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The Theme of Home in Louise Erdrich´S Love Medicine

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The Theme of Home in Louise Erdrich´S Love Medicine MASARYK UNIVERSITY Faculty of Education Department of English Language and Literature The Theme of Home in Louise Erdrich´s Love Medicine Bachelor Thesis Brno 2012 Supervisor: Mgr. Pavla Buchtová Author: Mgr. Eva Slaná 1 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Eva Slaná 2 Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor Mgr. Pavla Buchtová for her valuable advice and comments. I would also like to thank my family and friends for providing priceless moral support and encouragement. 3 Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 5 1. Louise Erdrich ..................................................................................................................... 7 1.1 Louise Erdrich´s life ........................................................................................................ 7 1.2 Louise Erdrich´s perception of identity and homeland .................................................... 9 2. The theme of home in Native American Literature ....................................................... 10 3. Women as home-creators in Love Medicine ..................................................................... 14 3.1. Marie Kashpaw, her daughter Zelda and granddaughter Albertine, and their perception of home .............................................................................................................. 14 3.2 Homecoming of June Kashpaw .................................................................................... 21 3.3 Lulu Lamartine ............................................................................................................. 26 4. Men as home-seekers and home-losers in Love Medicine ............................................... 31 4.1 Nector Kashpaw ............................................................................................................ 32 4.2 Lipsha Morrissey ........................................................................................................... 35 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 40 Annotation ............................................................................................................................... 45 Anotace .................................................................................................................................... 45 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 46 4 Introduction Home is a word with a great emotional potential. We can never be objective when we speak about our homes. Yet, we need to belong somewhere; we need a place and space where we feel safe, loved and able to love. Thus, it is no wonder that this theme has been accompanying the humankind in literature for centuries. Nevertheless, for people of different cultural backgrounds this theme can have various meanings. This bachelor thesis will deal with the perception of home of literary characters presenting the members of a Native American tribe in Love Medicine, a novel by Louise Erdrich. Love Medicine is book of complicated structure. There is not one narrator and a straightforward story. The story is like a spider´s web or mosaic– there are many stories narrated by individual people wattled together in one real-like chronicle, though not written chronologically, of two families living their lives during the tough second half of the twentieth century. Through the story of those two families we can see a picture of life reality of Native American people living in reservations from the World War II to 1980s. Every single narrator of the book says her or his part of the collective story from a different point of view. There is something, though, which they all have in common. Their very identity is created by where they come from and where they live, no matter, how much they would crave for escaping from the reality they live. Even if they leave their neighborhood they are always looking for something similar, they are always looking for home. Even if they stay in the reservation for their whole lives, they never stop fighting for what they need most – their homes. The theme of home is what will be analyzed in this thesis, on one hand from the point of view of several individual female characters in the book, on the other hand from the point of view of male characters. The perception of home is different for women and men in Love Medicine. Women are usually the ones who are tightly settled within their families and homes, they are also the ones who contribute mostly to the home-creating: they take care of the house, children and also husband. Since women in Love Medicine are so closely connected to their homes, their own personalities are often very important for perception of home of the other members of their 5 families. Thus, the most important element of the home-creating in Love Medicine is not the house as such, but the woman herself. That is why women in the novel usually do not feel uncertain about what and where their home is. Men in Love Medicine, on the other hand, usually do not contribute to the home- creating much, apart from providing the financial support for the family. The feeling of home of the other members of the family is typically not connected to the character of a man. It is not the fault of men that they are not able to take part in the process of providing home for the others, because they are not invited by women to it, sometimes they are not even allowed to take part. In consequence, the men´s perception of home in the novel is very insecure. Their perception of home is completely dependent not on themselves, but on another person – on their wife, mother or even daughter. This mediated feeling of home may be very confusing for the men, especially if they fall in love with another woman. They can never be sure then, where and what their real home is. That is the reason why men in Love Medicine, in contrast to women, seem to be completely lost in their lives. 6 1. Louise Erdrich Louise Erdrich is one of the most popular and praised Native American writers. Her novels reflect strongly her origin, and family and community background. That is why it is crucial to include her short biography, information about the tribe she is a member of, and a commented list of her works in this bachelor thesis. 1.1 Louise Erdrich´s life Louise Erdrich was born as the eldest of seven children in Minnesota in 1954, and grew up in North Dakota. Although both of her parents taught at the Wahpeton Indian Boarding school and worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, only her mother was a Native American - concretely Chippewa1, whereas her father was of German-American origin (“Louise Erdrich, 1954-“, n.d.). This multilingual and multinational heritage influenced her life and future work greatly as she often felt tension between the two worlds she belonged to. She has been coping with this ambivalence in almost all of her writings. For example Rainwater (1990) found that “Erdrich´s novels feature Native Americans, mixed-bloods, and other culturally and socially displaced characters whose marginal status is simultaneously an advantage and disadvantage, a source of power and powerlessness” (p. 405). Though culturally and gender marginalized person, Louise Erdrich was able to matriculate to prestigious Dartmouth College in 1972 as one of the first women admitted there. The college studies were very important for both her personal and working life. Firstly, she met there her future husband, anthropologist Michael Dorris, who was a chairman of the Native American Studies department. And secondly, she started her first serious literary attempts there. In 1975 she was awarded the Academy of Poets Prize for her poems in which she got along with the Ojibwe tradition. In 1976 she graduated her bachelor studies and went home, to North Dakota, where she taught at the Dakota Arts Council. She received her Master of Arts degree at Johns Hopkins University in 1979 and kept sending her literary attempts to publishers with rarely any positive responses. The same year she came back to Dartmouth 1 The Chippewa people are often referred to as the Ojibwe, Ojibway or Ojibwa. 7 College to do a poetry reading and in 1981 she got married to Michael Dorris (“Louise Erdrich”, n.d.). At that time, Louise Erdrich started to get popular for her short stories published in magazines, such as The Atlantic Monthly or The Paris Review. Her stories were praised for example in The Best American Short Stories of 1983; she won Nelson Algren Award in 1982 and The Society of Magazine Editors´Award in 1983. And finally, her first novel Love Medicine was published in 1984 and immediately won hearts of its readers as well as the Sue Kaufman Prize for Best First Novel, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for Best Book of 1984 dealing with Indians or Chicanos, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (About the Author, 1984, p. 273). The genius of Erdrich was not at least inhibited by her maternity- she brought up six children, among them three foster children Dorris adopted before they got married; and still she was able to publish a novel almost every two years. Erdrich´s firstly idyllic personal and working life with her husband and collaborator
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