Summary

(MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE)

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Erdrich’s novel The Antelope Wife makes a leap of style, incorporating deep history from a scene similar
to nineteenth century Ojibwe clashes with the United States Army with a mythic child who is raised by a
herd of antelope. Her narrative shifts from the physical world of the plains to the spiritual world of
animals who can communicate with humans and lend them their traits. She also leaps several
generations, bringing the mythic influence on Matilda Roy into the twentieth century where it shimmers
in the actions and personalities of the antelope women Klaus Shawano shadows in the early chapters.
When Klaus kidnaps the mother of the girls, he has taken on more than he can handle, and the results
play themselves out several generations later.

Rozina Whiteheart Beads invites us in to the narrative as a modern voice in chapter 3. Mother of Cally
and Deanna, the fourth set of twins in the Blue Prairie Woman line, she says at the close of her chapter:
“I would go back if I could, unweave the pattern of destruction. Take it all apart occurrence by slow
event.” She refers to early complications when soldier Scranton Roy follows, saves, and raises a female
Indian child after he has been involved in slaughtering members of the child’s band. The unassuaged
grief of the girl’s mother leads her toward madness until she is renamed and treks off to find her lost
daughter, leaving the first set of twins to be raised by their grandmother. Years later, Rozina, one of the
third set of twins in the Shawano line, picks up the story, which entwines offspring of the Roy and
Shawano families in ways so complicated that readers must often keep a list to sort out who is related
to whom.

Throughout the novel, characters try and decipher who they are. All seem to be seeking answers in love
or history, family or tribe. Cally confronts her Grandma Zosie midway through the book.What does my
name mean? Where is my sister? What about my father? And Mama, will she ever stop avoiding Frank
and make him her destiny? What does she want? . . . I look into her too-young brown eyes and get lost
in all that I don’t know.

Rozin makes the final journey to Frank’s arms from loss and grief teetering between the real and spirit
worlds. There are answers for Cally and a future for the characters who survive in Minneapolis, the city
full of noise and danger for Ojibwes. Erdrich’s novel ends with a catalog of questions. “Did these
occurrences have a paradigm . . . [?] Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bit of colored glass
sewn onto the fabric of this earth?” The answers reside in the nest of her words.

Themes

(BEACHAM'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR FICTION)

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Erdrich traces several passions through several generations. Anger at rejection, guilt, and longing appear
to be fated for many of her characters. Just as Yeats in "Among School Children" questions how to tell
the dancer from the dance, Erdrich's first-person omniscient narrator, at the end of the novel,
questions:

Did these occurrences have a paradigm in the settlement of old scores and pains and betrayals that
went back in time? Or are we working out the minor details of a strictly random pattern? Who is
beading us? Who is setting flower upon flower and cut-glass vine? Who are you and who am I, the
beader or the bit of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of earth?" As with Yeats, the question is
unanswered, although threads of connection tie many characters together.

Female twins abound in this novel: two sets of identical twins named Zosie and Mary; Rozina and her
undescribed twin sister who has died; and Deanna and Cally. The unidentified beaders in the four mythic
sections of the novel are twins as well. Rozina and Cally long for their missing twins, while the second
generation Zosie and Mary twins resist separate identification by others. The relationship of twins in the
novel is stronger than any bond that any of these women might have with others. In fact, all
relationships between women are stronger than relationships which contain men, whether be it
between husband and wife or father and child. When Matilda's mother comes for her, she leaves the
foster father who nursed her almost unthinkingly. The need for female bonding is so great that after
Deanna's death, Cecille serves as an older sister to Cally.

Along with the emphasis on female relationships goes the idea of the female need for freedom. It is
from this theme that Erdrich gets the name of her novel. Blue Prairie Woman's first husband is a deer;
she is the first of several antelope wives. Matilda wanders freely with a herd of antelopes. When Klaus
first sees Sweetheart Calico and her three daughters, he states that "they float above everyone else on
springy tireless legs." Sweetheart Calico's longing to return to the freedom of the west, a freedom which
does not include a human husband, is a part of this theme.

There is an unusual focus on food throughout the novel. Some of the imagery arises from Frank's career
as a baker and his attempt to bake blitzkuchen, the cake that saved the life of the German P.O.W. who
baked it. "Almost Soup," Cally's dog and the narrator of two sections of the novel, is barely saved from
being eaten by his puppy cuteness and Cally's intercession with either Zosie or Mary. After Augustus Roy
bites Zosie, he disappears, and Zosie and Mary gain weight. Not only does their weight gain suggest that
they have eaten Augustus, but Cecille asks, "So what did you do with him? Who took the first bite?"
Erdrich depicts various kinds of hunger throughout the text: physical, emotional, and spiritual.

