The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich
"The Beet Queen" is Louise Erdrich's second novel, set in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota. The narrative primarily focuses on European American characters, with Native Americans and those of mixed heritage featuring in more peripheral roles. Unlike Erdrich's other works that often explore themes of racism and cultural conflict, "The Beet Queen" delves into the search for identity amidst shared economic and cultural challenges among its characters. Central to the story is Mary Adare, a strong and grounded figure who builds her identity in a butcher shop after being abandoned by her mother. Her brother, Karl, presents a contrasting persona, embodying the Native American trickster archetype. Their lives intersect through Dot, their niece, a spirited young girl who becomes the titular "Beet Queen" during a local celebration, further connecting the novel’s characters. The prose is noted for its lyrical quality, weaving together themes of family, identity, and community with a poetic grace that has earned the novel critical acclaim as one of Erdrich's finest works.
On this Page
Subject Terms
The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich
First published: 1985, short story; 1986, novel
The Work
Louise Erdrich’s second novel, The Beet Queen, is centered in the fictional little town of Argus, somewhere in North Dakota. Unlike her other novels of people living on reservations, the characters in this story are mostly European Americans, and those Native Americans who exist have very tenuous ties to their roots and to the reservation that lies just outside the town. Racism, poverty, and cultural conflict are not in the foreground in this novel, which makes it different from most novels by Native American authors. Instead, European Americans, Native Americans, and mixed bloods are all in the same economic and cultural situation, and each of them is involved in a search for identity.
The prose in The Beet Queen is lyrical and finely crafted, as is evident in the description of Mary Adare, the novel’s central character. Abandoned by a mother who literally vanishes in the air, she builds her identity by developing a solid grounding. She is described as heavy and immovable, and she makes a home for herself in a butcher shop that is described as having thick walls and green, watery light coming through glass block windows. She has found an earthy den, which attaches her to the one thing that will never abandon her—the earth. Her brother, Karl, is her opposite. Thin, flighty, always moving, he is a European American who fits perfectly the archetype of the Native American trickster figure. He is the destroyer, lover of men and women, game-player, and cocreator of the character who ties the main characters of the novel together, his daughter, Dot.
Dot is a strong, willful girl who is adored by her mother, a strong, mixed blood Chippewa woman named Celestine, her Aunt Mary, and Walter Pfef, a town leader and her father’s former lover. It is Dot, the Beet Queen in a contest fixed by Pfef, who brings together the web of characters who are otherwise loosely joined in fragile relationships. During the Beet Celebration in which she is to be crowned, her father returns. Pfef, Celestine, and Mary are also there, and Russell, Celestine’s paralyzed war-hero brother, is the centerpiece of a float honoring veterans. Mary’s vain cousin, Sita, is also there, although she is dead. When the day is over, the circle of family is complete. Poetic and graceful, The Beet Queen is widely recognized as one of Erdrich’s finest accomplishments.
Bibliography
Banks, Russell. “Border Country.” The Nation 243 (November 1, 1986): 460-462. Banks reviews The Beet Queen and finds it an almost perfect example of classical comedy. Mary Adare is described as “one of the most memorable women in recent American fiction.” The novel is compared favorably with recent books of similar style.
Castillo, Susan Perez. “Postmodernism, Native American Literature, and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy.” Massachusetts Review 32 (Summer, 1991): 285-284. Castillo compares the tone and approach of Erdrich’s novels The Beet Queen and Tracks to Leslie Marmon Silko’s works. She concludes that although these writers differ in many respects, they have much in common. It is this commonality that offers the reader an instructive glimpse into Native American oral tradition.
Erdrich, Louise, and Michael Dorris. “Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris: A Marriage of Minds.” Interview by Michael Schumacher. Writer’s Digest 71 (June, 1991): 28-59. An interview with the collaborators, focusing upon how their books and essays are written, both those bearing only one of their names (such as the The Beet Queen) and those bearing both. Erdrich and Dorris discuss, among other things, the importance of orality in American Indian tradition as well as in their own talking out of their works and editing of their drafts, each by the other.
Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1992.
Perez, Susan Castillo. “Postmodernism, Native American Literature, and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy.” Massachusetts Review 32, no. 2 (Summer, 1991): 285-294. Analyzing issues raised by Leslie Marmon Silko’s review of The Beet Queen, Castillo discusses their different views of ethnicity and textual representation of Amerindian life. She concludes that these two gifted novelists also have important points in common: their treatment of oral tradition, their depiction of the tragedies of contemporary reservation life, and their refusal of stereotyping.
Rainwater, Catherine. “Reading Between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich.” American Literature 62 (September, 1990): 405-422. Rainwater examines the various conflicting messages in Erdrich’s first three novels, with emphasis on the structure of time. The article concludes that a guiding concept in Erdrich’s work is that “the world takes on the shape of the stories we tell.”
Rayson, Ann. “Shifting Identity in the Work of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 3, no. 4 (Winter, 1991): 27-36. Looking at different and joint productions of this husband-and-wife writing team, including The Beet Queen, Rayson suggests that the authors have not resolved the issue of mixed blood and shifting identity with which they are so much concerned, in spite of their use of differing voices to express them.
Storhoff, Gary. “Family Systems in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen.” Critique 39 (Summer, 1998): 341-352. The power of the self over and against that of the family is a common theme in Erdrich’s novels. Focusing on the influence of the family to shape or determine the choices an individual makes, Storhoff examines how different family backgrounds, experiences, and expectations effect the personal identities of members of the Adare and Kozka families.
Towery, Margie. “Continuity and Connection: Characters in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16, no. 4 (1992): 99-122. Erdrich’s novels, with their intricate connections between and recurrence of characters, seem to emphasize the importance of continuity in American Indian culture. This article contains three valuable appendices—on genealogy, the appearance of characters in different novels, and chronology—but these are not perfect; for example, Wallace Pfef does not appear for The Beet Queen.
White, Sharon, and Glenda Burnside. “On Native Ground: An Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” Bloomsbury Review 8, no. 4 (1988): 16-18.
Wickenden, Dorothy. “Off the Reservation.” The New Republic 195 (October 6, 1986): 46-48. Praises The Beet Queen for Erdrich’s prose style, her “poetic turns,” and her “observant eye.” Yet Wickenden points out the problems that arise when a novel is told in a series of extraordinary scenes rather than an evolving plot, and she finds the climactic scene at the Beet Festival contrived.