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INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information C om pany 300 Norm Z eeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313 761-4700 800.521-0600 Order Number 9335499 ‘The story comes up different every time’: Louise Erdrich and the emerging aesthetic of the minority woman writer Gallant, Alison Data, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1993 UMI 3(X)N.Zccb R(l. Ann Arbor. MI 4X106 THE STORY COMES UP DIFFERENT EVERY TIME': LOUISE ERDRICH AND THE EMERGING AESTHETIC OF THE MINORITY WOMAN WRITER DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Alison Dara Gallant, B.A., M.A. The Ohio State University 1993 Dissertation Committee: Approved by; B.H. Rigney P. Mullen Adviser Department of English J. Prinz To My Brother, Andrew ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I express sincere appreciations to Professor Barbara Hill Rigney for her guidance and unerring support, i would also like to thank Professor Patrick Mullen without whose ex pertise in folklore this project would have suffered, and Professor Jessica Prinz. i am also grateful to Dr. Karla Clark and Stewart Clark who have provided me companion ship and a roof over my head so that I could complete this project. To my family, Ira Band, Brenda Hunt, Laurie Jo Doiinger, Amy Bottke, Taara Hoffman, and Darrin Conroy, I thank you ail for the emotional support, love and faith in this project, without which I could not have carried it off. ill VFTA September 25,1963 .......................................................Born - Columbus, Ohio 1986 .................................................................................B.A., Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 Spring 1987.....................................................................Research Associate, Dr. James Phelan, Dept of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 Fall 1987-Spring 1989....................................................Teaching Assistant, Dept. of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 1988.................................................................................M.A., Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 Fall 1990 ..........................................................................Lecturer, Dept, of English, Siena College, Loudonville, New York 12210 Summer 1989-present....................................................Candidate, Doctor of Philosophy, Dept, of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English IV TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ....................................................................................................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................................................................................................................................iii VITA........................................................................................................................................................................iv INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................................................5 PART I—GENDER ISSUES CHAPTER I: THE PROBLEMS AND POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION: READING ERDRICH AS FEMINIST METAFICTION.......................................................................................20 CHAPTER II: WOMEN, SILENCE AND MADNESS IN THE NOVELS OF LOUISE ERDRICH ................................................................................................................................................ 45 CHAPTER II: ‘HIS SKIN WAS FINE AND GIRLISH': ERDRICH'S DECONSTRUCTION O F ...... GENDER...............................................................................................................................63 PART II—CULTURAL ISSUES CHAPTER !V- MYNAMEWASNOMORETHANACRUMBLING SKIN': FRACTURED IDENTITIES AND THE COLLISION OF CULTURES........................................................................83 CHAPTER V: THE SOUND OF MY OWN VOICE CONVINCED ME I WAS ALIVE: STORYTELLING, MEMORY AND SURVIVAL IN ERDRICH.................................................................. 103 CHAPTER VI: MAGICAL REALISM AND THE SUBVERSION OF NARRATIVE IN ERDRICH 128 CHAPTER VII: CONCLUSION: .THE AESTHETIC O F MARGINALITY: LOUISE ERDRICH AND THE EMERGING TRADITION OF THE MINORITY WOMAN WRITER 148 WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................................................. 170 INTRODUCTION in the past decade the novelist and poet Louise Erdrich has established herself as one of the important contributors to American literature of the 20th century. She is one of the few voices of Native American experience to have gained critical and popular attention. Her writing appeals to the feminist critical instinct, i.e., it deals with and confronts issues of gender, language, and power. Her first three novels bear an intertextual relationship, and the power of these novels derives at least partially from the fragmentation of voices and the collision of cultures. Like the equally marginalized novels of Toni Morrison, the devastating reality of the lives of the characters ioverlain by the beauty and power of mystical experience, the transcendent authority of mythical tmth. What I hope to show in this dissertation is that Louise Erdrich's artistic expression is shaped by an experience of double alienation from white, patriarchal society. As I examine various subversive writing practices through the course of this project, the reader should bear in mind that I think these practices are part of an emerging aesthetic of minority women writers, a tradition to which Louise Erdrich belongs. I should at least cursorily qualify what I mean by "feminist critic," and explain why I believe Erdrich's work elicits a feminist reading. When I use the term in relation to myself, I am using it in the broadest sense, that is, one who approaches a literary work assuming that literature, like any meaning-conferring apparatus, is marked by gender. This understanding of literature is not exclusive to feminist critics. Other schools of thought, i.e., Marxists, assume that literary expres sion is shaped by circumstances of the human condition such as class or race. Adrienne Rich once said that every mind resides in a body, and she is quite correct in putting forth the supposi tion that gender is an inescapable and shaping fact of our conscious experience, and that indeed there are particularities to female experience that can neither be understood nor appropriated by 5 6 male authority. Any feminist criticism has at its base the assumption that the literary medium is engendered. Feminist criticism has experienced no shortfall of difficulty in coming into the academy. In 1983, Elaine ShowaKer leveled charges against her male colleagues in the academy, revealing their uncanny ability to overlook feminist criticism(s) in their anthologies of modem criticism. She also took Jonathon Culler and Terry Eagleton to task for what she saw as their appropriations of feminist criticism for critical theory. Carolyn Heilbrun too has noted the cold shoulder feminism has received from the academy, pointing to the apparent hypocrisy of embracing a system of thought that questions the meaning of meaning - deconstructionism - but denying feminism a voice in such questionings. I myself have only come to feminist criticism recently, and I do not dare pretend to have completely assimilated all the complexities of feminist criticism(s) and its complicated relationship to post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and marxism. My perception of Louise Erdrich’s fiction as distinctly feminine was greatly informed by the thought and writings of a countless number of American and English feminist literary critics, as well as some of the members of the French school(s), such as Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Cixous and Irigaray and their theories of l'écriture feminine have tæen useful in several chapters. All femininst critics writing in the 1990’s should pay tribute to

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