SOURCE: "Louise Erdrich's 'Scarlet Letter': Literary Continuity in Tales of Burning Love," in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 4, Fall, 1996, pp. 113-23.
In the following essay, Matchie discusses similarities between Tales of Burning Love and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
In an address on National Public Radio, Amy Tan said she would rather be recognized as an American author than classified among multi-cultural writers as Chinese American. Perhaps for some the same might be said of Louise Erdrich, "the foremost practitioner of Native American fiction." She is most often represented as a mixed-blood, and much of the critical analysis of her fiction centers around her use of Chippewa mythology as a key to illusive meaning in her novels. It is also true, however, that Erdrich is an ardent student of American literary history and culture. One has only to look for references to Melville's Moby-Dick in Love Medicine (1984), Flannery O'Connor's notion of the Christian grotesque permeating Tracks (1988), or Lipsha's language and naiveté resembling those of Huckleberry Finn in The Bingo Palace (1994). And I would like to suggest that her latest novel, Tales of Burning Love (1996), is her contemporary answer—or parallel—to the classic American romantic love novel, The Scarlet Letter.
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