Vision Of Native American Life In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Study

Abstract

The present article aims to appreciate how Louise Erdrich, a modern feminine Native American author, truthfully imitates the creative and mythic vision of the inherited Native Americans. She concurrently represents the hybridized lives of the varied generations of the Native Americans. The novel dishes up as a site anywhere, ancestral as well as the current vision of the Native American life. The novel examines the struggle to balance Native-American tradition with modern world. The most prominent themes of the novel are those that are relevant to various literatures and discourses such as contemporary Native American literature, post modernism, realism, oral storytelling, folklore and mythology.

There is an invariable emotion of displacement as well as identity bewilderment. Erdrich investigates the cultural clash and hybrid identity faced by Native Americans in her works because she herself belongs to two dissimilar civilizations, a dissimilar set of traditions and races.  Her main characters stand for both sides of her inheritance. She deals only with the Native American characters embedded in native civilization and has as well represented characters so as to be not pure Native Indians. These varied hybrid characters are the representatives of an altering, developing Native American society.