33 pages • 1 hour read
The Shawl
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Symbols & Motifs
The Shawl
The shawl is a complex symbol with multiple shifting meanings. Initially, the shawl belongs to Aanakwad’s daughter. She wraps herself up in it at night, “exhausted” (362) by her mother’s inability to function in the face of her grief. After the daughter is killed by wolves, her father keeps the tattered remains of the shawl, establishing it as a symbol of the way that individuals hold tightly to traumatic memories, rather than letting them go. The memories of his daughter’s death are indeed painful and they irreparably damage Aanakwad’s husband. During the second section of the story, it is revealed that Aanakwad’s young son inherits what is left of the shawl from his father. He, too, is impacted by grief. It is only when his own son reminds him that keeping the clothing of the dead is culturally taboo and that such items must be sent off to “cloak” the spirit of the girl, that healing becomes possible. Burning the shawl becomes a way to leave the pain of previous generations in the past and to move on.
Aanakwad’s Name
Aanakwad’s name itself functions symbolically within “The Shawl.” The narrator explains in the first paragraph that her name means “cloud.” Clouds are ever-changing in form and can shift from flat and motionless in one moment to fast-moving and stormy in the next. Clouds thus symbolize Aanakwad herself, who is changeable, restless, and experiences states of explosiveness and sadness. Erdrich notes that Aanakwad is “moody and sullen one moment” and wild the next, that “she would shake her hair over her face and blow it straight out in front of her to make her children scream with laughter” (362). In addition to their potential for sudden storms, clouds are, to humans, unreachable. Although the sky is always visible, it cannot be touched. Aanakwad, too, is unreachable. She exists in a state of emotional isolation from her family members. At the beginning of the story, she no longer loves her husband and eventually leaves the cooking and cleaning to her daughter. Although physically with her family at the beginning of “The Shawl,” she has mentally and emotionally cut herself off from their group.
Violence
A motif is a repeated pattern that an author uses to support the thematic structure of their work. It can take the form of imagery, sounds, words, or even situations that the text returns to again and again. Erdrich uses violence as a motif in “The Shawl” to illustrate the themes of generational trauma and healing, and to speak to broader issues within Indigenous American communities during the 20th century.
The first instance of violence is the death of the nine-year-old girl at the hands of her mother (so the reader is initially led to believe) and a pack of wolves. This event becomes the catalyst for future violence in the family, both the abuse that Aanakwad’s surviving son subjects his own children to, and the physical altercation between him and the narrator that ultimately leads to forgiveness and the possibility of healing.
Erdrich also depicts violence on a larger scale, specifically the violence done to Anishinaabeg communities through the policy of forcible migration off the reservation. She writes that people were relocated “into towns, into housing” and that “It looked good at first, and then it all went sour. Shortly afterward it seemed that anyone who was someone was either drunk, killed, near suicide, or had just dusted himself” (367). The result of these removal policies was, for many people, violence and death, either at their own hand or at that of another. Erdrich suggests here that, cut off from traditional homes, ways of living, and relationships with the land, Anishinaabeg people struggle to survive.
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By Louise Erdrich
