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...
The thread she traces if both of flight and homecoming.
When she speaks of dual identity -- and the country life of farming, it is important to note that the author of the Beet Queen, Louise Erdrich intimately knows of the world she speaks of in her novels. Erdrich grew up in the plains and midwestern states, born Little Falls, Minnesota, and raised Wahpeton, North Dakota. Her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools and she is of mixed heritage -- her father was German and her mother both French and of the Ojibwa tribe, whose specific culture features prominently throughout her other works of fiction. Also, the author worked at various jobs as she grew up, including hoeing sugar beets, farm work, working as a waitress, short order cooking, life guarding, and construction work, before becoming a writer. (Author Biography, HarperCollins Website, 2003)
By locating an individual's struggle, that of Mary, and her brother Karl, against the development of their own community, the author locates these two individuals as part of a larger, communal struggle to forge an identity and a functioning economy. No individual is alone -- everyone is a product of their family and their heritage. However, no one has a unified heritage and family. Just as Karl and Mary are both very different, although united by upbringing and blood, even their own parentages are different as Dot's and Celestine's. Every individual is unique and every unique individual does not, despite Karl's protestations, stand in isolation but is part of a larger community and cultural identity, a spoke on a greater wheel.
Works Cited
Louise Erdrich." (2003). Author Biography. HarperCollins Website. Retrieved 6 Dec 2004. http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/beet_queen-author.asp#bio
Erdrich, Louise. (1986) the Beet Queen. New York: HarperCollins.
