Louise Erdrich's 1993 novel "Love Medicine" portrays paths Native Americans can take to establish a healthy psychological and social balance in a culture often dominated by white Americans. Erdrich explores the tension between native and white identity, the natural and supernatural legacies of Native Americans, the power of language in fiction and everyday life, and the necessity to discard old identities and forge new ones.
A member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, Louise Erdrich creates families in Love Medicine who arise from two traditions: the Chippewa culture of their ancestors and the Western traditions brought by Catholic missionaries who sought to "civilize" the tribe.(1) These differing mythologies present contradictory messages of power and place for these men and women. Erdrich's fiction shows a collision of worlds as her novel explores the discontinuity in the cultural reality of the Chippewa's situation juxtaposed against the ahistoricity of nature and the supernatural that permeates the novel's collective consciousness. This cultural tension results in confusion as well as spiritual and psychological ill health. Critics have argued that Erdrich's fiction depicts the valiant survival of Native American people and their struggle to regain their nearly forgotten cultural heritage.(2) While Erdrich's fiction certainly portrays the value in cultural knowledge, Love Medicine, as Catherine Rainwater has shown, uncovers the resulting ambivalence experienced by her characters as they attempt to reconcile their Native American heritage with the expectations of the dominant white culture in the modern and postmodern United States.(3) The ambivalence created in this attempted reconciliation underscores the difficulty faced by Erdrich's characters in reaching a balance between the spheres of past and present, personal and communal, private and public.
Love Medicine presents characters searching for a healthy balance between seemingly diametrically opposed cultures. This search for a healthy balance is evinced in the characters' belief systems, in their relationships with each other, and within their own sense of personal identity. Marie Kashpaw, June Kashpaw, Lulu Lamartine. Nector Kashpaw, and Lipsha Morrisey contend with their personal identities and beliefs, others' perceptions and expectations, and their place in their families and community. Love Medicine depicts characters whose searches lead them to discard obsolete identities as they journey towards a sense of subjectivity and self-knowledge; this journey becomes a process of healing.
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In an early critique of Love Medicine, novelist Ursula Le Guin describes the novel's technique as "oneness and manyness" which offers "passion and compassion, desolation and humor [that] all center in a perception of what it is to belong and not to belong, to be a person, to be one of the people" (6). Le Guin's notion of Lope Medicine's "oneness and manyness" encapsulates Erdrich's use of Magic Realism. Just as her fiction displays individuality and community so does it celebrate both the magic and reality of Ojibwa life and heritage. Erdrich's effort to offer seemingly dichotomous ideas or planes simultaneously does not mean that her fiction is without purpose or is contradictory. Instead, this inclusiveness, this multiplicity, depicts the complex nature of what it means to be both a rational and a feeling being, to be both an American and a Native American, to be schooled in both Catholicism and tribal beliefs. Erdrich's narrative technique, the multiple voices both competing and complimentary, requires a literary theory that allows for this simultaneous tension and peaceful interplay. Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic theories provide a way to look at both the individual and the community, the rational and the feeling being through the model of the Symbolic Order. Kristeva's Symbolic Order offers opposing elements--the symbolic and the semiotic--that work together to provide a balanced whole.(4)
Kristeva's identification of the symbolic and the semiotic within the Symbolic Order is useful because Erdrich's fiction, like Kristeva's theories, explores how to achieve a healthy balance between language and silence, law and desire. Kristeva's methodology exposes the unseen and brings what has been repressed or subjugated into the foreground, providing the wounded subject with the ability to heal, and healing is especially pertinent in Native American traditions. What has been hidden or unspoken enters language and consciousness achieving understanding, value, and balance, and thus, healing(5) the cultural, psychological, and spiritual schism created through marginalization, domination, and patriarchy.
Kristeva views human subjectivity as a social process that starts with the maternal body before the mirror stage or the Oedipal stage. Within this process (The Symbolic Order) human beings balance between two modalities: the symbolic (language system/rules and laws) and the semiotic (preverbal/drives and desires). These two systems are interdependent, and although they joust for supremacy, neither completely annihilates the other. Kristeva writes, "These two modalities are inseparable within the signifying process that constitutes language.... Because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either `exclusively' semiotic or `exclusively' symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both" (RPL 24). The semiotic and the symbolic are two parts of the whole Symbolic Order, and their uneasy partnership may cause confusion and ambivalence, but through a successful integration comes health and balance.
