| Like the work of other writers who have been excluded from the American mainstream, Louise Erdrich's novels are resistant in nature. The dissertation considers each novel in Erdrich's tetralogy, Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace, examining the parameters of indianness and the ways in which those parameters are a response to the construction of the indian in American letters. It de-exoticizes Erdrich's work, focusing not on her work as cultural artifact, marginalized and romanticized, but on Erdrich's significance and skill as an American novelist. Erdrich demonstrates the resilience and plasticity of traditional communities and their place as part of a U.S. national identity. Duane Champagne's model for comparative analysis and Jungian analytic psychology provide a theoretical framework. Champagne's paradigm assumes the agency of colonized groups and their periodic, even predictable, reassertions of, if not autonomy, at least self-definition. A means by which to voice discontent, the novel as a form is inherently resistant and disruptive. The genre thus lends itself to Champagne's assertion that colonial hegemony is unstable and that it suffers from ruptures occasioned by the survival, and concomitant discontent, of the Fourth World. Champagne advocates a language of criticism with which to analyze communities with dissimilar histories of colonization, one that, nevertheless, identifies consequences common to each. Similarly, Jung's theory of the archetype allows me to discuss Erdrich's work in terms more complex and sophisticated than those often limited to the indian (or Other) exclusively. In conjunction, these theories enable a discussion of Erdrich as an American writer, as part of a clear and unique novelistic tradition, without precluding an analysis of those qualities that make her work specifically Chippewa. Thus, it concludes that Erdrich's narrative voice emerges as one that is discretely mixedblood, or Metis. Erdrich's work, rather than being accessible to only a few, may be understood from a perspective that emphasizes its ritual and mythical nature without demanding an in-depth knowledge or comprehension of uniquely Chippewa views. |
