Love Medicine

‘“Patient Abuse.’ There were two ways you could think of that title. One was obvious to a nursing student, and the other was obvious to a Kashpaw. Between my mother and myself the abuse was slow and tedious, requiring long periods of dormancy, living in the blood like hepatitis. When it broke out, it was almost a relief.”

Erdrich frequently uses metaphors throughout her narrative. Here, the resentment that characterizes Albertine’s relationship with her mother is compared to a disease that cannot be cured and is largely unseen. This extreme metaphor of “Patient Abuse” and hepatitis helps to depict the relationship between mother and daughter with honest brutality.

“Elusive, pregnant with history, his thoughts finned off and vanished. The same color as water. Grandpa shook his head, remembering dates with no events to go with them, names without faces, things that happened out of place and time. Or at least it seemed that way to me. Grandma and the others were always hushing up the wild things he said or talking loudly over them. Maybe they were bored with his craziness, and then again maybe his mind blurted secrets from the past. If the last was true, sometimes I thought I understood.”

Grandpa’s suppressed knowledge of the past is a larger symbol of the silencing of Ojibwe histories throughout time. Whether his own mind holds his stories back, or his family keeps him from talking, a lineage and a history is lost within Grandpa’s silence. This silencing parallels the efforts of the Ojibwe to keep their heritage and culture alive within the fearful constraints of white supremacy.

“I worked carefully for over an hour. But once they smash there is no way to put them right.”

The destroyed pies and Albertine’s efforts to repair them represent the chaos of her family. Some things simply cannot be fixed once broken. Her family, multi-generational and full of personality and history, are bound by love and trauma. This quote foreshadows more conflict between the family members.

“Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing–that was me. I was like those bush Indians who stole the holy black hat of a Jesuit and swallowed little scraps of it to cure her fevers. But the hat itself carried smallpox and was killing them with belief. Veils of faith!”

Erdrich uses the metaphor of the veils of love to symbolize Marie’s desperate need for respect as well as the fraught history of forced assimilation and genocide. Marie believes that her veil of love–the nun’s habit–could save her, but could also make her sick, much like the Indigenous Americans who died of smallpox transferred via their white oppressors. That Marie still seeks out this veil of love despite her acknowledgement that the veil is both good and evil signifies how entrenched Erdrich suggests white supremacy is within her characters’ identities.

“My uncle knew my strength lay in what I didn’t know yet, just as, after I went to the island, it would lie in knowing more than I should, more than other people would like. Nothing would look the same after loving Moses Pillager. Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.”

This quote addresses the themes of growing up and knowing oneself. Lulu is given an ironic conundrum: Either she heeds her uncle’s advice but loses her sense of curiosity, or she follows her heart and gets chewed up by the chaos of the world she embraces. This quote emphasizes how a person can only know the effects of their decisions in hindsight, but Erdrich does not warn her reader against taking risks. Instead, it seems inevitable that Lulu would have gone through an arduous journey in love. This quote also suggests that “right” and “wrong” are not dichotomous, but only two of many complex layers in a person’s ability to understand themselves and the world around them.

“The only thing that wouldn’t cost money, I thought to comfort myself, was this baby, as long as she wasn’t registered, as long as I did not go to the hospital, as long as I could have her in the house, she was free.”

Here, the word “free” is used as a double entendre, meaning the word is both literal and metaphorical. The baby will be “free” if it is not born in a hospital because Marie will not need to pay hospital bills. But the baby will also be free from the influence of the white American system if Marie keeps the baby to herself, hidden away from hospitals and other institutions that seek to oppress and assimilate Indigenous Americans. This quote underscores two important conflicts for Marie and many of the other characters in the novel: poverty, and freedom from the influence of the white majority.

“She had looked over the bleak edge of her life, saw that I was her last hold, and caught at me. In the days that followed, I was surprised to find her grip turned strong and natural. Her temper still rose in flames, still licked the ceiling, but it tamped down fast, too. She seemed to have noticed that shape of my loneliness. Maybe she found it was the same as hers.”

