Body,Body Violence And Body Constitution Of The Natives In Love Medicine

Since 1960 s and 1970 s,Indian literature began to rise and the literary studies have also flourished.Louise Erdrich is acknowledged as one of the most prominent writers of the second wave of the “Indian Literature Renaissance” and she has created a series of novels about fictional reservations in North Dakota.Her debut novel,Love Medicine,the first novel of the series,was published in 1984 and attracted extensive attention from critics due to its unique narrative style and ethnic background.In the past 30 years,domestic and foreign scholars have studied and analyzed Love Medicine from multiple perspectives.Researchers have studied links between the narrative strategy and oral traditions as well as the intertextual features and postmodernist hints.Critics have also dug into the novel from the perspective of mythological archetype criticism,ecological criticism,new historicism and feminism to interpret Indian mythological prototypes,ethnic and gender identity,and religious and cultural conflicts in Love Medicine.However,“the body” is seldom taken as a lead to analyze the plights on and the struggles of the native people.Therefore,this thesis will take the natives’ body presented as the point of tangency,with the help of Michel Foucault’s and Bryan Turner’s theories of body,sexual and gender construction,to analyze cultural and social metaphors of the body,the violation of the body and the practice and construction of the body.The thesis first explores the physical characteristics of three natives,June,Nector,and Gerry from both social and political perspectives to analyze the causes of their body’s deformation,stiffness,and inconsistency which concludes that traditional Indian culture is politically at the edge of breakdown under the pressure of the mainstream culture,which affects the natives’ physical forms.Meanwhile,Indians are inevitably embroiled into the consuming waves and their adaption to the capitalistic world also contributes to the unusual body characteristics.Then the thesis probes into the physical dynamics of the Indians,which can be clarified as “body violence”.From the intensive and fierce physical violence presented in Love Medicine,the thesis,in the spectrum of body embodiment,asserts that the traditional values of the Indians are torn and destroyed in the process of forced yet disguised assimilation by institutions.The governmental regulations lead to the loss of harmonious relations among the Indian community,and the tension between the mainstream society and the Indian society has caused discordance of the natives’ bodies in the public and private spheres.Finally,the thesis digs into personal development and collective consensus of the natives and focuses on their resistance and survival.Through the analysis of Lulu and Mary’s successful breakthroughs,the thesis reveals that the natives,taking their body as rebellious fields,have broken the suppressions imposed by the mainstream society.They challenge the monogamous marriage mechanics applauded by the governments and institutions,control and practice their body on their own to reconstruct their subjectivity as the natives and native individuals.Besides,they make a breakthrough on the solidified combination of the opposite sex and promote the same-sex cooperation to rebuild their body and the concept of gender roles.They also advocate the reconsideration of physical death and interpret it in a new way to find unbreakable link to their culture and redefine themselves.Through the above analysis,this paper believes that the native people control their body through multiple dimensions to reconstruct the subjectivity and achieve autonomy.