Surrounding the symbolic is the Symbolic Order, which embraces both the symbolic and the semiotic. The Symbolic Order is; signification and the social realm; it is composed of heterogeneous elements. These elements include cultural and ethnic beliefs and identities, social roles and expectations, family dynamics and the community, and personal fears and desires. The Symbolic Order is heterogeneous because the semiotic is part of it while the symbolic itself is; homogeneous. Initially, the real and the symbolic are not divided because there is no sense of absence. While neither of these modalities can completely consume the other one in a healthy psyche, if the symbolic or the semiotic realm overtakes its counterpart in a subject, then madness or psychosis results. The semiotic is the realm of the body and the unconscious; it is preverbal and embodies the desire that cannot find expression through the symbolic (Kristeva RPL 25). The semiotic begins prior to the identification of the subject and the other and before the symbolic. It "logically and chronologically precedes the establishment of the symbolic and its subject ..." (Kristeva RPL 41). Kelly Oliver explains that Kristeva developed "the notion of the semiotic element in signification in order to bring the body back into the very structure of language," and "[s]emiotic activity is; the mark of drives that stem from the body" (3, 32). The semiotic is unformed, unsignified matter of sexual impulses, desires, energies, which assault the subject before the body is a real entity. Oliver notes that these drives are both biological and social (32). Semiotic expression is a child's or adult's only way of recovering what is lost in the separation from the mother. Kristeva's insistence on the importance of the semiotic allows for the inclusion not only of biological impulses but also of the social and cultural pressures that influence a subject. Social, cultural, and biological determinants are ways in which Erdrich explores her characters' identities.
Because they intertwine culture and gender, Native American women writers like Erdrich demand new modes of gender theory. Incorporating traditions from Native cultures broadens and expands the influence of feminist literary theory. While Love Medicine depicts cultural decimation and personal injury and pain, it also shows a way back to health and contentment. Healing propels these characters, and William Bevis has shown that Native American well-being, a sense of self, is based on the "transpersonal and includes a society, a past, and a place ... [that is a] tribal rather than an individual definition of `being'" (585). Anthropologist Ruth Landes explains the public/community nature of Ojibwa culture: "Public mide teachings stressed neighborliness, forbearance, concern for the sick, respect for all, paternalism ..., honesty, and homage to patron manitos" (Ojibwa Religion 42-43). The characters who are not healed in this fiction are the ones who either cannot find this transpersonal self with a connection to history, community, or spirituality or who have their sense of a past, place, and belief destroyed.
The transpersonal self, however, does not translate into a lack of personal selfhood or identity; instead, it suggests inclusion of others and of nature, openness and acceptance. "In Ojibwa thought, there is no original and absolute `self'; a person freshly born is `empty' of characteristics and of identity. Consequently tremendous pressure is exerted upon a young person to pursue the supernaturals and move them to fill up his `emptiness'" (Ojibwa Woman 124). The encouragement to pursue spirituality and supernatural communion in Ojibwa culture is seen in the texts' use of magical characters and spirits, who occasionally help effect their healing process. Lissa Schneider suggests that "forgiveness is the true `love medicine'" in Love Medicine (1): "With the exception of Nector, the many first person narrators describe a movement toward forgiveness and transformation through the act of sharing their stories with one another, a movement that influences the entire community" (11). Some of the healing is achieved through the magical elements in the text.
