Repression,Alienation And Remoulding:An Interpretation Of Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls From The Perspective Of Spatial Literary Criticism

Louise Erdrich is a distinguished Native American writer in the contemporary America,who is honoured as one of the most important contributors of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance.Her works are involved with a broad range of literary genres,such as novels,poetry,children’s literature,etc.,especially her outstanding excellence in novels.Four Souls,published in 2004,is her modern work.This novel narrates a story that an American Indian woman Fleur takes the journey of revenge of leaving the Indian reservation for the city and finally returning to her Indian tribe because of her ancestral land despoiled by white Americans.This thesis takes a series of Fleur’s shifts of the physical space on the road of revenge as a starting point,and her psychological process in different spaces as the thread of the novel,exploring how an American Indian woman realizes her self-reconstruction under the assimilation of the mainstream culture.Accordingly,this thesis starts from the perspective of spatial literary criticism by way of applying Lefebvre’s psychological space and social space in production of spatial criticism and Foucault’s power space theory,aiming at exploring the processes and causes of Fleur’s repression,alienation and remoulding through the analysis of Fleur ’s different experiences of spatial practices in the individual,psychological and social space.Firstly,this thesis analyzes the causes of Fleur’s repression in the individual space,that is,the suffering from the disharmonious atmosphere,the oppression under the white American power and the confinement in the limited room.Secondly,this thesis is expounded the causes of Fleur’s alienation in her psychological space.Due to the repression in the individual space,the temptation of Mauser’s trick,the control of alcohol and the influence of the materialistic white American world,Fleur is completely alienated,being lost in the white American world.Lastly,this thesis probes into Fleur’s process of remoulding in the social space.Under the dynamic function of social space,Fleur gradually gets rid of alienation in her psychological space and returns to her American Indian tradition after the processes of self-awakening,self-resistance and reconstruction.Based on Fleur’s experiences in these three spatial dimensions and the current situation that the mainstream culture is superior to the traditional culture in the modern society,this thesis interprets Erdrich’s Four Souls from the perspective of spatial literary criticism,not only presenting American Indians are confronted with the predicament of living space in the conflict of American Indian traditional culture and white American mainstream culture,but also laying emphasis on the significant value of American Indian traditional culture.In the meanwhile,it reflects Erdrich’s deep concern for American Indian traditional culture as well.