An Intertextual Interpretation Of Love Medicine

Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece of Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine is awarded several prizes since it has been published in 1984. It is one of the essential texts of the Native American literature. Love Medicine is paid attention for its Native American feature and descriptions of the plight of Native Americans. Critics from home and abroad have done numerous researches from various perspectives, such as the its tentative exploration of Native American identity and syncretic religious feature. Based on the intertextuality theory of Gerard Genette and Julia Kristeva, this thesis intends to present an intertextual reading of the Love Medicine to illustrate the concern of the Native Americans’plight and expectation of their post-traumatic renaissance.This thesis contains five parts:the introduction, three chapters and the conclusion. The introduction sketches out literary creations of Louise Erdrich, and details the literature review of Love Medicine. The intertextuality theory is introduced briefly as well.Chapter One analyzes the structural allusion to the Bible according to Genette’s intertextuality theory. The structural allusion to the Bible intends to analyze the plight of Native Americans. The allusion of the Native American ecology to the Garden of Eden in the Bible, which implies the harmony between human and nature in the Bible, describes the happy life of the ancient Native Americans. The intrusion by Western countries, which leads to the loss of territory of Native Americans, suggests the equivalent story of the loss of paradise in the Bible. The allusion to the lost paradise implies the plight caused by the Western culture. The novel’s open ending suggests the possibility of new life for the younger generation, alluding to the regaining of paradise of human beings in the Bible. The allusion to the new world indicates the rejuvenation after the plight, which is based on the reconstruction of belief. Through the analysis of the structural allusion of Love Medicine to the Bible, this thesis presents the Native Americans’plight under the mainstream culture.Chapter Two applies the topic allusion theory to give obvious intertextual meaning to Erdrich’s concern about the plight that the Native Americans are confronted with and the expectation of the renaissance of their Native American culture. June’s image is analyzed through the allusion to the scapegoat image in the Bible. June’s tragedy implies the blind assimilation to the mainstream American culture of the Native Americans, and both individuals and their culture had been victimized as scapegoats in the encounter with the dominant group and cultural hegemony. June’s tragedy awakes the Native Americans. Along with the topics of ablution by water and rebirth by Easter egg, the topics in Love Medicine suggests the post-traumatic renaissance of the Native Americans.The third chapter analyzes the hypertextual examples on the level of pastiche and parody of the mythology, to understand Erdrich’s expectations for the Native Americans. Through the interpretation of Native American cyclic pattern of storytelling, this chapter seeks to analyze the hypertextual allusions. The frame is alluded to the Bible and the story patterns are intended to imitate the folklore of Native American culture. That the two kinds of structures form the whole story indicates the co-existence of the two cultures. The pastiche of the mythological universal mother image and trickster image of Native American culture merge the cultural archetypes to present expectation of the cultural transformation of Native Americans to a new Native American constituent culture. Through parodies of the mythological folklore, Erdrich develops the story of Moses, Lulu and June. Different from result of the folklore, the three stories in Love Medicine imply three kinds of attitudes towards the plight. The novel criticizes both the blind rejection of cultures other than Native American and racial isolation represented by Moses, and the complete assimilation into and the unconditional acceptance of the dominant culture represented by June. Instead, through Lulu’s story, Erdrich suggests that the way out of the plight remains in the negotiation into the mainstream American culture.Love Medicine contains many symbols and intertexts. An intertextual reading offers a new way to understand the concern about the decline of Native Americans and expectation of renaissance of the Native American culture.