earth. Although everyone belongs to the earth and the stars, where all beginnings and endings come from, Archie recognizes that Stargirl is more connected to her celestial essence than ordinary folk (177).

The moonlight that streams in Leo’s window at nighttime represents the freedom of Leo’s feelings. During the day, Leo keeps his emotions suppressed and dovetailed to the group identity. In the pure moonlight, Leo can be his true self. Moonlight helps Leo break, imaginatively, with group conformity. He can think of Stargirl and embrace the individuality she represents. He can indulge in romantic thoughts and wonder. Thinking of Stargirl one night, Leo “floated up the white light that washed my sheets and slept on the moon” (85). Stargirl’s voice comes to him in the moonlit nights, “from the stars” (74). When Leo renounces Stargirl, the moonlight suddenly makes him uncomfortable, and he closes the shade. Rejecting the moonlight symbolizes Leo’s choice to stay with the group and turn away from Stargirl and the wondrous aspects in life she taught him to see.

Stargirl’s happy wagon symbolizes her internal feelings. Leo notes that, outwardly, Stargirl seems oblivious to personal criticism and cruelty. Instead, she feels others’ pain and unhappiness. Stargirl projects positivity. The happy wagon shows that Stargirl, though a remarkable, compassionate person, is still an ordinary girl at heart. She does have feelings; she just keeps them private. She uses the happy wagon as a way of externally expressing her emotions; the number of pebbles in the wagon correspond to her level of happiness. When Leo comes over for dinner, she reveals that the wagon is filled with the largest number of pebbles ever. When Stargirl becomes Susan, Leo observes that there are only two pebbles in the wagon—a record low.