SOURCE: Stokes, Karah. “What about the Sweetheart?: The ‘Different Shape’ of Anishinabe Two Sisters Stories in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tales of Burning Love.” MELUS 24, no. 2 (summer 1999): 89-105.

In the following essay, Stokes explores the role of Anishinabe culture, mythology, and storytelling in Love Medicine.

Even though she grew up off-reservation speaking English, and writes a novel, a European form, Louise Erdrich's work is informed and ordered by elements of Anishinabe as well as of German-American, Catholic, and Midwestern cultures. These elements tantalize non-Anishinabe readers by lending a different shape to her fiction, a shape that they can sense but cannot fully distinguish. In order to discern the different shape of her novels, readers must educate themselves about the Anishinabe background of the works.

The meaning of Anishinabe storytelling relies on cultural knowledge through which the hearer fills in the blanks of the teller's “synechdochic omission[s...