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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Shawl, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Inheritance, Reinterpretation, and Personal and Cultural Legacy
Communal Storytelling
The U.S. Government, the Anishinaabeg, and the Consequences of Interference
Summary
Analysis
There is a story told among the Anishinaabeg about a woman named Aanakwad. Aanakwad is known to be moody, a characteristic reflected in her name, which means “cloud.” She’s married and has two children (a nine-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son), but falls in love with another man who isn’t her husband and has a child by him. Aanakwad can’t bring herself to care for the new baby. Not because she doesn’t love it — in fact, she loves it too much, as much as she loves its father, and she can’t face the pain of not being with the other man. Her daughter, a dutiful nine-year-old, takes care of the baby instead and, when Aanakwad stops being able to cook or clean, the daughter takes over that work too. The daughter is so exhausted by this work that she sleeps deeply every night, wrapped in a red-and-brown plaid shawl.
In the very first line of “The Shawl,” the reader is thrust into a story with no context for how it relates to the unnamed narrator. Since it is introduced as a story told “among the Anishinaabeg” (a name that refers to several culturally related indigenous tribes that live around the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada), it’s clearly a story with significance that expands beyond just the narrator. This opening also offers the first mention of the titular shawl. It’s closely tied to the daughter and the fact that she is forced to take on her mother’s responsibilities at a young age.
Themes
The husband, aware that his Aanakwad is suffering because he is not this other man whom she loves, becomes afraid of her. The husband eventually realizes that this life is untenable, and sends for the other man’s uncle so that he can come fetch Aanakwad. At this time, there are no roads in the Anishinaabeg land, and people live spread out, connected only by trails they traveled with horses, wagons, and sleds.
In addition to describing Aanakwad’s complicated family situation, the narrator describes what Anishinaabeg life was like at the time of this story. That the narrator specifies that their life was like this during Aanakwad’s time implies that it no longer is—in other words, this is a story of the way things used to be. The details given indicate that people weren’t easily accessible, living in remote corners of the reservation without roads or systematized transportation. There also is a contrast building here between Aanakwad and her family—she is selfish and subject to her emotions, like her namesake cloud—while the husband and his daughter are painted as selfless and responsible.
Themes
The uncle eventually arrives in a wagon drawn by horses and with sled runners. Aanakwad and her husband, after days of argument, decide to split up the children: the daughter will go with her mother and the baby, while the son will stay with the husband. The son, desperate not to be left behind, chases after the cart as the uncle drives it away into the snow. He tries to jump into the wagon, but his mother pries his hands off. So he runs as fast as he can behind the cart, faster than he’s ever run before, until he collapses. As he lies in the snow watching them leave, he realizes he doesn’t care if he lives. Right before he loses consciousness, he sees gray shapes heading out of the woods and onto the trail ahead.
The son’s realization that he doesn’t care if he’s alive or dead represents a dramatic break for a five-year-old. His mother’s abandonment is so traumatic that he cannot imagine life mattering once he realizes his efforts to avert this desertion are futile. This experience plants a seed for his later emotional and familial troubles as an adult. It is worth noting that while the story makes clear that the parents argue over the fate of the children, it isn’t clear what they argued about. While the son feels abandoned by his mother, it is possible that the mother argued for her son to come with her, but lost the argument. What is unknown in a story is just as important as what is known.
Themes
The husband finds the son and takes him home. At first, when the boy tells him about the shapes he saw, the husband thinks they are manidoog—spirits. But with further description, the father decides he ought to go investigate. He takes a gun. It’s likely that the reason this story spreads through the settlements is because what the husband sees next is so disturbing to him that he has to retell it, over and over, to try to dampen its power over him. What he discovers are wolf tracks and evidence that the daughter has been eaten by these wolves.
Like all Native Americans, the Anishinaabeg people gained guns through their contact with European settlers and traders. The presence of a gun in this part of the story is a result of the influence of white settlers on the Anishinaabeg way of life. In these scenes the reader also begins to see the significance of storytelling for these people, picking up the thread that was laid down in the first line of “The Shawl.” Here, storytelling is a way for the father to try to escape from, or eject from himself, the trauma of a painful memory.
