Languages of Power: Pauline in Louise Erdrich's Tracks

Abstract

Pauline Puyat, with her sado-masochistic religious zeal and schizophrenic sexual delusions that suddenly and inexorably flare up into terrifying outcomes for everyone in her vicinity including herself, is one of the most disturbing characters in Louise Erdrich's often bizarre and surreal fictional landscape. She is born a half-breed Chippewa but intensely hates her Indian heritage, and she takes advantage of every opportunity to deny her link to the Indian community while at the same time constantly going back to the reservation for gossip, sympathy, and pleasure. She also quietly condones the three white men, Lily, Tor, and Dutch, beating and raping Fleur, a Chippewa medicine woman and the heroine of the novel whom she loves and hates, and then ends up killing them by locking them up in a freezer. Later, she interrupts a healing ritual Moses and Nanapush were conducting for Fleur, strangles her lover Napoleon Morrissey, and runs naked to the Mission, to later become a nun named Leopolda. In short, aside from the United States government and the Turcot Lumber Company, she is the most destructive force in the novel, ceaselessly undermining and dissipating the safety and coherence of the Chippewa community others desperately try to hold together.