Louise Erdrich’s Autobiographies: Spaces of Identity (Re)construction and Storytelling as Utopia in “Love Medicine”

Abstract

Although some critics do not even accept that Love Medicine is a novel at all, but a collection of short stories with the same characters telling the stories of their lives, it is clearly an identity narrative. This paper will focus on spaces of identity (re)construction in Love Medicine that reflect the tension between the mainstream white American culture and the Native American traditional one. The church, the pub, the car, the road, the bridge, or the reservation itself thus function as heterotopias, while the space of the autobiographical story functions as a utopia. The paper will discuss these spaces and their roles in the characters’ quest for identity.