The most common emotional response Erdrich presents is longing. Blue Prairie Woman longs for her
daughter; Sweetheart Calico longs for her daughters and her western sky; Klaus Shawano longs for
Sweetheart Calico; Richard Whiteheart Beads longs for Rozina, when they are separated, and for
Deanna after her death; Frank longs for Rozina when she is guilt ridden following Deanna's death; Cally
longs for Deanna; and Rozina longs for Frank and Deanna. As Zosie says about the northwest trader blue
beads, "I came to understand that my search for the blueness called northwest trader blue was the
search to hold time." Possession of the beads in one of the mythic stories is only part of the problem.
One must know his own true name, a magical name which the elders give to a child, usually during an
initiation ceremony, or, otherwise, according to Zosie's story, the beads will kill their owners of
"longing."
Unlike previous Erdrich novels, such as Love Medicine or The Bingo Palace,where the lives of Ojibwa
seem to be better on the reservation than in cities, the Minneapolis experiences of Frank, Rozina,
Cecille, and Cally seem to be more positive than not. Frank is successful as a baker; Rozina as a teacher
and then a lawyer, and Cecille as a kung fu teacher; and Cally sees more possibilities for her future in
Minneapolis than on the reservation. Richard, Klaus, and Sweetheart Calico suffer in the city, but only
Sweetheart Calico seems affected by separation from western reservation life. Richard is an alcoholic
and commits suicide, but his failure as a person is not tied to the urban experience but to his failed
relationship to Rozina and his guilt concerning Deanna's death. Klaus's alcoholism is not tied to the
urban experience either but to his love of Sweetheart Calico which does much to ruin both of their lives.

Characters

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Scranton Roy is the son of a Quaker father and a reclusive poet mother. When a traveling drama troupe
visits his Pennsylvania community in the nineteenth century, Scranton is smitten by a tall, slender
blonde actress who wants nothing to do with him. Angry at her rejection, Scranton enlists in the U. S.
Cavalry in St. Paul, Minnesota. After training, his company marches west and raids an Ojibwa village.
Despite Scranton's Quaker heritage, he takes part in the indiscriminate killing and bayonets an old
woman. As he pulls the bayonet from her body, he sees his own mother in her. Disgusted with his own
savagery, Scranton runs away, but as he flees, he sees a dog with a baby strapped to its body. After
pursuing the dog for several days, he befriends it and begins to care for the baby, whom he nurses as if
he were female. Abandoning the army, Scranton builds a sod house for himself and the baby, whom he
names Matilda after his mother. When Matilda Roy is old enough for school, she is attracted to her
teacher, Peace McKnight, whom Scranton Roy brings into his house and marries. After Matilda's mother,
Blue Prairie Woman, comes for her, Matilda Roy leaves Roy, who is saddened by the loss. However, he
has a son with Peace McKnight, who is weakened from the "mottled skin sickness" and dies from a
protracted labor. Roy not only puffs air into the baby's lungs but nurses his son Augustus, just as he has
earlier nursed Matilda. Years later, when he is an old man, Roy takes most of his possessions and his
grandson, Augustus, and attempts to find the tribe he raided forty years before. Erdrich never mentions
any of Scranton Roy's other activities or his end, so that his character, as depicted by the scenes
portraying it, is a tracing of passions, from rejected love, to hatred, to love again through Matilda, to an
attempt at restitution for his part in killing innocent people.

Blue Prarie Woman is the mother of both Matilda Roy and the twins Zosie and Mary. According to Cally
Whiteheart Beads, who is Blue Prarie Woman's Shewano grandmother, Blue Prairie Woman is called "So
Hungry" by her tribe because of her insatiable hunger. Devastated by the loss of Matilda during the
cavalry raid on her village, Blue Prairie Woman is so miserable that the tribe renames her "Other Side of
the Earth." Seven years later, unable to bear the loss of her baby, Blue Prairie Woman walks west in
search of her daughter, leaving her twins to be raised by their grandmother, Midass. Accompanying her
is a dog, Sorrow, that she nursed to ease the pain in her breasts when Matilda disappeared during the
raid. When Blue Prairie Woman finds Scranton Roy and Matilda, she leaves with Matilda without Roy's
knowledge; however, Matilda carries the mottled skin disease that quickly kills Blue Prairie Woman.
Before her death, Blue Prairie Woman kills the dog Sorrow that she fed with her own mother-milk;
Sorrow's flesh will provide food for her daughter. Blue Prairie Woman also gives her daughter the same
second name she was given by her tribe, "Other Side of the Earth," a name which will be a key to
Matilda's destiny.

After her mother's death, Matilda, who is now "Other Side of the Earth," feeds on the dog that drank
her mother's milk and lives and travels with a herd of antelope, whom she interests. For Erdrich, Matilda
becomes the prototype of the antelope woman, a woman with grace, beauty, and wild passion. Erdrich
never specifically states what happens to Matilda after her journey with the antelope, but the fact that
her story is known by the Ojibwa suggests that eventually she rejoins the tribe. Her name and her
mother's name are given to later daughters of the tribe.

Zosie Roy, the wife of Augustus Roy, and her sister, Mary, are identical twins. Although Augustus Roy is
married to Zosie, he also tries to have an affair with Mary. Problems arise when he has difficulty
identifying the woman with whom he is making love. At first, Augustus can differentiate between the
twins because their hair "whirlwinds" spiral in opposing directions. However, the twins have paradoxical
emotions about their relationship with Augustus. Each wants him to recognize her individuality, yet each
refuses to allow him the means for that recognition. To keep Augustus from recognizing them by their
hair, they arrange their hair in new patterns. When Augustus gives Zosie a gold ring, she senses its
purpose and only wears it once. Then, Augustus tries burning each sister in hopes of producing an
identifying scar, but his "accidents" never permanently mark the twins. Missing the communion of
"twinship," Mary and Zosie resent the separation that Augustus has caused. Finally, when the frustrated
Augustus marks Zosie's earlobe when he nearly bites it off during an act of love, the sisters respond by
making him disappear, presumably by eating him.

