The Beet Queen

¶ … Queen

Mary Adare begins the narrative of Louise Erdrich's 1986 novel the Beet Queen, saying she was "girl in the stiff coat," in 1932. (Erdrich, 1986, p.1) Deprived of her brother Karl, who she cared for she feels weak -- for from the beginning she has experienced a sense of disconnection from other members of her immediate family, even her own brother and mother. Her brother is spindly and apt to faint during moments of great distress while his sister is strong as she begs mealy apples when her family is hungry. Early on in the narrative, Karl is lost to Mary when he hears a dog bark, and turns tail, leaving Mary to the mercy of apparent strangers in the form of her aunt and uncle. (Erdrich, 1986, pp.8; 1)

Much later, in the novel Karl will state, in Chapter Fifteen, that he gives nothing, takes nothing, means nothing, holds nothing, despite his status as a parent of Dot, and his relationship with Celestine -- he eschews parental responsibilities and resists the ties of family because of the negative influences he has seen family bring, while Mary accepts them. Mary lives in the country and works off the land, with her hands, because when Karl turned and ran, she fled to the fields, while he, in contrast, abandoned her to the town. Karl also experiences his sexuality as different than most men in the novel, as he is gay, despite his one tryst with Celestine.

Thus, both Mary and Karl, in very different ways, see themselves as disconnected from society, although Mary seeks connection to her family and to the land, while Karl seeks the lonely life of a permanent outsider. From the beginning of her life, Mary gains an immediate, even physical sense of her difference. Her mother brushes her lank black hair and says, disapprovingly "you don't get that from me," as her mother is quite vain of her appearance and figure, hoping at one point to gain a job as a saleswoman because of them in town. (Erdrich, 1986, p. 2) Karl, like his mother, loves the life of the town, away from the land. Another immediate contrast between Mary and her family is that Mary likes her mother's suitor and lover. In contrast, her sibling Karl despises Mr. Ober.

The irony, of course is that not only is the trio's "big white house" and automobile in Mr. Ober's name, but that he is Karl's father as well as the mother's lover. (Erdrich, 1986, pp.1-3) the children's pregnant mother, once abandoned by Mr. Ober upon his death and cast out of their home, becomes a thief and abandons her two children. Mary comes to reside with Fritzie, her aunt, who runs 'the House of Meats,' with her husband, a shop eventually Mary takes over as the proprietress.

Thus, why is the book not entitled 'The Meat Queen?' The title of the book the Beet Queen refers to the sugar beet industry that comes to prominence over the forty years chronicled by the novel. The multifaceted development of the local economy, from the meat house, (the 'meeting' house, pun intended of the novel) to the flourishing sugar beet industry, and the waxing and waning fertility of all of the rest of the fields, reflects the pluralistic nature of the Adare family itself. Amongst the Adares, family ties are often far from clear.

The novel's center and emotional core is undoubtedly Mary, but the book is also narrated by a variety of characters, most notably the Chippewa Celestine James. Her dual white and Indian natures add further dimensions of identity and the multiple natures of race, sexuality and class in the structure of the novel, especially after she briefly becomes the lover of the ambiguous Karl, Mary's brother. Another individual, an outsider named Wallace Pfef is also a narrator of sections of the book, and thus from the outside, in the eyes of a community outsider, the reader is able to gain access as to how Mary seems to an observer, both as a profoundly ordinary woman, as hard worker at the House of Meats, and yet an individual who still possess a strong ability as a mystical dreamer and whose fall on the ice causes miracles.

Even after she loses her miracle making ability, Mary is capable of profound insights. "Everything that happened to him in his life," she wonders of her brother, at one point, as she is driving in her car towards the end of the novel. "All the things we said and did. Where did it go?" As she "didn't have an answer," so she "just drove," reflecting "once I had caused a miracle by smashing my face on ice, but now I was an ordinary person. In the few miles we had left I could not help drawing out Celestine's strange ideas in my mind. In my line of work I've seen thousands of brains that belonged to sheep, pork, steers. They were all gray lumps like ours. Where did everything go? What was really inside? The flat fields unfolded, the shallow ditches ran beside the road. I felt the live thoughts hum inside me, and I pictured tiny bees, insects made of blue electricity, in a colony so fragile that it would scatter at the slightest touch. I imagined a blow, like a mallet to the sheep, or a stroke, and I saw the whole swarm vibrating out. Who could stop them? Who could watch them in their hands?" (Erdrich, 1986) Thus, even as a minister of blood and death, Mary is still capable of putting her trade in some philosophical context, a kind of miracle in and of itself, one might add.

Finally, the birth of Wallacette Darlene Adare, known as "Dot' Celestine and Karl's girl, bring together many of the different identities and plots that wind throughout the course of the book's narrative sprawl. She is the child of a half-breed woman and a man of uncertain but white parentage, who is of dubious sexuality. Dot merges in her person the identities of White and Indian, of the different lives of the Adare brother and sister, as Celestine was once Mary's girlhood friend, and also the lives of Karl's town and Mary's country existence and the House of Meats. When the girl Dot finally gains the capability of narrating her own tale she calls her birth the logical outcome of a thread beginning with her grandmother Adelaide, the fancy mother that abandoned her two children, an outcome that traveled through her father and arrived in her birth. The thread she traces if both of flight and homecoming.