Gender Alienation And Identity Construction In Shadow Tag

Louise Erdrich,is a renowned American Ojibwa writer and one of the most important contemporary Indian writers in the United States.Her full-length novel,“Shadow Tag”tells the story of the tragic marriage of Gill,an artist of Indian descent,and his wife,Irene.Gill is a painter known for his nude portraits of his wife.In the process of being painted by her husband,Irene gradually realizes that her privacy and soul are being plundered,and uses red and blue diary entries to try to counter her husband’s violent emotional catharsis by fabricating stories of her own cheating.Despite all the efforts to restore their happy family,the divorce ends.During a post-divorce reunion,Gill commits suicide in a lake and Irene drowns while swimming to Gill.This is a family tragedy about love and marriage,but also a novel about alienation,gender alienation,and identity construction.This paper explores the many asymmetries and imbalances in the gender division of labour and gender ideology between the two sexes in the novel from the perspective of gender alienation.By revealing the problems in the system of social gender relations and the phenomenon of alienation in gender relations,it actively explores strategies and ways to eliminate the phenomenon of alienation and rebuild women’s identity.This paper consists of six parts: Chapter one is the introductory part;Chapter two mainly compares the main theories applied in this paper and the development of alienation theory.The third chapter analyses the characters and events in Shadow Tag by applying the Marxist feminism theory of gender alienation to explain the manifestations of gender alienation and the process of alienation for both men and women:that is,to explore how Erdrich presents the conflict between Indian culture and mainstream consumerist culture in Shadow Tag,and to analyse how the main characters Irene and Gill in the novel are.This is to explore how Erdrich presents the alienation of the protagonists,Irene and Gill,in the context of the conflict between Indian culture and the dominant culture of consumerism,and how they lose their identities in the dominant culture.Chapter four analyses the social,cultural and ideological roots of the phenomenon and manifestations of gender alienation in relation to the text and Marxist gender alienation theory.Chapter five focuses on how to go about eliminating alienation and achieving the construction of identity.The chapter first explains how the main characters Gill and Irene’s loss of the concept of Native American community and their alienation from their tribal group are the root causes of their ethnic identity crisis and even the failure of social and cultural identity construction from the perspective of female identity construction,and how Irene constructs her own female subject identity in her marriage,and how Gill and Irene’s daughter Rile is inspired by her mother Irene’s racial and cultural story enlightenment and the help of a memory chart she created herself,reconnected with her tribal group and tribal cultural traditions,recovered her colonial trauma,and rebuilt her Native American identity.Chapter six,which focuses on the usefulness of the theory in the context of today’s society and the practical implications of Marxism and feminism,aims to provide some practical value to women’s liberation and the elimination of gender alienation and the emancipation of women and identity in today’s consumerist society.Finally,the concluding section summarises the whole thesis.