Themes
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The narrator interjects to comment that the wolves weren’t always a threat to the Anishinaabeg people. They only became one when the people, wanting furs and hides to sell, had used their guns to kill all the animals that the wolves would normally eat. This led to the wolves violating the old agreement between them and the first humans. So the wolves hunted humans until the people understood what was going on and left enough game for the wolves.
The full significance of the gun—the influence of white settlers—is now clear. Not only did contact with Europeans introduce guns into Anishinaabeg life, but those guns led directly to a disruption of what had been an old and balanced relationship between the Anishinaabeg people and the wolves, and this imbalance had fatal consequences for the Anishinaabeg. More broadly, the gun and the fur trade imply the way that the arrival of European settlers enmeshed the Anishinaabeg in a new economic system that pushed them toward behavior that turned out to be self-destructive.
Themes
The husband finds the daughter’s torn plaid shawl at the scene of her death and brings it home. At first, he doesn’t explain to his son what he knows, so his son continues to think that his sister and his mother are living with the other man across the lake. When the son asks about the shawl, the husband cries. Eventually, the husband begins to weaken from tuberculosis, though it takes him years to die. In these years, he finally tells his son what he thinks happened: the wolves began to close in, and Aanakwad, in order to save herself, her baby, and her lover’s uncle, threw her daughter to the wolves. The son is stunned by this story, remembering how, when he was chasing the cart, he hadn’t cared if he lived or died. He imagined that in this moment, when their mother had betrayed her too, the daughter had also felt this. The son is haunted by this idea, as well as by the knowledge that the thing that was broken in him the day his mother left might never be repaired. He never sees Aanakwad again.
The shawl reappears again here, but now its initial connection to the daughter’s outsized and unasked-for responsibilities is also drenched in tragedy as it is the only remnant of her death. That tragedy, embodied in the torn piece of her shawl, is handed down to the son in the form of the father’s story of what happened, a passage of sorrow from one generation to another. Again, note how this story that the narrator is imparting about Aanakwad includes instances of the story’s own telling, showing the process of it moving from one man’s understanding of what happened to a story told among a whole people. The fact that, at this moment, it’s noted that the son never saw Aanakwad again after the day she left is a hint that this widely told story isn’t necessarily accurate. It’s an interpretation of what happened, told by those left to tell it.
Themes
There is a shift in the story: now the narrator is describing his own life. He explains that his father begins to drink a lot after the death of his wife, the boy’s mother. The father drinks in binges, not returning to the house for days. When he does come home, he’s violent. The narrator and his younger twin siblings, Doris and Raymond, get into the habit of sneaking out of windows and hiding in the woods until their father passes out. The boy is only ten, and his siblings are six, but he takes care of them.
Though the narrator has shifted to describing his own life, there’s still no explanation of why Aanakwad’s story matters. However, the narrator’s childhood seems to echo Aanakwad’s story in a few ways: just as Aanakwad became an absent mother because of her emotional torment and the husband also became tormented by sadness, the narrator and his siblings have no mother and a father lost to alcoholic rages. And, just as Aanakwad’s daughter is forced to take on her mother’s work, the narrator does the same, caring for himself and his siblings even though he’s very young. This symmetry suggests that there may be a connection between Aanakwad’s story and the narrator’s life, something passed down from one to the other.
Themes
The narrator notes that as a result of what they’ve experienced together, the siblings remain close into adulthood. As adults, they live near each other. Doris and Raymond marry a brother and sister, and the siblings get together to play cards and—sometimes—drink beer together. Though what they experienced as children is not rare in their community, they appreciate being able to talk about it with each other because it’s helpful to be able to compare their different perspectives. For example, when he is an adult, the boy learns that Raymond saw him the first time he hid his father’s belt while his father was passed out.
