“There is a thread beginning with my grandmother Adelaide and traveling through my father and arriving at me. That thread is flight” (335). It is telling that the identity of the Beet Queen is not revealed until the final section of Louise Erdrich’s novel. Dot is, in fact, the last of a line of unique women and men and has gathered the qualities of all those who came before her. Dot has many fathers and mothers, and it is through them that she becomes Beet Queen—but on the day of her celebration she decides that her true identity is not that of a beet queen. And since The Beet Queen is more about the journey than the destination, in this context the novel’s open ending emphasizes that the process is far from over for Dot.
Travel—the constant moving away from or toward places and people—is a central theme of this novel. And perhaps because of this endless motion, we sometimes feel as if this tale contains no single protagonist. It is certainly not Dot, since her real transformation begins in the final pages of the book. If, however, we were to pick one still point within the novel’s complex cast, it should be Mary Adare.
On a cold day, the orphaned Mary and Karl Adare jump from a cold boxcar into the town of Argus. Their mother has literally flown away with a new lover at the aerial show of a fair, and their baby brother was lovingly abducted by a desperate couple. Their life in general seems to have dispersed, disintegrated in front of their eyes. Karl leaves Argus as soon as he arrives, when the next train rolls through town; the rest of his life seems determined by that moment, since he will spend his days as a traveling salesman, stopping only for brief affairs with both men and women.
Mary, however, decides to settle down, seeking shelter with her aunt and uncle: “I planned to be essential to them all, so depended upon that they could never send me off. I did this on purpose, because I soon found out that I had nothing else to offer” (19). She had spent the previous months moving from one town to another with her mother and Karl; during this time, she watched the way Adelaide’s wanderlust—only in part provoked by their poverty—was destroying the family, and the way Karl had come to resemble her. As if to emphasize her decision, she grows into a stout woman whose decisions, likes, and dislikes are usually final. At first an outsider, she takes over the family’s butcher shop when her aunt and uncle move to Florida. Her cousin Sita, who admired Mary’s mother for her elegance and love of traveling, also leaves Argus to become a fashion model.
It is Mary’s refusal to move or change that turns her into a point of reference for the other characters. In a story where dispersion and flight are key elements, Mary seems reliable, predictable. Karl travels briefly to Argus and leaves Mary’s friend Celestine pregnant; his previous affair had been with Wallace Pfef, an eminent Argus town leader he met at a convention. Once Karl disappears, Mary takes the reluctant Celestine and her baby under her protection. Wallace, sensing that he, too, is part of the family tree—after all, he has helped deliver the baby—also acts as guardian to baby Wallacette/Dot. Thus an eclectic family is created out of necessity, adding its members gradually and not always willingly: Sita, mentally ill in her later years, refuses to have any contact with Mary and Celestine. Entrenched in her upscale suburban home, she wears Adelaide’s pawned garnet necklace and laments her own loss of beauty and sanity.
Mary’s stubborn, forceful nature gradually alienates her from even Celestine and Dot, who as a child looks up to her aunt. Perhaps as a legacy of her chaotic early childhood, Mary has become a dictatorial figure in her family and community. She treats the customers at her failing shop as harshly as she does her family. Her instinct to survive through action and calculated decisions is understandable but does not sit well with the children who must obediently play the games she designs for Dot’s parties.
However, even Mary cannot escape a magical vein that runs in the family. Upon their arrival in Argus as children, Karl had made a branch of flower blossoms linger as perfume long after he jumped back on the train. A few years later, Mary herself performed a minor miracle—at least according to the nuns who ran her school—by sliding face first into the icy ground and leaving an imprint of what appeared to be the face of Christ (although Mary herself was convinced that it was Karl’s face). Another mythical occurrence is her mother’s fairy-tale disappearance. As the years go by, Mary develops a strong affinity for esoteric arts and the afterlife. A practical woman, she is certainly not skilled in these areas and therefore seems to others a fake and an eccentric. And she herself recognizes this shortcoming: “Once I had caused a miracle by smashing my face on ice, but now I was an ordinary person” (203).
Not surprisingly, Mary’s exaggerated sense of self-righteousness and desire to control others unites the rest of the family in several attempts to evade her influence. As Dot grows into her teens, her childhood admiration for her aunt will also fade, although Celestine’s daughter will inherit Mary’s forceful ways and herself become an outcast among her peers. The culminating scene of the novel is the Beet Festival organized by Wallace, who has also fixed the votes for Beet Queen so that Dot may win. He thus hopes to make up for his failure as surrogate father. When Dot discovers what he has done, she reacts not with gratitude but with fury: having inherited Mary’s and Celestine’s solid builds and unladylike ways, she knows that nobody will believe she could have legitimately been voted Beet Queen.
In The Beet Queen, people, places, events, and even time periods, all seem to mutate and fall apart, only to surprise readers by coming back together at various points. At the festival, the entire circle of family and acquaintances is finally united, albeit in a strange, disjointed manner. Following an overdose of pills, Sita’s body is picked up from her suburban garden and parked under a tree until the festival ends. Karl returns to seek a reconciliation with Wallace. Jude Miller, the baby brother taken from Mary when her mother disappeared, makes his way back to Argus to witness the events. Now a priest, he is known to Karl through a chance meeting, but the rest of the family remains unaware of his existence. At the end of the novel, he seems to have made no contact with Mary and Karl. Russell, Celestine’s brother and a war veteran whose many wounds have caused his body to deteriorate and become unrecognizable, rides a parade float as a town hero.
In this final section, the first-person narration—which had shifted mainly among Celestine, Mary, Karl, Sita, and Wallace—finally belongs to Dot. We hear her voice and sense her perceptions instead of reading her through the eyes of others. In a stunt that echoes her grandmother Adelaide’s escape, Dot flies off in the plane that was to write her name in the sky, pronouncing her Queen of the Beet Festival. Doubling as a sky-seeder for the drought-parched town, the plane nevertheless makes a quick return after fulfilling both duties. At this point, Dot realizes that she must handle the “thread of flight” she has inherited with more responsibility than did some of her predecessors, namely Karl and Adelaide. In the end, Dot creates her own miracle, as the town sees rain for the first time in months.
Louise Erdrich has thus woven a complex network of characters whose lives are not always as much their own as they would like to believe. In the end, the prevailing message is that we cannot escape heritage. Sita tries, and ends up losing her mind and her life. Adelaide’s own attempt leads her to a life of barely suppressed rage eerily similar to Sita’s. After a lifetime of flight, Karl yearns to settle down and come to know his daughter. And in the novel’s open ending, we can only hope that Dot will mix the traits she has inherited—flight and groundedness, sensitivity and hard pragmatism—into a stable combination of yet another unique character.
SOURCES
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Beidler, Peter G., and Gay Barton. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 1999.
Erdrich, Louise. The Beet Queen. New York: Perennial, 2001.
Krupat, Arnold. The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Peck, David, ed. “Louise Erdrich.” In American Ethnic Writers, Vol. 1, 159–162. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000.
Stookey, Lorena L. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999.
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