This quote is a major turning point in the relationship between Marie and Margaret. It is an event in the plot that promotes a lesson learned that all the other characters can apply to their own lives. Often, characters in this novel take their frustrations and traumas out on one another. Here, Marie and Margaret prove that they have more in common than they think and realize that they should respect one another for those shared challenges instead of succumbing to constant fighting. They resolve their conflict and represent the support that can occur when one chooses kindness over anger. The psychology of conflict in these families could also signify the internalization and recycling of the type of pain and trauma-infliction Indigenous Americans have suffered at the hands of white Americans. Here, Erdrich shows that the community can break away from this adoption of American traumas and come together against those conflicts.

“I could not believe it, later, when she showed me the picture. Plunge of the Brave, was the title of it. Later on, that picture would become famous. It would hang in the Bismarck state capitol. There I was, jumping off a cliff, naked of course, down into a rocky river. Certain death. Remember Custer’s saying? The only good Indian is a dead Indian? Well from my dealings with whites I would add to that quote: ‘The only interesting Indian is dead, or dying by falling backwards off a horse.’”

This quote highlights two important criticisms of society Erdrich articulates through her story. The first is that what white society knows about Indigenous American history has been largely communicated through interpretive art and film made by white people, and at the expense of the complex identities of Indigenous Americans. That the painting of Nector is famous and hangs in the state capitol demonstrates that white institutions readily accept the white painter’s interpretation of Nector even though he personally rejects it. The second criticism Erdrich develops here is Nector’s defeatist attitude in the context of his discovery of white supremacist attitudes. Nector, who fears that everyone uses him and propels him into jobs and marriages and lives he doesn’t ask for, readily accepts the dogmatic singular-mindedness of white people’s interpretations of him.

“I was a flood that strained bridges. Uncontainable. I rushed into Lulu, and the miracle was she could hold me. She could contain me without giving me away. Or she could run with me, unfolding in sheets and snaky waves.”

Nector Kashpaw is a character that exemplifies the hidden, unexpressed depths of the identities that make up this family drama. Nector has a difficult time taking accountability for his life, but he is also self-aware. He is a living paradox, developed in part by his own unstable home life and the harsh realities of living as an Ojibwe man in a white-dominated world. In Lulu, Nector sees someone who understands him without judging him. This relationship, and Nector finding himself within his affair with Lulu, highlights how love can be a driving motivation. Nector believes he is “uncontainable,” directly contrasting his emotions outside of their relationship, as he feels he has limited options for work, life, and love in his world. He is both limited by and made more complex by his Ojibwe identity.

“I had been on a high horse. Now I was kneeling. I was washing the floor in my good purple dress. I never did laugh at myself in any situation, but I had to laugh now. I thought of cutting up a shroud. The nun was clever. She knew where my weakness had been.”

In this quote, Marie reveals new depths to her character and more thematic concepts. Marie’s sin here, at least in her mind, is too much pride. Marie physically kneels to clean the floor as a way of metaphorically kneeling to her God. As much as she knows how fallible her husband is, still Marie turns her anger on herself, knowing that she is the only one who can keep their family together. Marie cannot rely on her husband. This characterization is repeated among many other female characters in Erdrich’s literature. What’s more, Marie’s weakness here seems to be love. She welcomes love and gives love, which puts her in a vulnerable situation—but Marie’s perceived weakness is also her greatest strength.

“He’d always had a joke, then, too, and now you couldn’t get him to laugh, or when he did it was more the sound of a man choking, a sound that stopped up the throats of other people around him. They got to leaving him alone most of the time, and I didn’t blame them. It was a fact: Henry was jumpy and mean.”

This quote emphasizes the tragic juxtaposition of Henry before and after the war, and it highlights the loss of laughter in Henry’s character. Lyman, as the protagonist of Chapter 10, brings a bright sense of humor to the novel. This humor becomes outmatched by Henry’s tragedy. This quote also foreshadows further conflict with Henry, as even Lyman has to admit that people will not want to be around Henry, which will keep Henry even more isolated.

“Only I didn’t believe she was threatening my life at the time. I had a false view of pregnant women. I thought of them as wearing invisible halos, not committing mayhem.”