The ability to compare perspectives on their childhood experiences allows the narrator and his siblings to understand that their memories can exist from different perspectives. The example of stealing the belt illustrates this: while the narrator may have felt very alone when he first made this effort to save himself and his siblings from a portion of their father’s violence, he later learns that Raymond shared in this experience with him, making it a less lonely memory. This strategy of sharing and rehashing childhood memories in a way that opens them up to revision by other people stands in contrast with the way that Aanakwad’s husband kept telling a story that only had a single author (himself) who hadn’t even been present at the time of the daughter’s death. The latter passed trauma from father on to son, while the former seems to open up the possibility of emotional connection and release.
Themes
However, hiding the belt didn’t prevent their father from hitting them with other things—a board, a willow wand, his own hands. So the boy and his siblings Raymond and Doris constructed their own hiding spot in the woods, with a campfire, to wait out their father’s violence. They also learned to sneak cash out of where their father stashed it in his sock, and to stow away food so that their father could not sell it. The result of all these machinations is that the boy and his siblings begin to regard their father as something other than a father, as something not even quite human.
The children’s father’s behavior, driven by his own despair after governmental relocation and the death of his wife, is now inherited by his children. Just as the five-year-old boy must endure the pain of both losing his mother and then coming to see his mother Aanakwad as a monster, so do these children cease to have a father or even be able to see their father as a human being.
Themes
When the boy is 13, he decides he’s big enough to take on his father. He’s gained adult height at a young age and has been practicing fighting with hand-made punching bags. So when he hears his father coming home after a drinking binge, he sends Raymond and Doris out of the house. His father returns, five days drunk. He’s still a big man, not yet weakened by all his drinking. His nose had been broken and twisted in a fight, but pushed back straight by another fight. The boy surprises his father with a punch and, as the two fight, the boy is surprised by a sort of joy he feels in fighting his father, and by the extent to which he feels he wants to kill his father, on his own behalf and for his siblings. He feels like he’s not himself, like he's watching himself from outside.
During the fight with his father, the boy becomes almost dissociated from himself—he is both in the fight, and watching himself from outside the fight. The implication is that he is protecting himself and his siblings, but he is doing so at the cost of losing his connection to himself. The father’s nose, which is straight because it has been broken twice recalls the impact of governmental interference on the Anishinaabeg. The government forced the people out of their out of the way homes into towns, onto mapped roads. The government sought to straighten the Anishinaabeg into something the government could control. But as the father’s nose indicates, something can be straightened and yet broken, or even it can be straight because it has been doubly broken.
Themes
The fight reaches its climax: the father breaks a chair and throws the pieces. The boy uses one of the chair legs to hit his father on the ear and continues hitting him over and over again. He sees this scene as if he’s watching himself hit his father, watching his father fall and hold up his hands to beg for the beating to stop. He realizes that his father hasn’t been fighting back for a while.
The inheritance of trauma is enacted in what happens to the chair in the fight: the weapon of the father becomes the weapon of the son. The violence of the father is passed down to the son.
Themes
When he recognizes that his father has given up, the boy suddenly feels the two of them thrust back into their normal relationship—he recognizes his father as his father again. He notes that his father’s nose is broken again, and bleeding. To wipe the blood, the boy uses a piece of a plaid woman’s shawl that his father always kept for him. As the boy cleans, his father watches him and then grabs the boy’s wrist and takes the shawl from him. He holds the shawl against his forehead, and lies still for a while. The boy doesn’t dare move—he’s barely breathing. Finally, the father says, in a suddenly sober voice, “Did you know I had a sister once?”
The reappearance of the shawl in the story reveals that the alcoholic father is the same person as the five-year-old boy left behind by Aanakwad, connecting the two stories in “The Shawl” and making clear the path of trauma: from the father who found the shawl, to his son, and from that son to the narrator of “The Shawl.” The revelation of the connection between the stories is also a moment of healing, though: just as the reader realizes the connection, the alcoholic father begins to share the story with the narrator. And in this moment of shared storytelling, the narrator loses his desire for vengeance against his father and instead cares for him, and the father becomes sober. It is as if in sharing the story, the trauma of the story dissipates.
