Fleur

“Fleur” explores issues of agency, authorship, and authenticity in the craft of storytelling. The stories of Fleur’s drownings which open “Fleur” combine hearsay, myth, and fact, as Erdrich establishes a storytelling tradition within the community at Lake Turcot, employing magical realism, a technique which combines fantastical elements with reality. Pauline presents her personal experience of discovering Fleur’s tracks shifting into those of a clawed animal as fact to support the semi-mythical presentation of Fleur by the community elders. However, by the end of the story the tribal knowledge is called into question explicitly. Pauline notes that there are still stories about Fleur and her baby and that the “old men talk” about her (189), but Pauline notes that they get the story “wrong” because “they only know they don’t know anything” (189). Erdrich complicates the magical realist presentation by introducing an element of speculation, positioning Pauline—and thereby the narrative voice of the story—as the ultimate authority on Fleur’s semi-mythical personhood. Reinforcing Pauline’s authority, Pauline pivots early on from the subjective knowledge of the tribe to facts she alone knows about Fleur’s time in Argus, writing “that’s what this story is about” to indicate a separation between events (178). Pauline indicates that she is to be trusted because she was able to see everything and to know “everything” including “what the men said when no one was around” and what was done to Fleur (179).

Erdrich presents Pauline’s ability to see and report the story as a kind of power, able to shape Fleur’s narrative and her own role within it.

Pauline’s role within Fleur’s story complicates her status as an objective truth-teller, and Pauline is often dismissive her own role in the story. Erdrich fames Pauline as an unreliable narrator whose own motives affect the presentation of the plot. For instance, Pauline shifts culpability for sealing the men into the meat locker to Fleur via Fleur’s “cry building in the wind” that “spoke so plain [Pauline] understood that [she] should move” and “slam down the great iron bar” to seal in the men (187), using Fleur’s association with the supernatural to undermine her own agency in enacting revenge upon Fleur’s assailants. By contrast, Pauline describes her inability to save Fleur from the men in more grounded, physical terms: She goes “stiff with fear” and is unable to “unlatch [herself] from the trestles or move at all” (186). In both pivotal points of the text, Pauline frames herself as a passive observer, either limited in action by her fear or motivated into action by Fleur’s influence rather than her own initiative. Where Pauline claims authority in telling the story, she rejects authority over her own actions within it. Even Pauline’s role as observer within the text is challenged by Pauline’s narration of the most violent moments in the story. Rather than watching the men die, she watches the storm “become a fat snout” and sniff out the butcher shop before tossing her around and forcing her to close her eyes (187). The damage the storm conveys is not truly seen by Pauline, either. Rather, she describes what “Fritzie said” about the damage, including the “dust” still coating “her china figures, and upon her kitchen table” (188). Similarly, when Fleur is being attacked, Pauline does not see; she closes her eyes, only able to “describe what [she] couldn’t block out”: Fleur’s “hoarse breath” and cries “in the old language” including Pauline’s name (186). Even as Pauline’s power lies in seeing and telling the story, Pauline omits key details of what could be seen and told, forcing the reader to rely on Pauline’s occasionally poetic interpretation of events, just as the reader relies on the fantastical stories about Fleur from the opening to develop a sense of the mysterious woman.

Pauline’s role as an observer also offers a vision of female power that contrasts with Fleur’s. Where Fleur is beautiful, physically strong, and charming, Pauline describes herself as invisible, homely, and weak. Yet Pauline’s invisibility allows her to observe others without being noticed, and to be in the position to witness and reveal the men’s crime against Fleur, as well as be the agent of their deaths. By contrast, Fleur’s threat to the men is more overt. She charms them with her looks and takes money from them through her card playing. Her sexuality threatens the men too, as their attraction to her makes them susceptible to Fleur’s manipulation, unlike the men of Lake Turcot who avoid Fleur despite her good looks. Erdrich portrays Lily and the other white men who work at the butcher shop with hubris; they are so confident of their superiority over Fleur that they are shocked when she beats them. They are infuriated when she outsmarts them again after they up the ante. The assault on Fleur is an attempt by Lily and the others to re-establish white masculine dominance over the indigenous woman who has upset their notion of their own power. However, Fleur and Pauline invert the power structure once again by killing the men. Erdrich contrasts the deaths of Lily, Dutch and Tor—a clearly motivated act of vengeance—with the earlier deaths of the Native men who save or attempt to save Fleur, which create a sense of Fleur as dangerous and otherworldly.

Erdrich also examines the role of whiteness within power dynamics in the story. Fritzie, a white woman, is portrayed as having the power to influence her husband Pete without questions. The men of the story do not try to undermine or dominate Fritzie in the story, despite her being in a position of power. Pauline, on the other hand, has been claimed by Dutch, forced to abandon her education and perform domestic work, because he brought her to town from the reservation. Erdrich explores colonialism and white supremacy in the American history of relations with America’s Indigenous peoples with symbolic plotting. Lily’s whiteness is emphasized when he attacks Fleur: Pauline notes that he does so with his “creamy hands” (185). After the rape, “Lily was paler and softer than ever, as if his flesh had steamed on his bones” (185). The act of violence makes Lily even whiter than he was before, and Erdrich suggests that Lily’s whiteness and capacity for violence against a Native woman are directly linked. Erdrich engages a tradition of positing American expansion as a figurative rape of Native American people and lands; the sexual assault of Fleur by Lily and the others becomes a manifestation of that history. Erdrich offers redemption and the reclamation of agency to her Indigenous characters through their triumph over the violent white men. Fleur—and by extension Pauline—uses traditional powers (derived from animals, bloodlines, and the lake) to get vengeance, using the wind to send a message of instruction. Erdrich complicates this revenge story through the figure of Fleur’s baby, fathered either by Misshepeshu, the water monster, or one of her assailants. The ending becomes ambiguous: Did Fleur successfully reclaim her power or is the child a manifestation of violence against Native women?

Reinforcing the ambiguity of the ending, Erdrich engages shapeshifting, especially between human and animal forms, to reveal elements of character. Lily is described in the text as looking something like a pig with snake eyes, and when he attacks Fleur he wrestles with a pig to such an extent that “the men couldn’t tell from the other in that light” (186). Lily’s transformation from man to animal is complete once he becomes a literal piece of meat covered in a bear hide and surrounded by other meat in the locker. Fleur is a more literal shapeshifter throughout the text, evinced by the aforementioned claw prints as well as Pauline’s note that Fleur’s “fifth toes were missing” and that her teeth resembled an animal’s (180). Where Fleur’s shapeshifting abilities grant her greater power, and her transformation into a bear is portrayed as a sign of her skillful hunting, the transformation of the white men into dead bears signifies their less-than-human status as a result of their violence.