The Shawl: a study on the interpretation of history - Essay Example

The Shawl: A study on the interpretation of history The Shawl by Louse Erdrich is a story about a piece of history within a family and how that piece of history defined how the members of that family lived from that point forward. The story begins with a woman who falls in love with a man who is not her husband and is from a different a different camp. The woman falls into a depression after giving birth to a child by the man she loves and it falls to her daughter to take care of the family. The husband decides to send her to the other camp to be with the man because life has become miserable because of the passion she holds for this other man. Their children, a boy and a girl, are divided between them, the girl going with the mother and the baby, and the boy to stay with his father. The boy, not wanting to be left behind, runs after the wagon, but falls and faints, leaving his father to carry him home. As he wakes, the boy tells stories of seeing shadows out on the road and the father, who suspects it was more than just the imaginings of a little boy, sets out and discovers evidence that his daughter was torn apart by wolves, leaving him to believe that his wife had thrown her to them to save the wagon from being attacked. The man is lost in despair, holding to the brown shawl, torn to pieces, that was all he had left of his daughter. The son grows to manhood, a wasted life of alcohol and violence. His son finally confronts him physically to stop his own abuse, and upon wiping his father’s injuries with the strange piece of cloth that has always been at his bedside, hears finally the story of his aunt. In hearing the story, the son asks if having been a brave and tenderhearted girl, was it not possible that she had sacrificed herself to save the others in the wagon. The way in which a family defines itself is through the perception of its history, the story of ancestry that creates a framework of identity while providing for the relationships within that family to become connected through the beliefs about that history. Anaquot, the mother in the story, is framed as a selfish woman whose love for another man tears her family apart and leads to the death of the one beloved member of the family - the daughter. Throughout the history of the three generations that are represented in the family, her selfishness and vile act at throwing her daughter to the wolves provided a foundation on which the rest of the relationships were defined. The family identity was based upon the loss of this girl, the tragedy of her murder by her mother. Because Anaquot is framed as a selfish woman, it is plausible that she threw her daughter from the wagon in order to save herself and the others. As the girl was a beloved child to the father, her death would need more blame than just the wolves, thus he laid the blame on his wife who was leaving him. The boy, who had such a great sorrow in being left behind, was forever changed by the horror of this realized history within his family. He was in the position to be left behind, to live within the aftermath of this history, and to deal with being the lesser child who was not wanted by either his mother or father, but was a poor substitution for the daughter who had been lost. There are two distinct sets of characters that can be compared and contrasted for their position within the story. The daughter and son of Anaquot and her husband are in contrast, the daughter, a child who had great value, and the son whose value had yet to be determined as at his young age had shown only an emotional dependency that made him seem weak. His strength was yet to be developed, but it would be developed through the impact of the family history from which the rest of his fate was determined. The other strong comparison can be made between Anaquot and her daughter, Anaquot indulging her emotional state at the expense of all others, while her daughter took over for her mother, showing great strength and maturity in taking care of those things of which her mother was no longer concerned. The comparison of the son and daughter of Anaquot and her husband is defined by nobility and weakness, the daughter noble and strong, while the son is weak and without the will to stand proud and do as is needed. While he shows fortitude in running after the wagon, he grows into the kind of man who gives into his weakness, tainted by the memory of the terrible things his mother committed. He termed his being left with his father as a rejection, a fact which is further expounded by the grief that his father holds more dearly than the joy of having him as a son. He is fully aware that the value of his dead sister far exceeds that which he has being still alive, thus he sets a course of self-destruction, externally expressing his survivor guilt. The child of the son, grandson to Anaquot, is in the position to defend himself against the family history that has stolen the dignity and pride from the generations before him. His father has become the classic drunk, physically abusive and driven towards destruction. He holds onto his history through the actions that outwardly scream his continuing pain, a pain that is old and deep. He was very young when his mother left him and threw his sister to the wolves. He was a mere child of five, his whole world constructed by the history that his father gave to him about the events that happened and creating a point of view that is specific to the way in which that history was presented. His father has imposed a system of beliefs, under which he has collapsed and become less than he might have become had his world been framed with different events. However, the child of the son, the grandson to Anaquot, was not in the middle of the whirlwind of the events. The emotional ties to the selfishness of Anaquot was not a part of his history, a history of which he had not been previously made aware. Therefore, having worked out some of his issues by taking the power and control away from an abusive father, he listens to the story of the piece of cloth, of the shawl of his aunt who had been at his father’s bedside for as long as he could remember. His family history, revealed for its deepest shame, that his grandmother had thrown his aunt from a wagon to be torn apart by wolves, was given to him to consider. Upon considering this, he took into consideration the nature of his aunt as told to him by his father, and came to a conclusion that neither the grandfather nor his father had considered - that his aunt had sacrificed herself to save her mother and the baby. A family’s history defines the way in which members of that family will find their role and create their identity. In the case of Anaquot’s family, the future of her husband, son, and grandson were defined by the morality and nature of her personality that led to the easy belief that she had betrayed her daughter. Having betrayed her husband allowed for the belief that this was within her personality to betray her daughter and throw her to the wolves in order to save her own life. The family identity was forever tainted because Anaquot could not deny her baser desires and be true to her husband. Had she been the sort of woman who did not indulge her selfish desires, the death of her daughter would not have been framed within the family history in the way that it had been defined. It might have been considered that the daughter, being a beautiful and generous spirit, saw that the only way to save her family was to sacrifice herself to the wolves so that the others could get away. The idea that there was no other plausible answer that the husband of Anaquot could consider suggests that his concept of the personality of his wife was tainted by her previous behavior. Because of the distance of time and space, the grandson found a possible redemption for a haunted family history. Outline I. Summary of Story II. Theme Statement: The way in which a family defines itself is through the perception of its history, the story of ancestry that creates a framework of identity while providing for the relationships within that family to become connected through the beliefs about that history. A. Character Comparison 1. The son to the daughter 2. Anaquot to her daughter B. Family Identity through Family History 1. The self destruction of the son 2. The grandson finding a way to defend the history IV. Conclusion Read More