As older women, Zosie and Mary's resistance to identification extends to Rozina Whiteheart Beads and
her daughter, Cally. Rumors abound of their existence and their residence, making it nearly impossible
for Cally to find them, to know which one she addresses, or even which one is her real grandmother.
Both do ornamental bead work, and as Erdrich describes their weaving and sewing, they appear as the
fateful bead workers of the Ojibwa myths.

Klaus Shawano, the brother of Frank and Cecille Shawano and the husband of Sweetheart Calico, is one
of the most frequent first-person narrators in Erdrich's novel since four of the 23 narratives bear his
romantic perspective. Born during World War II, Klaus takes his first name from a German prisoner of
war. The reader meets Klaus at a powwow where he works part-time as a trader selling jewelry and
other works of craftsmen. When he first sees Sweetheart Calico and her three grown daughters, Klaus
experiences an intense longing much like a romantic love based not only on attraction but on barriers
and separation. Through enticements, Klaus separates the mother from her daughters and takes her
east with him to Minneapolis, literally binding her with the fabric sweetheart calico. In part Sweetheart
Calico is Klaus's prisoner; in part she is imprisoned by the city. Because their love is mutually destructive,
they both become alcoholics. Klaus, who loses his job at an Indian-owned sanitation company, pursues a
vagrant life under freeway underpasses when Sweetheart Calico leaves him. When a sober Klaus helps
his wife to leave Minneapolis for the west, he frees himself from alcoholism and her from an urban life
that crushes her spirit.

Sweetheart Calico is the mother of three daughters and the wife of Klaus Shawano, but more important
to the story, she is one of the antelope women. Such women, says Jimmy Badger, an old medicine man,
"appear and disappear. Some men follow the antelope and lose their minds." When Klaus Shawano
takes her away from a western powwow to Minneapolis, he separates her not only from her daughters
but from the land and existence she loves. The only cure for their all-consuming but destructive love, for
Klaus's alcoholism and for Sweetheart Calico's misery is Klaus's willingness to give Sweetheart Calico her
freedom. Through tears Klaus watches her "slender back, quick legs" and "staggered leaps" as
Sweetheart Calico enters the western wilderness which rescues her from the overwhelming emphasis
on the commodification of life in a materialistic Minneapolis.

Rozina Whiteheart Beads is one of few Erdrich characters who makes a successful transition from Indian
reservation to white metropolis; she is a teacher and then a lawyer. The wife of Richard Whiteheart
Beads, whom she divorces, Rozina later becomes the wife of Frank Shawano. With Richard Whiteheart
Beads, Rozina has twin daughters: Deanna, who dies in childhood, and Cally. When Frank Shawano
develops cancer and is not expected to live, Rozina plans to live with Frank and care for him during his
illness. Her husband Richard, who is grief stricken, tries to commit suicide by breathing the carbon
monoxide from his truck. Although Richard changes his mind, Deanna, their daughter, crawls into the
truck when he abandons it, falls asleep, and dies. While Rozina blames Richard for Deanna's death, she
blames herself as well. She not only separates herself from Richard, but from Frank, who recovers from
cancer. Many years later Rozina marries Frank, but on her wedding night, Richard shoots and kills
himself. Despite the shocks of her daughter's death and Richard's suicide, Rozina's marriage to Frank
works. For both of the men who love her, Rozina evokes the kind of passion felt by the men who love
the antelope women.

Frank Shawano is the older brother of Klaus and Cecille and the second husband of Rozina Whiteheart
Beads. During World War II the Ojibwa kidnap a German prisoner of war whom they plan to kill to make
up for the death of one of their men during the war. To win his freedom, the German bakes
a blitzkuchen, a cake so delicious that the tribe not only lets the German go free, but adopts him. Baking
this cake becomes an ideal for Frank when he becomes a baker. He attempts the cake many times, but
his most successful blitzkuchen is the wedding cake he bakes for his own wedding, when he discovers
the cake's missing ingredient, fear. The most common image of Frank is feeding others; he has a talent
for love that is evident in his relation to Rozina, his brother Klaus, his brother's wife Sweetheart Calico,
and Rozina's children. He provides for others, but he manages to preserve their dignity while helping
them. Cancer temporarily kills the easy laughter of this nurturing man, but the laughter is reborn when
Rozina presents herself as a surprise—and very personal—anniversary present for him at the same time
as he arranges a surprise party for her.

