“Miracles” And “Saints”

Dealing with the collision between Native religion and Catholicism,Love Medicine(1984),Tracks(1988)and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse(2001)are interrelated both by characters and plots,and characterized by their intrinsic intertextuality and correlation.This thesis manages to regard the three novels as a narrative system,and attempts to study on the counter-narratives in these three novels in an effort to shed new light on Louise Erdrich's works.This thesis investigates three saints or saint-like characters in the novels via close reading,and it studies the counter-narratives in these novels applying post-colonial theory.This thesis asserts that by appropriation and redefinition,Erdrich successfully severs the underlying relations between saints and miracles,and replaces the dominant cultural narratives with counter-narratives.Specifically,some potential causal relationship exists between miracles and saints in the mainstream discourse,and miracles are one of the important criteria to be used in judging whether a person can be canonized.In other words,only by having performed a miracle could a common man be made a saint.Erdrich constructs three saint-related characters,namely quasi-saint Pauline/Sister Leopolda,pseudo-saint Marie Lazarre and New saint Agnes/Sister Cecelia/Father Damien,who directly or indirectly break down the internal relationship between the two concepts of saints and miracles,so that the narrative system constructed by the three novels forms the antagonistic narratives with regard to the mainstream ones.To be specific,miracles performed by quasi-saint Pauline/Sister Leopolda are nothing more than vicious lies and act as blatant blasphemy,and miracles that used to making an ordinary venerate as a saint turn out to be an accelerator to overturn her identity as a quasi-saint.The miracle of the pseudo-saint Marie Lazarre derives from vicious tortures and is by no means the real stigmata,which makes Marie's honor as a saint plausible and unconvincing.As for the new saint,Father Damien repudiates the socalled miracles and demonstrates certain personal weaknesses such as indulging in secular love,but Erdrich constructs him as an imitable new saint with good personality and great love,which strongly challenges the criteria of canonization,namely the performance of a miracle.In all,Erdrich successfully includes the Catholic discourse into her own counter-narratives,and with the counter-narratives underlying these three novels,the voices of marginalized minorities have great chances to be heard.What is more,Erdrich perhaps attempts to promote the idea that religious boundaries are both penetrable and flexible,but such acts of penetration should be enacted with the hope of advancing religious reciprocity rather than relentless domination.