Critical analysis of love medicine by Louise Erdrich

Love Med

Love and Loss in Love Medicine

The sad narrative of life on an Indian Reservation is one that cannot be told within the scope of a single generation. Instead, it must relayed across multiple interconnected generations persisting within a beleaguered collective culture. In many ways, this is the only way to gain a nuanced understanding of the way tribal life now persists, splintered by the invasion of the European lifestyle but echoed in the inextricably linked families that still remain. This tribal orientation, if not today the protective and familial force that it was before the arrival of the Europeans, gives America's Native Americans a shared feeing of cultural otherness. This is the premise that underscores the groundbreaking 1984 text by Louise Erdich and which is even further affirmed by the 1993 Extended Edition of Love Medicine considered here. The Erdich text is perhaps most important for providing a peering insight into the lifestyle, experiences and pitfalls which plague the frequently self-contained, isolated and disadvantaged populations of America's Indian Reservations. In her portrayal, Erdich demonstrates this otherness to devastating and often fatal effect.

Basing her text on the experiences of the remaining members of the Chippewa tribe, now inhabiting the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, Erdich describes the various love stories and secrets that eternally connect three families across three generations. Erdich weaves a complex story that jumps seamlessly backward and forward in time but exists on a single continuum of cultural separateness from the lives of white Americans. Indeed, each generation experiences and attempts fitfully to cope with this otherness. Perhaps no character in the Erich text endures this struggle with greater dignity than does Marie. We find in Marie a woman who is an outsider on a number of levels. As a white woman married into the reservation life, Marie experiences a kind of otherness unlike those around her. She is an other both inside the reservation and, due to her affiliation therewith, an other in the world beyond. Worse yet, we may also say that she experiences an otherness in her own marriage.

Accordingly, a useful starting point for understanding these conditions -- apart from the more obvious and broadly contextualizing experience of being relegated to life on the reservation -- is the love triangle that would define the intersecting families of the novel for succeeding generations. The first generation of characters featured in the Erdich novel -- excluding the eldest matriarch in Rushes Bear -- revolves on Marie, Lulu and Nector. Many of the deceptions and entanglements that imbue the narrative with so much sadness and uncertainty begin with the marriage of Marie and Nector. Though Nector and Lulu are in love, circumstances ultimately lead to a fast and impassioned courtship between Nestor and Marie. From their first exchange, Marie's otherness is highlighted not just as a product of her racial orientation but also as a product of her low upbringing. Here, Erdich writes from Nector's perspective, "they say I am smart as a whip around here, but this time I am too smart for my own good. Marie Lazrre is the youngest daughter of a family of horse-thieving drunks. Stealing sacred linens fits what I know of that blood, so I assume she is running off with the Sisters' pillowcases and other valuables." (Erdich, p. 61)

Nector goes on to observe of her that "she is just a skinny white girl from a family so low you cannot even think they are in the same class as Kashpaws." (Erdich, p. 62) These derisive observations are hardly what one might expect in the first meeting of a couple eventually to be married. Indeed, Nector shows sufficient disdain for Marie on account of her ethnic and socioeconomic otherness. It is perhaps quite understandable then that the courtship would take Lulu quite by surprise.

The union forces her to find happiness through a series of fleeting marriages and affairs. Perhaps most critical among them would be both her marriage to Henry Lamartine and her on-again, off-again affair with Nector. As to the former, this relationship would echo the pattern of senseless loss that marks the lives of Erdich's characters. Here, it is Henry whose suicide becomes one of the first casualties of Lulu and Nector's forbidden love. This is pertinent because in Henry's act, Marie perceives yet another area in which she possesses a distinct sense of otherness.

Marie recalls this in a sequence that is quite telling of her own disposition. She tells that "I understood Henry, and I felt for him as I sat. I knew why he had parked his Dodge square on the tracks and let the train bear down. He must have loved her. But I wouldn't park myself on the tracks for Nector. 'I'd see him in hell first,' I said to the room." (Erdich, p. 162) Here, Marie laments her disposition but with a hardened sense of self-assurance. Indeed, her relationship with Nector has afforded her some status within the insular Chippewa tribal culture, but not so much that she was protected from the tribal chairman's infidelity. She reflects in this sequence that her sadness and hurt are for the loss of her love rather than for the loss of her security, her name and the status afforded by her marriage. She still resolves that even if Nector is to leave her for Lulu, she will remain strong, able-bodied and capable of carrying on with her own name. In this regard, her otherness is actually her strength.