Richard Whiteheart Beads, the first husband of Rozina and the father of Deanna and Cally, has worked
as a sanitation engineer. Because Richard frames Klaus for illegal dumping on tribal lands, Klaus is falsely
arrested by federal agents. On learning of Rozina's plan to leave him for Frank, Richard's obsession with
Rozina and his drunken behavior lead to his daughter Deanna's accidental death. Planning to asphyxiate
himself, he is responsible for Deanna's asphyxiation when she hides in the truck running in his garage.
Richard accepts the blame for Deanna's death, but his guilt as well as his separation from Rozina lead
him to alcoholism. When, after many years, Frank and Rozina finally marry, Richard interrupts the
wedding with a second failed suicide attempt when he almost jumps over a cliff. On the night of Rozina
and Frank's wedding, Richard finally succeeds in killing himself: he shoots himself in front the hotel door
of the newlyweds. Once Deanna is dead and his wife leaves him, Richard's life is virtually determined,
but this destined end is entirely his own choice. As the omniscient narrator of the last section of the
novel says, Richard "would have died in his sleep on his eighty-fifth birthday, sober, of a massive stroke,
had his self-directed pistol shot glanced a centimeter higher."

Cally Whiteheart Beads, who, when eighteen, calls herself Cally Roy, is Deanna's twin sister. Cally misses
Deanna deeply, and nearly a year after Deanna's death Cally almost dies herself from an unnamed fever
while she lives with her mother and her grandmothers on the reservation. At eighteen, seeking more
freedom, Cally goes to live with Frank Shawano and works for him at his bakery. Her presence leads to
the reunion of her mother and Frank and their eventual marriage. While living with Frank, Cally develops
a sisterly relationship to Frank Shawano's baby sister, Cecille. Though Cecille, a kung fu teacher, is older
than Cally, Cecille partially fills the role that Deanna once had in Cally's life. Like Klaus, Cally is a frequent
narrator; she delivers four of the twenty-three narratives. As a child she describes her discovery of her
mother's illicit life with Frank. As a young adult she describes her mother's reunion with Frank and the
preparations for their marriage. Her attempt to discuss the secret of her naming with her grandmothers
leads to the discovery of both her and Deanna's true names; she is Blue Prairie Woman and Deanna is
"Other Side of the Earth."

The most unusual character as well as the most unusual narrator is Cally's dog, "Almost Soup." Saved by
Cally's love from becoming dinner, the dog addresses an audience of his peers with humorous tips for
survival among the dog-eating Ojibwa. "Almost Soup" ties together several ideas in the text: hunger and
unusual foods, such as father's milk, dog flesh and human flesh; Cally's almost fatal illness after
Deanna's death; and Rozina's reactions to Deanna's death and Cally's illness.

The Antelope Wife

(CRITICAL SURVEY OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION)

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In THE ANTELOPE WIFE, Louise Erdrich’s seventh novel, a United States Cavalry private, Scranton Roy,
sent to quell a Native American uprising in Minnesota, mistakenly attacks a neutral village instead. He
captures an Indian dog with an infant strapped to its back and rears the baby as his own. In this way the
white Roy family begins its intricate relationship with the two Ojibwa families of Showano and
Whiteheart Beads.

Typically, the book is peopled by many complex characters. The baby’s grieving mother marries a man
named Showano and bears twins. Her granddaughters Zosie and Mary Showano figure prominently as
the twin mothers of Rozina Whiteheart Beads and grandmothers of Rozina’s twin daughters.
Meanwhile, Rozina, married to tribal businessman Richard Whiteheart Beads, falls in love with baker
Frank Showano. That love triangle echoes the one formed years before by Zosie and Mary Showano and
the grandson of Scranton Roy. Finally, Klaus Showano, Frank’s brother, is nearly destroyed by his
infatuation with a seductive antelope woman, a creature of legend whom he meets at a powwow.

Welcome flashes of humor appear in the wisecracking monologues of the Indian dog Almost Soup, a
four-legged standup comic who tells dirty dog stories. Black comedy also occurs at the disastrous
wedding of Rozina and Frank Showano, where the bride’s first husband menaces the wedding party and
is felled by a blow to the head with a frozen turkey.

Erdrich is at her finest when she writes through Native American culture and consciousness. Here she
returns to the lyricism of her earlier work, introducing a vital new group of characters. Her poetic skill
and perceptive insights remain undimmed.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCIV, March 1, 1998, p. 1044.

Library Journal. CXXIII, March 15, 1998, p. 92.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 17, 1998, p. 9.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. XCV, September, 1998, p. 48.

The New York Times Book Review. CIII, April 12, 1998, p. 6.

Newsweek. CXXXI, March 23, 1998, p. 69.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, February 9, 1998, p. 72.

The Wall Street Journal. March 20, 1998, p. W7.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVIII, May 17, 1998, p. 11.

The Antelope Wife

(LITERARY MASTERPIECES, CRITICAL COMPILATION)

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In her seventh novel, Louise Erdrich uses as a historical backdrop the 1862 uprising of the Dakota
(Eastern Sioux) people at a time when starvation stalked the reservation. However, her characters
actually belong to the Ojibwa tribe, also known as the Chippewa. A young U.S. Cavalry private, Scranton
Roy, is sent with his company to quell the Dakota rebellion but mistakenly stumbles into a neutral
Ojibwa village and attacks the inhabitants instead. Sickened by guilt, he captures an Indian dog that is
fleeing with an infant strapped to its back, names the baby Matilda and rears her as his own, nursing her
with his own miraculous milk in a touch of Magical Realism. In this way the white Roy family begins its
intricate relationship with the two Ojibwa families of Showano and Whiteheart Beads.

