Inheritance, Reinterpretation, and Personal and Cultural Legacy Theme Analysis

Louise Erdrich’s story “The Shawl” is a story about inheritance—of stories, material items, and traumas. The narrator begins by sharing an anecdote told among the local Anishinaabeg (a name that refers to several related Native American tribes that live around the Great Lakes region of the U.S. and Canada) about a mother named Aanakwad, who leaves her husband for a different man, taking her nine-year-old daughter and infant with her while leaving her five-year-old son behind with her husband. During the trip, Aanakwad and her children are attacked by wolves. Afterward, at the grisly scene, Aanakwad’s husband finds a torn piece of his daughter’s shawl and assumes that Aanakwad threw their daughter to the wolves in order to save herself and her infant. After the narrator moves on in the story to describe his own childhood with an alcoholic and abusive father, it is revealed that his father has the shawl and is in fact the younger brother of the girl who was thrown to the wolves. As the narrator and his father later revisit the story of the sister’s death, the narrator wonders whether the girl was not thrown at all, but rather sacrificed herself to the wolves in order to save her mother and the infant. Through this reinterpretation of the anecdote, Erdrich suggests that inheritance is not simply something static that you receive passively, but rather something you can reshape.

From the beginning of the story, Erdrich emphasizes things that are passed between and among family members and communities. The shawl referenced in the story’s title is the most literal instance of something being passed down. It first appears on the girl in the anecdote—a “red and brown plaid shawl” that she wraps herself in as she sleeps. After the girl has been killed by wolves, her younger brother notes that it is kept in the house where now only he and his father live. By the end of the story, it reappears after the narrator finally fights and defeats his abusive father, and then use “this piece of blanket that my father always kept with him for some reason” to wipe away his father’s blood. The shawl, then, has traveled from being a significant object to Aanakwad’s daughter to being one to Aanakwad’s grandson.

For Erdrich’s characters, stories are also an inheritance. The anecdote that opens this story, about the girl who was fed to the wolves, is framed in the very first sentence of “The Shawl” as something that “is told ... among the Anishinaabeg” people, of whom the narrator is one. In other words, it is a shared story, something that has been passed through the community. Later, the narrator reveals that he first heard this story from his father, further demonstrating the path the anecdote travels among generations.

But for Erdrich, just as one can inherit a shawl or a formative story, one can also inherit traumas and sorrows from their family or community. Erdrich implies that the narrator’s father’s abusive behavior is tied to his sorrow about what he understands his mother to have done to his sister. When, as a young boy, the narrator’s father learns what happened to his sister, “he knew that this broken place within him would not be mended.” Later, when the narrator finally fights back against his father’s drunken physical abuse and is able to overpower him, the father becomes subdued and suddenly sober. At this moment, he tells the narrator the story of the shawl and the sister to whom it originally belonged: “Did you know I had a sister once?” The father here acknowledges that his drunken rages were the result of the trauma he inherited, a trauma he has been passing down to his own children.

Inherited sorrow is not limited to the narrator’s immediate family, though. It’s something that afflicts his entire community. The narrator describes how, when the United States government moved people from his and related tribes into towns, “it seemed that anyone who was someone was either drunk, killed, near suicide, or had just dusted himself.” Even though this period of “despair” is over by the time the narrator is telling this story, its effects still linger in the existing generation: “We still have sorrows that are passed to us from early generations, sorrows to handle in addition to our own, and cruelties lodged where we cannot forget them.”

Despite all this, “The Shawl” does offer the hope that such cycles of inherited trauma can be disrupted through the story of what happens after the narrator’s father finally reveals what happened to his sister. After sharing the story of his sister, the narrator’s father suddenly speaks in “the new sober voice I would hear from then on.” The father doesn’t just become sober for that moment, but instead remains sober from then on, suggesting that in sharing the trauma with others, the pain and rage—if perhaps not the sorrow—induced by that long-ago tragedy is eased. Further, once he learns of the origin of the shawl—the literal symbol of a thing passed down—the narrator tells his father that “we never keep the clothing of the dead. Now’s the time to burn it…. Send it off to cloak her spirit.” The father agrees, which indicates that he is letting go of this manifestation of the sorrow from his sister’s death that he’d been holding onto his whole life, and which had cut him off from his people’s traditions.

Not only does the narrator convince his father to let go of the shawl, the physical embodiment of the terrible story about his father’s sister, but he also reinterprets the story itself. Instead of the story the father had always believed, that his mother Aanakwad had been so selfish as to feed his sister to the wolves in order to save herself, the narrator proposes another possible reading: What if his sister, known to be dutiful and loving to her mother and the infant, was similar to the old Anishinaabeg people in her remarkable kindness and had sacrificed herself in order to save everyone else? What if it had been her decision?

Notably, the narrator offers this reinterpretation in the form of a question. The reader doesn’t see the father’s response, and thus Erdrich ends “The Shawl” without explicitly saying whether one or the other interpretation is true or even considered plausible among the characters. Yet the truth of what happened to the daughter is ultimately not important. Instead, the story’s ending demonstrates how the narrator and his father might be able to reinterpret the story they inherited, rather than passively accepting the sorrow passed on to them. In doing so, they transform their history from a legacy of victimhood and shame to one of heroism that connects them to the profound kindness inherent in their Anishinaabeg cultural legacy. That “The Shawl” connects the daughter’s story to the despair of the larger Anishinaabeg community further implies that such reinterpretation might offer not just the narrator and his father a path forward, but also it might give the entire Anishinaabeg community the ability to view their own cultural legacy not with shame but with pride.