Humor VS Identity Formation: A Study Of The Stylistic Features Of Love Medicine

Louise Erdrich is a productive woman writer of contemporary Native Americanliterature. She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the secondwave of the Native American Renaissance. Almost each of her works draws amarvelous picture of the reservation life of the North Dakota Chippewas, featuringNative American heritage.Erdrich’s first novel Love Medicine (1984) is the most notable of her NorthDakota novels. It was reissued in1993in a new and expanded edition. The1993version has since been considered the authoritative one and is adopted as the primarytext for this thesis. It comprises eighteen disjointed, independent yet interconnectedshort narratives. Each narrative is told from a different perspective—representative ofthe Native storytelling tradition. These narratives constitute a three generation,fifty-year saga of six related families—Pillager, Nanapush, Lamartine, Kashpaw,Lazarre and Morrissey—living on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, a North DakotaChippewa reservation. Love Medicine is centered on the poor living conditions on thereservation, local people’s optimistic attitude towards life as well as their love andhatred.Love Medicine starts with June Kashpaw’s death on her way back to thereservation. June’s funeral realizes a family reunion. Characters appear one by one totell their stories. Marie tells about what she has suffered as a girl, how she encountersand marries Nector, and how she manages to support her family with little help from her husband. Nector reveals his experiences in the white world as a young man, hisexperiences as the tribal chairman and his marriage with Marie and love affair withLulu. Lulu narrates her life as a nonconformist woman on the reservation, hermarriages and love affairs as well as her resistance against oppression imposed by theU.S. government. Albertine exposes the cause and effect of Gerry being both acriminal and a hero. Lipsha discloses how he finds his parentage and determines hisidentity on the reservation.Erdrich aspires to counter-present biased stereotypes of Native Americans andto present authentic characters that any non-Native would identify with. Humor is oneof the means that she employs to achieve the ends. Love Medicine is recognized asamong the first Native works to clearly exemplify humor in Native fiction since thebeginning of the Native American Renaissance. However, due to various reasons, thehumorous elements in the book are largely ignored, and the book is misinterpreted asa chronicle of devastating defeat and ruin. This thesis intends to unearth the humorouselements in Love Medicine through detailed textual analyses, attempting to answer thefollowing questions:1. What forms does humor take in Love Medicine?2. Whatfunctions does humor perform in representing alternative Native Americans?This thesis attempts to study the verbal humor, situational humor and humorouscharacterization, more specifically, the tricksters in Love Medicine. The mostcommon conceptualizations of humor, such as the Incongruity theory, the Relieftheory, etc., theories about Native humor as well as the trickster theories are to lendtheoretical support to the textual analysis. The thesis aims to prove that Love Medicineis not a record of the defeat and despair of the “vanishing victims” but an account ofthe optimism and survival of Native Americans. Native Americans are wise enough togain power from humor to dismantle the humorless stereotypes so as to constructgenuine Native American identity.