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The Red Convertibles

Louise Erdrich's short story "The Red Convertible", which was published as part of her book Love Medicine, is a blend of the authentically autobiographical and the artistically Modernist. Her own life has been marked in many ways by the fundamental themes of Modernism - alienation, disillusionment, fragmentation, and uncertainty - for Erdrich's background is one of cultural and biological division, with a German-American father and a Chippewa mother who combined their traditions and beliefs in Erdrich's natal household. She grew up in a household in which stories and the spoken word were valued, but the stories that were told could be either based on Byronic poems or Chippewa traditions; these stories were almost necessarily built up of the fragments of different elements.

Even more important in terms of the overall Modernist bent of her work, Erdrich grew up in a household that was marginalized from American society because it was biracial. The fact that she so strongly identifies with the American Indian side of her family ensured that she would feel even more marginalized, more alienated from American society as a whole. Her characters in "Red Convertible" reflect this sense of marginalization and alienation, the sense that their ability to make a place for themselves in the broader current of American society is made all but impossible by the fact of their race, by the fact that their families came here before anyone else's.

In exploring the ways in which so many people feel alienated - and especially those like women and racial minorities who are so effectively disenfranchised from cultural and economic power - Erdrich chose for the central symbol of this story an all-American symbol. A first car is something that nearly every American teenager dreams about, and a red convertible is certainly something that a lot of young American males - of every conceivable combination of race and ethnicity - have spent at least a moment o...

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The Red Convertibles. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:55, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688435.html