From Forget to Forgive: Mother-Child Relationship in Love Medicine

Abstract

Mother-child relationship has not received sufficient attention from scholars in studying Louise Edrich’s works, but the mother plays a vital role in children’s identity search. This paper aims to find out the mother-child relationship in Erdrich’s novel Love Medicine. Close reading is applied in the research, and American native traditions and customs are adopted in the analysis. The paper finds that native children go through the process of choosing to forget to finally forgive their mothers in their identity search and construction.