Erdrich uses religious beliefs in order to display the contradictions faced by her characters. In many Native American beliefs the "magic" is part of the natural world, an expected attribute of people gifted with the touch, but Catholicism has relegated magic to the supernatural realm. This division between natural and supernatural works against Native ideas of inclusion. The Ojibwa viewed magic as part of their culture and society; magic could heal or harm, but with magical abilities came power: "The Ojibwa regarded all religion and magic as `medicine' or as `power,' expressed through visions and purchased formulas and exercised responsibly or hostilely toward society" (Ojibwa Religion 42). The Ojibwa
saw all life as a personalized Mystery, voicing this in their tremendous
esteem for visionary shamans who succeeded at life's risky activities. They
pursued magical formulas, philosophies, and techniques which we outsiders
can separate from religion only by our civilization's alien opinions about
magic's impersonality. Adept shamans were believed to manipulate the manito
Supernaturals as we do electricity. (Ojibwa Religion 3)
In Christianity, a belief in magic moves out of the natural realm and into the supernatural realm where magic and certain kinds of spiritual connections become "miracles" confined to a particular place and time. Christ and his miracles are confined to New Testament Sunday School stories while saintly miracles are more a part of medieval legend than a living belief system. This temporal division is at odds with the Native beliefs which show that magic or even miracles are possible through belief and knowledge. These differing valuations of magic show the discord between Christianity and the Ojibwa religion. These differing mythologies present contradictory messages of power and place for these men and women and thus illustrate the shifting nature of truth. By connecting magic's or medicine's positive or negative use to society, the Ojibwa developed a religion tied to the community. Erdrich's fiction picks up this connection by showing magic to be powerful when the shaman or healer works for others--family, community--but it becomes ineffectual or weak when employed for the individual or when that familial/communal connection is broken.
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Throughout Love Medicine Marie Lazarre Kashpaw strives for her own subjectivity, yet her first attempt is made through identification with the Virgin, an object of worship. Erdrich transforms the symbolic specter of Christian martyrdom into the contorted and bloody person of young Marie Lazarre as she battles with her spiritual mother, Sister Leopolda (who is revealed to be her biological mother in Tracks). Much of the religious ambivalence and abuse found in Love Medicine has its roots in Tracks with the character of Pauline Puyat/Sister Leopolda. Pauline is attracted to the power she associates with Anglo religion, and as Sister Leopolda in Love Medicine this attraction is transferred to her biological daughter. Both Marie and Pauline/Leopolda are attracted to Catholicism because of the Virgin Mary. Kristeva argues that the Virgin Mary, as a symbolic figure, provides a way for women to enter into the Symbolic Order without sacrificing their own mothers. Kelly Oliver explains that: "[a]n identification with the Virgin is an identification with the mother and the symbolic at the same time. It is an identification with the perfect, immortal, holy Mother. But it is also an identification with the Word that marks and defines her.... By identifying with the Virgin, women can identify with the mother within the Symbolic order" (52). Marie's identification with the Virgin indicates not only her desire to identify with a female religious figure but also her need to embrace Sister Leopolda as a maternal figure. Erdrich highlights the irony of Marie's connection to this very unmaternal nun by revealing in Tracks that Sister Leopolda is Marie's biological mother.
The compromise position Kristeva ascribes to the Virgin Mary allows for a place for women and mothers in Catholicism. However, Kristeva goes on to show that this identification with the Virgin can be harmful because it demands a sacrifice of the semiotic maternal body in order to identify with the symbolic holy mother. Christian tradition has long associated sexuality with death, which was all connected to Mary's immaculate conception of Christ (Kristeva Reader 165). Jonte-Pace notes that association underscoring a connection between mothers and death:
Marian theology inverts this connection making Mary `alone of all her sex'
the mother who does not die. Maternal generativity, sexuality, and death
are torn asunder. In the reduplicated `division of the very flesh' of the
mother's body, the splitting of the Madonna into virgin and mother, and the
division of the text itself, word meets flesh. (9)
Thus the myth of the Virgin denies a subject the necessary narcissism (belief in self) to identify with the semiotic mother.
Marie yearns to become a saint because she associates martyrdom with power. Rather than remaining an abstract concept, her yearning results in the specific visualization of herself as St. Marie. She envisions herself becoming a saint's statue, yet the picture combines the gold of a Catholic statue with the ocean shells of native religions: "And I'd be carved in pure gold. With ruby lips. And my toenails would be little pink ocean shells ..." (43). This fusion of religious emblems presents the ambivalence inherent in a people who have been forced to accept the validity of the colonizer's beliefs, and on a more personal level,