Love Medicine: A Tentative Quest For Cultural Identity

Louise Erdrich is one of the most important Native American writers in the past twenty years as well as one of the most accomplished and promising novelists of any heritage now working in the United States. She represents the 3rd generation of writers of the so-called Native American Renaissance. She is an unusually prolific and versatile writer and her most distinguished works are the novels set in North Dakota: Love Medicine (1984,1993), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), Tales of Burning Love (1996), The Antelope Wife (1998), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003).Love Medicine, as her first novel, has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1984. It has presented the current situation of the Native survivors on the Chippewa reservation. Under the background of the conflicts and synergies between the white culture and native culture, individuals are striving to pursue their own cultural identity. For most Native Americans, the issue of identity dwells in their minds and gnaws at their hearts.Within a framework of Hommi Bhabha's hybridity theory, the author of this thesis endeavors to quest for the cultural identity of the central figures in the novel Love Medicine, to reveal a"third space"implied between the lines and to read out Louise Erdrich's implication of condemnation of the interior colonization implemented by the dominant white culture as well as that of his motivation of subverting the doom intended by assimilation and eradication.This thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to Louise Erdrich, her literary career, the literature review home and abroad and the layout of the thesis. The body of the thesis is from Chapter Two to Chapter Four. These three chapters respectively deal with the analysis of the formation of the protagonists'gender identity, religious identity and racial identity during their arduous identity quest by these figures in the novel Love Medicine. Chapter Five is the conclusion.Chapter Two intends to underscore the identity crisis of the female characters in the alienated world due to the failure of their continuance of the traditional gender role influenced by the white patriarchal culture and their efforts to reconstruct their own gender role in the tribal community of their traditional culture.Chapter Three intends to explore the endeavor of the protagonists to reconstruct their own religious identity caught in the dilemma between the mainstream Catholicism and their native religion.Chapter Four intends to explore the identity as the"other"of the Native Americans due to the racial discrimination policy adopted by the dominant white society, and, to read out the solution implied between the lines as the author's unique feature to resist the discrimination and to reconstruct their racial identity.Chapter Five is a conclusion. It intends to reveal a"third space"implied by Louise Erdrich, which serves as a distinguished example for other ethnic groups to follow in order to survive under the background of multiculturalism.