The child’s grieving mother, Blue Prairie Woman, marries a man named Showano and bears him twin
daughters, the first of four generations of twins. Not much is known about the first pair, but the second
set, also named Zosie and Mary, figure prominently in the action as the two mothers of Rozina
Whiteheart Beads and the grandmothers of Rozina’s twin daughters, Cally and Deanna. Slowly Zosie,
Mary, and Rozina reveal themselves as beaders- creators, while Cally eventually becomes an observer
and chronicler of their story, a wise woman and “namer” in the way of her grandmothers.

Just as quilt-making provides the underlying framework for Alias Grace (1996), Margaret Atwood’s novel
of nineteenth century Canada, the traditional Ojibwa craft of beading serves here as both a literal and
figurative underpinning. The Antelope Wife opens with a near mythic passage describing two archetypal
beaders at work: “Ever since the beginning these twins are sewing. One sews with light and one with
dark. . . . They sew with a single sinew thread, in, out, fast and furious, each trying to set one more bead
into the pattern than her sister, each trying to upset the balance of the world.” These cosmic twins
embody the positive and the negative, the good and the bad, the whole of experience. Yet the reader
remains largely unaware of their skillful, steady work as they sew “us all into a pattern, into life beneath
their hands. We are the beads on the waxed string, pricked up by their sharp needles.”

It is Cally Whiteheart Beads who notes that family stories also repeat their patterns from generation to
generation: “Once the pattern is set we go on replicating it. . . . the vines and leaves of infidelities . . . a
suicidal tendency, a fatal wish. . . . From way back our destinies form. I’m trying to see the old patterns
in myself and the people I love.” These patterns become more evident as the novel swells with accounts
of lost daughters, lost mothers, lost wives, even lost dogs.

The number three seems to be significant: Blue Prairie Woman is identified by three different names
and is the mother of three daughters. Disastrous love triangles occur: Rozina, who is married to tribal
businessman Richard Whiteheart Beads, falls in love with Frank Showano, a baker. That triangle echoes
the ménage à trois formed years before by twins Zosie and Mary Showano and Augustus Roy, the
grandson of Scranton Roy. In love, Augustus once traded the precious red whiteheart beads for Zosie in
marriage but soon found himself equally attracted to her sister. Each of these triangles results in death.

At least four of the male characters—Augustus Roy, Richard Whiteheart Beads, Frank Showano, and his
unhappy brother Klaus—are smitten with dark, beautiful women. Klaus, an urban Indian besotted with
the wild, speechless antelope woman he meets at a Montana powwow, binds her to him with strips of
sweetheart calico. (She is given the name of this flowered cloth.) Even Scranton Roy quotes his mother’s
poem: Come to me, thou dark inviolate.

Food always plays an important role in the rituals of love, death, and holiday feasts. Klaus feeds Ojibwa
love tea to his beloved before he carries her off to Minneapolis. Master baker Frank Showano longs to
duplicate the delicate flavor of the Blitzkuchen, a cake baked by a German refugee in order to save his
life, but he searches in vain for the missing ingredient. A conversation at the family’s Christmas dinner
reveals to Cally the terrible secret which her twin grandmothers share.

Yet it is hunger that forms the crucial element for these people throughout their lives. In the beginning
the physical hunger of the Dakota triggered the events that now link these families together. The Ojibwa
know hunger too, personified in their folklore as a terrifying cannibal known as the windigo, a hunger
spirit that can also turn humans into cannibals. A being of ice, it is especially feared in winter. On the
second night after Richard Whiteheart Beads kills himself, his former wife, Rozina, who has been
obsessed with the funeral food, dreams of a strange windigo man: “He does not speak, but as he stands
there he slowly unzips his body. It opens like a fearful suit. Inside, he is smooth as a cave of river ice. She
can see, faintly, from within his rib cavity, faint glows of phosphorescence. Death has hollowed and
scoured him out inside. . . .”

The windigo is used as a tale to frighten children, as a joke that is not entirely funny, and as the
embodiment of real starvation. Before her baby Matilda was born, Blue Prairie Woman was known as
the girl So Hungry, because she could never be satisfied. Such hunger led others to fear that she might
be possessed by a windigo.

Another, more ghastly windigo story is hidden within the history of Augustus Roy and the Showano
twins Zosie and Mary, who share him. When they try to trick him in the dark by each pretending to be
the other, Augustus desperately bites Zosie’s ear to identify her. Then he is suddenly gone. Rumors
suggest that the sisters may have eaten him, but no proof is ever discovered.

There is also the symbolic hunger of the milkless infant Matilda Roy, of her mother Blue Prairie Woman
with no babe to suckle, and of those starving children who cannot resist eating their mother’s cherished
red beads because they look like berries, even though they are made of glass.

