Women’s Rites of Passage in Tombs of the Vanishing Indian

This paper attempts to examine female rituals in Marie Clements' Tombs of the Vanishing Indian. It explores rituals written by and for women in order to trace different key concepts associated with women’s ritual practices. The paper, therefore, references Abigail Brenner’s book Women’s Rites of Passage as an expansion of Arnold Van Gennep’s influential work The Rites of Passage, investigating the arguments that women's ritual practices enacted for and by women exhibit characteristics and dispositions that distinguish them from men’s traditional structure of rituals. The selected text is a representative sample of ritual performance among the female characters of Native American culture. This choice of Clements’ play is made in order to explore the extent of differences in the nature, ideologies, functions, and driving forces calling for ritual application. The paper applies both Van Gennep and Brenner to trace the indigenous’ ritual experiences of the female characters. The application of both methodologies is significant because of their interconnectedness and reinforcement of ideas.