Themes
The Anishinaabeg used to live spread out across the reservation. At some point, the U.S. government moved everyone into towns and housing. This had seemed like a positive change at first, but it didn’t work as expected: soon after, many people became drinkers, depressed, or suicidal. This was the context in which the narrator’s mother died, and during which his father began drinking and became abusive. Though this dark period is now in the past, the newer generations are still carrying the burden of those years. Because of this, they feel a strong urge to try to forget.
The narrator once again shifts the story to a brief history of the recent past of the Anishinaabeg. This shift, occurring right after the father reveals his own history of trauma to the narrator, is meaningful. It links the Anishinaabeg’s general inherited trauma from U.S. government interference to this particular family’s trauma. And it shows how, even after the darkest moments of pain have passed, the trauma remains along with feelings of shame and a desire to avoid that past. But it is notable that the narrator, in telling this history, is refusing to forget that past, and is instead sharing it with the reader just as his father shared the story of Aanakwad with the narrator.
Themes
The narrator, grown now, feels he’s gotten away from the impact of the dark period, to an extent—his continued solitude is, for him, connected to the aftereffects of those bad years. His siblings Raymond and Doris are both married, and in the narrator’s estimation they’ve gotten away. And even their father has recently connected with a new woman.
The narrator and his family are representative of those who have suffered and inherited past trauma. Even those who largely escape its legacy are at least partly always affected by it. The narrator connects this trauma with loneliness, with solitary living, with not sharing a life with other people. The implication is that some who have inherited trauma seek to stop the cycle of inheritance by keeping it to themselves, but that this is a trap, and that in fact is through sharing that healing can come.
Themes
One day, the narrator and his father discuss the old days and, specifically, Aanakwad’s story. The narrator has been thinking about this story and has two things to tell his father. The first thing is a suggestion: he tells his father he shouldn’t be holding on to his sister’s shawl, because it’s not part of their tradition to keep the dead’s clothing. He should burn it to send it off for her spirit to wear. His father agrees.
While the narrator lives alone, he has nonetheless reconnected with his father, as the fact that they now meet and talk about the past together indicates. That these conversations result in the father agreeing to burn the shawl—the embodiment of the trauma of the sister’s death— show that such shared communication has a healing power. Further, that conversation—that sharing of stories—between the two men leads not just to personal healing but to closer alignment with the practices of the cultural heritage from which their forced relocation had cut them off.
Themes
The second thing the narrator’s been thinking about is a question. He asks his father if he thinks it’s possible that his sister, the narrator’s aunt, was not actually thrown by their mother from the wagon, as the father had spent his life believing, but that she had instead jumped of her own volition. His rationale for this question is that the father has often said how brave and how good of a person his sister was—one of the old kind of their people, who had apparently been lost in the transition to towns. Being this kind of person, she may have understood the situation—the wolves were hungry, the baby needed her mother, the father (her brother) was in the snow behind them, and the uncle was the only person who knew the way—and recognized that, if someone had to be eaten by the wolves, it should be her. Given all of that, she may have jumped from the wagon herself, her shawl flying out behind her like a cape.
The narrator and his father continue to share the story of the father’s sister. But now with a further step: the narrator is not just sharing the story, but re-interpreting it in a way that only communal storytelling allows. In this re-interpretation, the sister is not a victim but a hero. Her death is not a product of Aanakwad’s shame, but rather of her own courage and of her cultural heritage as an Anishinaabeg. And the shawl, in this reinterpretation, is not the embodiment of the tragedy of her death, but almost like a superhero’s cape. By re-interpreting the story of the past, the narrator gives his father and himself a new path forward. Their past becomes not something to try to forget or be ashamed of, but something to celebrate and which gives them strength. Interestingly, “The Shawl” itself performs a similar function. It shares with the reader a story and re-interprets it, and finds in the Anishinaabeg history not a tragedy from which there is only trauma, but rather a foundation on which to build.
Themes