Other Ojibwa legends tell of deer and antelope people, creatures that can change from one form to
another, treading a thin line between the human and animal worlds. Matilda Roy, last seen running
naked with an antelope herd, may even be an ancestor of Sweetheart Calico. Klaus Showano,
attempting to explain his fascination with his antelope wife, warns, “If you see one you are lost forever. .
. . Some men follow them and do not return. Even if you do return, you will never be right in the head.”
Grandma Zosie has told Cally that the young Blue Prairie Woman, then called So Hungry, was once
cooking food in the woods and was joined by a deer who loved her. “Of course, too bad that he’s a
deer,” Zosie adds in a practical tone. She informs Cally and her sister Deanna that they and their mother
Rozina are part deer. The children have already seen Rozina walking with Frank Showano, who appears
to them with a deer’s head on his shoulders. Such a fusion of everyday reality and the truth of dream
and legend is accepted without hesitation by all the characters in accordance with their traditional
Native American worldview.

Welcome flashes of humor also occur, particularly in the wisecracking monologues of the Indian dog
Almost Soup, a four- legged stand-up comic. He has slyly avoided the hazard of becoming “puppy soup”
by charming young Cally, who adopts him as a pet. Advised by his mother always to look a bit
disreputable in order to save himself, Almost Soup offers his own wisdom to young pups: “Stay cute, but
stay elusive.” He spices up otherwise emotional proceedings by telling dirty dog stories. Another blackly
comic scene occurs at the disastrous wedding of Rozina and Frank Showano when Richard Whiteheart
Beads, the bride’s first husband, threatens to jump off a cliff, escapes from the emergency room to
menace the wedding party, and is ultimately felled by a blow to the head with a frozen turkey.

Erdrich is at her finest when she writes about Native American culture and consciousness, in which
dreams may serve as a source of power or a blinding revelation and legends offer an alternate
perception of the world. In this novel she returns to the richer poetic voice heard first in Love
Medicine (1984) and Tracks (1988), moving away from the more commercial style of later work such
as Tales of Burning Love (1996). The Antelope Wife may be read for entertainment, but it offers much
more: the echoes of myth and history, a gradual emergence of the design shaped by the legendary
beaders. One minor flaw is the inclusion of chapter titles in Ojibwa that remain untranslated; in such
cases, the context is of little help.

In Love Medicine, Erdrich was one of the first authors to write successfully from within the worldview
and mythology of Native Americans. Her short story chapters were told by multiple narrators in a style
that strongly influenced subsequent novelists such as Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club, 1989). The Antelope
Wife continues this tradition and has generally been well received. Although the book was actually
written before the 1997 suicide of Erdrich’s estranged husband, author Michael Dorris, several
reviewers have noted that Richard Whiteheart Beads’s self-destructive behavior (his attempt at carbon
monoxide poisoning that inadvertently results in the death of his daughter Deanna and his final gunshot
to the head) seems to foreshadow Dorris’ impending death. However, the novel’s true accomplishment
lies in Erdrich’s return to the lyricism of her earlier work, her exploration of a broader historical and
geographical area, and the introduction of a vital new group of characters. Her poetic skill and
perceptive insights remain undimmed. This book is equal in power and technique to her best.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCIV, March 1, 1998, p. 1044.

Library Journal. CXXIII, March 15, 1998, p. 92.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 17, 1998, p. 9.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. XCV, September, 1998, p. 48.

The New York Times Book Review. CIII, April 12, 1998, p. 6.

Newsweek. CXXXI, March 23, 1998, p. 69.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, February 9, 1998, p. 72.

The Wall Street Journal. March 20, 1998, p. W7.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVIII, May 17, 1998, p. 11.

Literary Techniques

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In an essay in American Literature, Catherine Rainwater isolated several characteristics in Erdrich's

novels that make them different from the typical American novel. In The Antelope Wife, for example,
while time is present, ceremonial time is more important. Readers will find that establishing historical
sequences in any kind of chronological order in The Antelope Wife is difficult. Instead of presenting
scenes according to chronology, Erdrich presents them according to theme; thus, various story lines are
interrupted to bring in new characters or events which relate to the theme rather than to the narrative
order. Marriages and divorces and powwows seem to operate tunelessly. Because of Erdrich's use of
tribal kinship, readers are frustrated when trying to determine family relations in an era of the nuclear
family. Thus, Frank Shawano nurtures Sweetheart Calico and Cally Roy whether or not they are clear
family relatives. Instead of a central character or hero or heroine, Erdrich develops approximately a
dozen characters but infuses them with no sense of priority or privilege. Male characters are no more
important than female characters, although most of the women are stronger than the men. In The
Antelope Wife,no central character demands our sympathy in the way that characters such as Huck Finn
or Tom Jones do.

Instead of a clearly marked narrative point of view or authorial perspective, Erdrich uses four first-
person narrators, Klaus Shawano, Cally Roy, Rozina Whiteheart Beads, and the dog, Almost Soup, as well
as omniscient first and third-person narration. Thus, establishing what is true in the novel becomes a
real challenge, particularly when the reader realizes that some stories have been told and retold many
times, such as the stories regarding Scranton Roy and his grandson Augustus. Fabulous incidents from
myths and folk tales, such as Scranton Roy's nursing Matilda and his son, and female characters such as
Blue Prairie Woman's having a deer husband, are mixed with day to day real events so that Erdrich
establishes a baffling but rich reality.

