The Shawl Summary

The narrator of “The Shawl” begins by introducing a story told among the Anishinaabeg people: a woman named Aanakwad has a child by a man whom she loves but who is not her husband. She already has two other children with her husband—a nine-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. When Aanakwad gives birth to this third child, she is so overcome by her love for the baby’s father, and her despair that she does not love her husband, that she neglects the child. Instead, the daughter cares for the infant. As Aanakwad’s despair deepens to the extent that she stops cooking or cleaning, the daughter takes on those tasks too. Because of this, the young girl is often exhausted, and sleeps deeply every night wrapped in a red-and-brown plaid shawl.

Eventually, the husband is forced to acknowledge that his marriage is no longer working. He sends for the other man’s uncle, who comes in a horse-drawn wagon to pick up Aanakwad and take her to the other man. Aanakwad and her husband decide to split the children: the infant and the daughter will leave with their mother, and the son will stay with the husband. The son, desperately wanting to prevent his mother from leaving him, chases after the wagon until he collapses. Before losing consciousness, he sees some gray shapes entering the trail ahead from the surrounding woods.

When the husband collects the young boy, the son tells him about the shapes, and the husband travels on the trail to investigate. He finds wolf tracks, and from the terrible scene left behind puts together that the daughter was thrown to the wolves in order to protect the woman, the infant, and the uncle driving the wagon. The brings home a torn piece of his daughter’s plaid shawl. After a few years, as the husband is weakening from tuberculosis, he reveals the story to the son, who is deeply disturbed to imagine his mother throwing his sister to the wolves.

The narrator then tells the story of his own childhood. He describes how his father became an alcoholic after his mother died. The narrator cares for himself and his younger twin siblings, Doris and Raymond. The children get in the habit of leaving the house and hiding in the woods when they hear their father coming home drunk, because otherwise he will beat them. One night, when the narrator is 13, he decides he is now big enough to take on his father and they fight. The narrator overwhelms his father and knocks him to the ground. When the fight is over, the narrator sees that his father is bleeding, and reaches for a nearby cloth his father keeps around—a piece of a red-and-brown plaid blanket. The father suddenly seems sober and reveals to the narrator that he once had a sister. At this point, the reader understands that the father is the five-year-old son from Aanakwad’s story.

The narrator provides further detail about his father’s drinking: he notes that it began during a difficult time for his people, the Anishinaabeg, after they were forced by the government to move into towns and housing, instead of living in the spread-out way they were used to. This change led to widespread drinking, suicide, and general despair among the people. This is the context in which the narrator’s mother died, his father’s drinking got bad, and his father began to abuse him and his siblings. Though things have begun to get better for the survivors of this era, the aftereffects of the despair remain, passed down from ancestors who endured it.

Eventually, some years later, the narrator and his father again discuss the shawl and the father’s sister’s death. The narrator convinces his father to burn the shawl instead of holding onto it, as it is the tradition of their people not to hold onto the relics of the dead. The narrator also suggests a possible revision to the father’s understanding of what happened to the sister: What if, instead of being thrown, the sister had sacrificed herself out of her love for her mother and her infant sibling?