Love and Loss in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine

Introduction: Cultural Otherness on the Reservation

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 be 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 yet echoed in the inextricably linked families that still remain. This tribal orientation, if no longer the protective and familial force it was before the arrival of Europeans, gives America's Native Americans a shared feeling of cultural otherness.

This is the premise that underscores the groundbreaking 1984 text by Louise Erdrich, and which is further affirmed by the 1993 Extended Edition of Love Medicine considered here. Erdrich's text is perhaps most important for providing a penetrating insight into the lifestyle, experiences, and pitfalls that plague the frequently self-contained, isolated, and disadvantaged populations of America's Indian reservations. In her portrayal, Erdrich 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 — Erdrich describes the various love stories and secrets that eternally connect three families across three generations. Erdrich weaves a complex story that moves seamlessly backward and forward in time, yet exists on a single continuum of cultural separateness from the lives of white Americans. Each generation experiences and attempts fitfully to cope with this otherness.

The Love Triangle: Marie, Nector, and Lulu

Perhaps no character in the Erdrich text endures this struggle with greater dignity than Marie. We find in Marie a woman who is an outsider on a number of levels. As a white woman married into 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 with it, an other in the world beyond. Worse yet, she also experiences an otherness within her own marriage.

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 Erdrich novel, excluding the eldest matriarch Rushes Bear, revolves around 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 Nector and Marie.

From their first exchange, Marie's otherness is highlighted not just as a product of her racial identity but also of her low upbringing. Erdrich 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 Lazarre 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." (Erdrich, p. 61)

Marie's Otherness Within the Tribe and Marriage

Nector goes on to observe 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." (Erdrich, p. 62) These derisive observations are hardly what one might expect at the first meeting of a couple eventually to be married. Nector shows considerable disdain for Marie on account of her ethnic and socioeconomic otherness, which makes the swiftness of their courtship all the more surprising — and its impact on Lulu all the more painful.

Conclusion: Belonging Through Love

This is an important sentiment and one which brings at least some measure of comfort not just to Marie but to the reader as well. Where so much dishonesty, heartache, and conditional misfortune have colored the lives of the families in Erdrich's novel, we are made to understand that the characters have remained entangled with one another by virtue of their love. In far too many instances, death and tragic loss intervene before characters are ever able to make full and honest expression of this feeling. Nevertheless, we may deduce from these sentiments that even if she never fully felt it, Marie always belonged — whether within her tribe, her family, or her marriage.