| To explore the culture and history of the Ojibwa people, Louise Erdrich focuses on how her characters' identities are formed and reformed in relation to their families, religions, and community. Throughout this exploration, she employs an illness/healing metaphor to examine the importance of knowledge, understanding, and acceptance in forming a healthy individual and community. For many of the characters, a crisis of identity and cultural connection helps them reach a clearer sense of subjectivity. For Erdrich, health comes with knowledge and acceptance, and she uses the Magic Realist mode to demonstrate the primacy of magic in the culture depicted, to reveal part of Ojibwa belief system that has been nearly forgotten, to show the interconnectedness of the individual's power to the strength of the community, and to create a reality reflective of the Ojibwa world view.;Erdrich's interest in the interconnectedness of language, subjectivity, family, and culture make her fiction particularly amenable to Kristeva's psychoanalytic theories. Kristeva's theories posit identity as a social and linguistic construct, revealing her methodology to be especially appropriate for an analysis of Erdrich's Magic Realism. Magic Realism's dissolution of boundaries, its give and take between the concrete and the abstract, between the psychological and the physical make Magic Realist narratives ripe for psychoanalytic criticism. This study also incorporates anthropology, religious and cultural studies to create a methodology suitable for this multi-ethnic writer and literary mode.;In the healing metaphor, language and storytelling exhibit a clear relationship to communal and personal health. Erdrich suggests that identity comes through a knowledge of one's culture and a connection to one's community; identity formation is propelled by a search for a family and communal connection. Searching for this connection, sometimes consciously, but oftentimes unconsciously, leads these characters to uncover a personal and communal, familial and cultural, past. Differing mythologies present contradictory messages of power and place for Erdrich's characters and thus illustrate the shifting nature of truth and identity. Erdrich's fiction adopts the Ojibwa connection between magic and nature by showing magic to be powerful when the shaman works for others but ineffectual without that familial/communal connection. |