In this quote, Erdrich uses irony to develop a metaphorical message about love. Rather than represent a pregnant woman as saintly, Erdrich portrays Dot as quick-tempered, fiercely defensive, and intensely combative. With this use of irony, Erdrich develops the metaphorical message that love for self and child can sometimes be expressed through intense rage and violence. This fits in with the themes Erdrich writes about love as a double-edged sword: Motivating, meaningful, and mystifyingly brutal.

“One of Dot’s most peculiar feats was transforming that gentle task into something perverse. She knit viciously, jerking the yarn around her thumb until the tip whitened, pulling each stitch so tightly that the little garments she finished stood up by themselves like miniature suits of mail.”

Here again Erdrich depicts Dot’s maternal or domestic behavior as violent. But now, Erdrich identifies the source of that violence: the darkly insurmountable task of ensuring safety for a child. Before she is even born, Dot’s daughter requires some sort of armor, the armor of a mother’s love. Dot’s life is full of instability, but this is at least one thing she can try to do to offer her daughter protection.

“Gerry’s friends, you see, had no confidence in the United States judicial system. They did not seem comfortable in the courtroom, and this increased their unreliability in the eyes of judge and jury. If you trust the authorities, they trust you better back, it seems. It looked that way to Gerry, anyhow.”

Gerry’s distrust of the formal legal system is representative of the history of Indigenous American communities in the United States. Due to clauses in legal reform around Indigenous reservations, there is reservation law and order that is often dichotomous to state law and order. The unconscious biases of the people who make up the state’s institutions of law are clear to Gerry, and his distrust in the systems around him leads to further prejudice against him. There is no one to defend him, because these institutions of power have used manipulative measures for centuries to ensure that Indigenous communities fear and avoid them.

“I saw that tears were in her eyes. And that’s when I saw how much grief and love she felt for him. And it gave me a real shock to the system. You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn’t hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess.”

Marie Kashpaw’s struggles and pains don’t decrease as she gets older. Through her continued heartbreak with her husband’s infidelities, Erdrich shows that love cannot be aged out of. All the work Marie put into raising families and keeping her loved ones stable doesn’t end, and it doesn’t give her respite in her older age. This positions Marie’s matriarchy as ceaseless–her role for her entire life will be to love with a ferocity that may not always be reciprocated.

“It makes sense, is what I’m saying, but you still can’t hardly believe it. You think a person you know has got through death and illness and being broke and living on commodity rice will get through anything. Then they fold and you see how fragile were the stones that underpinned them. You see how instantly the ground can shift you thought was solid.”

Here, Erdrich characterizes Marie Kashpaw’s vulnerability. The wall she put up to be a pillar of strength for her family also hid her own feelings. This quote demonstrates that everyone, no matter how resilient they are, has their own insecurities, fears, and heartbreak. In breaking down, Marie shatters the solidity of her children’s understandings of her and the world around her as unbreakable. These realizations happen often only in older life, when children become adults and finally see their parental figures as a multi-layered, nuanced human being. Marie is not a saint–she is human like everyone else.

“I’m going to tell you about the men. There were times I let them in just for being part of the world. I believe that angels in the body make us foreign to ourselves when touching. In this way I’d slip my body to earth, like a heavy sack, and for a few moments I would blend in with all that forced my heart.”

Lulu’s experiences her body as a space of joy, love, and pleasure. Most other characters experience their body as painful spaces, physical entities that they abuse to nurse their emotional scars. But Lulu uses her body for celebration, which she is judged harshly for. This characterization of her body also parallels her to other female characters such as June and Albertine, who go through similar spells of lightness, heaviness, and tingling in their bodies as they venture into the nuances of the physical and metaphysical world.

“Men, it seemed, from their long-lived height, had been the pawns in their lives by which they worked out large destinies. They teased like girls, flirted like house cats, made bold jokes, whispered behind my back, made tongue-in-cheek show of respecting my position and then undercut me.”

