Thematic Research On Trauma In Louise Erdrich’s The Tetralogy Of Truth

The Tetralogy of Truth written by the Native American author Louise Erdrich,including The Beet Queen(1986),The Master Butchers Singing Club(2003),Shadow Tag(2010),and La Rose(2016),aims at revealing the unforeseeable,unspeakable,and unintelligible truth of the Native Americans’ traumatic experiences,and tries to present the traditional Native American culture as the healing force.Erdrich presents her profound perception and understanding of colonial trauma,war trauma,and family trauma with an attempt to demonstrate the suffering of the Native Americans while highlighting the damaging effects of these traumatic experiences on them.The special feature of The Tetralogy of Truth is that,unlike other Native American literary works,it does not always choose Native Americans as the main characters.Instead,Erdrich’s literary characters come from diverse racial communities,but they all recognize the force of the Native American culture in healing trauma.This thesis aims to analyze the colonial trauma,war trauma,and family trauma in the four novels in Louise Erdrich’s The Tetralogy of Truth by referring to trauma theory.Shadow Tag is a good example of Erdrich’s depiction of the traumatic influence of colonization on the Native Americans.Gill,the protagonist of the novel,is characterized by Erdrich as one colonizer to control his wife Irene,who is treated as a colonized subject instead of a model for his portrait.Irene’s nude portrait reflects the power dynamic between Gill and Irene in the context of colonization,symbolizing the oppression and exploitation of the Native American groups by European colonizers in the early colonial era.However,Riel,the daughter of Gill and Irene,a hybrid of the colonizer and the colonized,reconnects herself with the tribal cultural traditions through her memories,reclaims her Native American identity,and ultimately overcomes the spiritual trauma inflicted on her generation by the white society.Erdrich used The Master Butchers Singing Club to demonstrate her understanding of the traumatic effects of war on the Native Americans.Cyprian and Fidelis are two veterans of World War I who fought on opposite sides.They both suffer trauma,but their reaction to the war trauma is different.Fidelis tries to rebuild himself through love and friendship,while Cyprian tries to achieve balance through acrobatics training.The third character in the novel,Step and a Half(Minnie),is always searching her self to overcome the trauma resulting from her ever witnessing the Massacre at Wounded Knee,another form of war between the Native Americans and the Europeans.All these three figures find comfort in Delphine,a symbolic figure of the Native American culture with healing powers to alleviate her people’s spiritual vacuum and confusion.In La Rose and The Beet Queen,Louise Erdrich presented her understanding of the problem of family trauma.The trauma of Nora in La Rose results from the loss of her son,but this trauma is finally healed by her adopted son,La Rose,who represents the Native American culture.In The Beet Queen,Carl’s traumatic memories of being abandoned by his mother troubles him,and it is Fleur,a representative figure of Native American descent,who heals this trauma.In Louise Erdrich’s literary world,the Native Americans even today still suffer from the bitter memories of colonization or even of the massacre by the early European settlers,the bitter memories of the world wars on the macro level,as well as family traumas on the micro level.For Louise Erdrich,the Native American culture always plays the role of a healer,and can help her traumatized characters to recover from those bitter memories through their interaction with the Native American culture.