Erdrich's symbolic art has always been rich in her novels, and The Antelope Wifeis no exception. Story
elements melt down to symbolic details, such as Erdrich's subtle identification of several female
characters with the antelope. Thus Erdrich emphasizes in her descriptions of Sweetheart Calico or
Matlida physical descriptions of legs and haunches and similarities between the antelope's movements
and theirs. Matilda's needs as a baby make Scranton Roy desperate in caring for her. Eventually the
baby's hope for nourishment leads to father's milk, as Scranton Roy replaces his careless hatred of
Indians with love for a specific Indian child. The concern for naming and the skills of the namer are a part
of this symbolic method, since the Ojibwa true names are keys to identity. The names seem to operate
in harmony with the header women who are Ojibwa fates determining a character's destiny.

The four mythic sections of the novel, which describe the action of two women whose ornamental bead
and quill work is an analogue to the Greek fates, introduce a structural element to The Antelope
Wife that is unique to this novel. In previous novels, Erdrich has followed one or two characters in one
of her story chapters. In The Antelope Wife a chapter is woven of more than one story line. "Northwest
Trader Blue," Chapter 18 of the novel, begins with a Christmas description by Cally of her grandmothers,
but it is interwoven with patches of the story of Augustus's love for Zosie and Mary, Rozina's cooking, a
description of the dinner table, and Zosie's stories about the blue beads. The chapter ends with a
description of Sweetheart Calico's desire to leave Minneapolis, a description which may actually be a
dream by Cally. Erdrich forces her readers to make connections between the disparate story lines of her
novel. Thus, the weaving symbol becomes a narrative strategy of weaving story lines.

Ideas for Group Discussions

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Multiple narrators and a non-linear narrative structure are just two of the nontraditional elements that
Louise Erdrich employs in Antelope Wife. Because such elements may be unfamiliar to many readers, it
can be helpful to create a time line of the important events in the novel. Next make a list of characters
and their relationships, paying careful attention to kinship lines and the recurrence of twin girls. Use the
time line and the list of characters to help answer the discussion questions below, or as starting points
for other examinations of the text.

1. Part of Erdrich's project in The Antelope Wife is to trace character traits through multiple generations.
Starting with Blue Prairie Woman, trace her character traits through succeeding generations of Ojibwa
women in The Antelope Wife. In your own family, going back to your grandparents, if possible, try
tracing behaviors and gestures from generation to generation. Does it seem sometimes as if we have
inherited behaviors and gestures?

2. How do Ojibwa cultural practices contradict urban ways for contemporary Indians in the city?

3. What goes wrong with Rozina's marriage to Richard Whiteheart Beads? What is attractive to Rozina
about Frank Shawano?

4. How do Richard and Rozina Whiteheart Beads handle the guilt they feel regarding Deanna's accidental
death? How does the way each character handles his/her guilt reflect his/her character?

5. What does Richard Whiteheart Beads hope to accomplish by his suicide attempts?

6. Odd things are eaten with odd consequences. What does the blitzkuchen signify? Why would Zosie
and Mary eat their lover, Augustus? What significance do these events have to the novel as a whole?

7. Characters such as Sweetheart Calico and Blue Prairie Woman are almost symbolic abstractions in the
way that Erdrich describes them. What is the purpose of such characters?

8. Almost Soup's advice to Ojibwa dogs, the story of the P.O.W. baker, Klaus, and the first anniversary
party of Rozina and Frank Shawano are hilarious. What is the basis of Erdrich's humor?
9. Erdrich uses elements of myth, folktale, and realistic narrative in The Antelope Wife. She follows
several characters, not simply one or two. She employs several different narrative perspectives. Because
of her use of these techniques, is her novel confused? If not, what holds it together?

Social Concerns

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The action of Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife, which spans more than a century, traces guilt and love
through several generations of three families, the Roys, the Shawanos and the Whiteheart Beads. One
of the character-narrators of the novel, Cally Whiteheart Beads, summarizes the novel as follows:

Family stories repeat themselves in patterns and waves generation to generation, across bloods and
times. Once the pattern is set we go on replicating it. Here on the handle the vines and leaves of
infidelities. There, a suicidal tendency, a fatal wish. On this side drinking. On the other a repression of
guilt that finally explodes.

The novel begins in the latter part of the nineteenth century when Quaker Scranton Roy enlists in the U.
S. Cavalry after being spurned by a woman he desires. As his company enters an Ojibwa village, Roy's
contempt for the Indians escalates to frigid hate, and he bayonets an old woman. Tugging at the
bayonet in her wound, he envisions his own mother instead of the Indian and runs away. As Roy runs,
he sees a dog with a child on its back escaping from the village. After many days he befriends the dog
and nurtures the child, whom he miraculously nurses and raises as his daughter, Matilda Roy. When Roy
marries Peace McKnight, a school teacher, and Matilda and Peace bond as if they were sisters, the
family seems complete. Meanwhile, however, the girl's birth mother, Blue Prairie Woman, has survived
the cavalry raid and is tormented with longing for her missing child. Years later, when Matilda is seven,
Blue Prairie Woman abandons her twin daughters to find the daughter who has been lost to her.
Despite the passage of time, Matilida instinctively recognizes that Blue Praririe Woman is her mother,
and without hesitation she leaves the father who has nursed her. The bond between mother and
daughter is closer than that between father and child.