Lyman theorizes that what brings Marie and Lulu together is their understanding of what it meant to be a woman in a certain position. Men had made their lives more difficult, but men had also given these women a source of focus to build their lives in opposition to. Now, with Nector dead, Lyman embodies that source. The pressure that this places on Lyman’s psyche is notable, but this quote emphasizes how much women have in common if they recognize their competition as a sisterhood against a patriarchy.

“However, after the fighting tapered off, those who were still in condition to do so, Nanapushes and Morrisseys and Lazarres alike, methodically demolished, scattered, smashed to bits, and carried off what was left of the factory. And as they did so, walking around me as if I were just another expensive and obsolete government-inspired mechanism, there was a kind of organized joy to it that I would recognize only many drinks later as the factory running backward.”

Here, the epic fight at the factory uses Lyman as a scapegoat, just as Marie and Lulu use him as scapegoat for their resentment over Nector’s infidelities. But in this case, Lyman becomes the symbol of government interference on Ojibwe culture and livelihood. In destroying Lyman’s factory, his employees symbolically take back the tokenization of their history. He sees in this fight and destruction the cycle of history repeating itself again.

“She was going to say that her husband, my father, would have been proud or, better yet, jealous of what I’d attempted, that he would have understood the failure of this worthwhile project. She was going to tell me that change came about in slow measure and although my pain was bitter, it was not unnatural and therefore I could absorb it the way earth drinks in rain. She was going to tell me that the drowned could stop wandering, go home […] But, before she could speak, I noticed she was holding out her hands and in reflex I held out my own hands to her.”

This building of a bridge is a crucial plot development. Lyman, as the physical manifestation of Nector’s disloyalty, has always felt pulled between two different identities. He always wanted his hand held in love, and here, Marie gives that to him. But he also projects his own hopes and previous expectations of his father onto Marie, hoping that she’ll give him that too. Instead, Marie reaches out to him and refuses him the more superficial story of what his father would have thought about him. Thus, Marie again acts as a pillar of matriarchal strength, giving Lyman an opportunity to feel the solidity of love.

“They gave you worthless land to start with and then they chopped it out from under your feet. They took your kids away and stuffed the English language in their mouth. They sent your brother to hell, they shipped him back fried. They sold you booze for furs and then told you not to drink. It was time, high past time the Indians smarted up and started using the only leverage they had–federal law.”

Lyman’s vision for the future of the factory is both progressive and regressive. Lyman sees an opportunity to use the white American system to the benefit of the reservation, to funnel money into his community through a subversive cooperation with the American government. And yet, the contemporary reader will know that the casino models on reservations will heighten discrimination against Indigenous Americans, bring strangers into their community, and force participation in the capitalist system. Lyman’s plan could work the way he envisions it, or it could turn into more involved problems. Here, Erdrich foreshadows future conflict for both Lyman and the legacy of his community.

“Placed against the wall, oddly, the heart seemed to pulse. In and out. He started at the heart with his name firmly inside of it, and suddenly something moved inside of him. He felt a jolt of strangeness. For a moment he was heavy, full of meaning. Howard was sitting there. Howard was both familiar and different. Howard was living in this body like a house.”

Howard’s moment of autonomy is symbolic of a major shift in attitude. Howard, unlike the rest of his family, rejects the identity placed on him by others. By claiming his own name and seeing it firmly placed in the world around him, Howard transcends his chaotic home life and challenges his assumed fate to continue his family’s poverty and violence. Though the moment is quick, here, Erdrich presents Howard as the inheritor of history and the marker of a new generation.

“It’s a dark, thick, twisting river. The bed is steep and narrow. I thought of June. The water played in whorls beneath me or flexed over sunken cars. How weakly I remembered her. If it made any sense at all, she was part of the great loneliness being carried up by the driving current. I tell you, there was good in what she did for me, I know now.”

In meeting his father Gerry and in seeing King’s chaotic family life, Lipsha settles his internal conflict over his identity. He recognizes how lucky he was to have been raised by a pillar of strength like Marie Kashpaw. Rather than resent his mother June, he lets go of the pretense of expectations. The river in this quote is a symbol for Lipsha’s rising self-confidence and his release of bitterness. Thus, the novel ends with hope, satisfaction, and forgiveness for the illnesses inherited through the abusive cycles of history.