The purpose of this research is to examine the treatment of gender and history in Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks and Toni Morrison's novel Jazz. The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the pattern of ideas emerging in each of the works, and then to discuss how the specific issues of gender and social and cultural history are articulated and analyzed, as well as the relevance these issues have for a more complete understanding of the relevance of gender and history representations have to positioning the novels as cultural commentary.
In order to appreciate the way gender and history are treated by Morrison and Erdrich in their respective novels, it is useful to note that the fictional design of each novel appears to be ethnographic in character. Tracks, for example, is placed in the context of a dying Native American community at Matchimanito Lake near fictional Argus, North Dakota, between 1912 and 1924, and tells the story of how some members of the community facilitate that decline and dispersal of the population. The dying is both metaphorical and literal, for the novel opens with an account of an epidemic of tuberculosis raging through the community that prefigures the epidemic of industrial destruction of the wilderness. The initial narrator of the story, the old medicine man Nanapush, has the perspective of the ages. From the vantage point of leader of the tribe, he explains (to an adopted child, it turns out) that he survived the epidemic and nursed the only surviving child of the Pillager family, Fleur, back to life. Much of Tracks focuses on the life of Fleur, who has about her a fearless, charmed, changeling quality and whose powerful persona is both attractive and dangerous and whose life is suffused with magic, as the Pillagers have always been, even though as a youngster she does not particularly desire to function in that realm. A second narrator, Pauline, who is Fleur's friend and who does culti...