Years later, tormented by guilt for his part in the raid and his continued longing for Matilda, Roy and his
grandson Augustus bring an offering of Scranton's possessions to assist the Ojibwa. Augustus falls in love
with an Ojibwa girl, Zosie, and her identical twin, Mary.

The story of The Antelope Wife, is a paradigm of narratives, all of which involve either rejection in love,
or a love based on romantic longing either for a child or lover, or hatred of oneself or of others. These
passions are not confined to one generation but seem to be an action of an inherited fate covering
many generations. Erdrich begins The Antelope Wife 17 each of the four parts of her novel with myths
of female twins who, sewing patterns with colored beads and quills, are similar to the Greek fates
creating the patterns of future lives. The novel opens with a brief myth,"Bayzhig:"

Ever since the beginning these twins are sewing. One sews with light and one with dark. The first twin's
beads are cut-glass whites and pales, and the other twin's beads are glittering deep red and blue-black
indigo. One twin uses an awl made of an otter's sharpened penis bone, the other uses that of a bear.
They sew with a single sinew thread, in, out, fast and furious, each trying to set one more bead into the
pattern than her sister, each trying to upset the balance of the world.

In the "Niswey" myth, the blue and green quills are identified with the grandmother of the Shawano
family; two of her descendants, Frank and Klaus, are major characters who love women through
separation and longing. In the "Neewin" myth, the "whiteheart beads" receive their ruby-red color from
the addition of molten gold. Because they are drawn to the beads' color, "bright as summer berries," the
beader's children eat the beads and keep the beader from completing her design; thus, the beader kills
her children. Later, these beads are identified with another lover, Richard Whiteheart Beads, and the
myth foretells the death of Deanna, one of his twin daughters.

Most of the action of the novel occurs in Minneapolis between the end of World War II and the 1990s.
Unlike previous Erdrich novels, where misery for full-blood and mixed-blood Indians seems to be
associated with cities, in The Antelope Wife the Native American characters seem to live successful lives
as part of a larger urban society—as lawyers, bakers, and sanitation engineers. Like European
immigrants who carry their European heritage into their American identities, Erdrich's Ojibwa are also
influenced by their Native American roots. In The Antelope Wife the contemporary Ojibwa are shaped
by passionate longings influenced by the past even as they pursue contemporary urban careers.

Literary Precedents

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William Faulkner's linked short stories in such works as Go Down, Mosesforeshadow the structures that
Erdrich creates in her novels. The focus of Faulkner's stories is on the McCaslin family from the pre-Civil
War past to the novel's present in the twentieth century. Erdrich's The Antelope Wife deals with more
families, but the historical sweep of the novel is similar to Faulkner's. Animals like Old Ben the bear in
Faulkner and the dog Lion provide symbolic aspects of wilderness and human behavior just as Erdrich's
antelope women do in The Antelope Wife. As Faulkner's novel leaves gaps in action and story line for
readers to make connections, so does Erdrich in The Antelope Wife. Faulkner's novel is a moving account
of the racial dilemmas in the South, while Erdrich deals with a Native American reality midway between
the reservation and the city, Minneapolis. Faulkner critically examines the psychological effects of the
problems of racism, while Erdrich's Ojibwa are torn between older tribal identities and their lives and
careers in a contemporary urban Minneapolis. Despite many stories of failure, Erdrich's novel seems
hopeful that the Indians will make their way. While Cally describes the Ojibwa lives as "scattered like
beads off a necklace" in Minneapolis, she also sees the necklace of those lives "put back together in new
strings, new patterns." At the time that Go Down, Moses was written, Faulkner's South of the 1940s had
yet to address its racial problems.

Related Titles

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While earlier Erdrich novels feature characters who appear in all or many of her first five novels, such as
Lulu Nanapush and Marie Kashpaw, the only connections to Erdrich's earlier novels in The Antelope
Wife is Rozina Whiteheart Beads' brief mention of a Pillager woman early in the novel and several
narrators depictions of places on the eastern Ojibwa reservation or details about the Ojibwa in
Montana. Erdrich develops new families in The Antelope Wife; the novel is a fresh start in a familiar
world. What seems likely is that Erdrich will return to many of the new characters in The Antelope
Wife in the same way that she developed characters from her earliest work Love Medicine to her
previous novel, Tales of Burning Love. The Twin Cities and parts of North Dakota and Montana compose
Erdrich's fictional world just as Faulkner's world is encompassed in his fictional county of
Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi,

While Faulkner's major concerns are race and class, Erdrich tells stories similar to those of first
generation immigrants to the United States. The dilemma for her Ojibwa is similar to that of the
European who is loyal to a foreign national identity at the same time he attempts to become an
American. Erdrich's Ojibwa experience a dilemma of loyalty to tribal customs and values while at the
same time they merge into an urban American identity. In earlier novels, such as Love Medicine, life on
the reservation is difficult, but better than life in the cities, such as Minneapolis. In The Antelope
Wife characters lead successful lives in Minneapolis; Ojibwa pursue mainstream careers, and the issue
of intermarriage with other races is a given, not a matter of shame as it sometimes appeared in her
previous works.