Matthew C. Jones University Writing Program University of Florida Voices Lost with Femininity and Masculinity in The Beet Queen Qianqian Chen and Joan Qionglin Tan This article examines lost voices in Louise Erdrich’s novel The Beet Queen. Impacted by the white-male-elite values, white woman Sita Kozka and Native American man Russell Kashpaw, in their endeavor to forge ultimate femininity and masculinity, experience downward trajectory phases marked by loud voices, objectification, oppression, voice loss, and death. By comparing Sita’s death and Russell’s rebirth, it unfolds that the pursuit of femininity and masculinity, within the patriarchal and racial conceptual framework, results in voicelessness and disempowerment. It also contends that only by forging independent identity and preserving indigenous culture can women and Native American men make their voices heard. Introduction Louise Erdrich (1954- ), the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is renowned for multi-vocal narration in her postcolonial American sagas. According to Cambridge International Dictionary of English, “voice” is defined as “the sounds that are made when people speak or sing” and “(the right to) an expression of opinion” (1629). The polyvocality in Erdrich’s fictions demonstrates that the sounds her characters make are integral to their attempts to tell their stories and express their opinions. From Mikhail Bakhtin’s perspective, the polyphony of voices manifests the “social, political, ideological” conflicts of “the epoch” in works of literature (Bakhtin 1984: 38). In Erdrich’s novel The Beet Queen (1998), not only do the multiple AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 47 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2022-0004 Qianqian Chen and Joan Qionglin Tan 90 voices convey such clashes from 1932 to 1972, but some gradually lost voices also reveal the gender and racial oppression and objectification brought by the dominant ideology of “dictatorships” built upon the “latecolonial male elites” (Connell 2016: 11). Certainly, there is a “mutually reinforcing dialectical relationship between capitalist class structure and hierarchical sexual structuring” in a postcolonial society (Eisenstein 1979: 5), which “as a hierarchical, exploitative, oppressive system requires racial oppression alongside sexual and class oppression” (Eisenstein 1979: 46). Overwhelmed by the white-male-elite ideology, white woman Sita Kozka and Native American man Russell Kashpaw, in their endeavor to forge ultimate femininity and masculinity, both lose their voices and fall as victims of the gender and racial hierarchy (Meisenhelder 1994: 46). This article further analyzes the underlying causes for Sita and Russell’s downward trajectory phases marked by loud voices, objectification, oppression, voice loss and death. By comparing the white woman’s death and the Indian man’s rebirth, this article sheds light on the trajectory whereby the pursuit of femininity and masculinity, within the patriarchal and racial conceptual framework, results in voicelessness and disempowerment rather than assimilation into the elite world. It also contends that only by forging independent identity and returning to indigenous cultural roots can women and Native American men raise their voices to the world. 1. “Perfect”Woman and Man with Femininity and Masculinity In Simone de Beauvoir’s view, “Woman herself recognizes that the world is masculine on the whole; those who fashioned it, ruled it, and still dominate it today are men. As for her, she does not consider herself responsible for it; it is understood that she is inferior and dependent” (Beauvoir [1953] 1956: 567-68). This might be taken as a norm for a “perfect” woman in the patriarchal society. In The Beet Queen, Sita is unambiguously portrayed as an inferior and dependent woman living up to the standards set for women by men. With “a stick figure, cartoon thin,” she looks like “the same frail kind of beauty that could be broken off a tree by any passing boy and discarded, cast away when the fragrance died” (Erdrich 2006: 68, 21). It is self-evident that this “beautiful” and “perfect” female image is based on a patriarchal criterion (Erdrich 2006: 17-18). The physical charm out of such an easily broken body and quickly dying vitality constitute a “subtle pleasure” and evoke a “pity for the wretched” in men’s eyes (Beauvoir [1953] 1956: 218-19). In the patriarchal thinking, one tends to embrace the idea that “it may provide a way for women to make their lives easier by conforming to assumptions about women’s behaviour” (Dawson 2018: 29). Being fully aware of the importance of her sexual power, Sita goes to great lengths to maintain her man-pleasing appearance by extreme methods, such as taping a Band-Aid tightly across her forehead to prevent wrinkles Voices Lost with Femininity and Masculinity in The Beet Queen 91 from growing, washing her hair with beer and eggs, doing no manual labor, and even stealing her cousin Mary Adare’s jewelry box because it is from her icon Aunt Adelaide Adare, a charming and frail mistress of a rich man. All the measures she takes seem to be designed to preserve her charisma in order that one day she will become a woman like Adelaide kept by a wealthy man. While reading the novel, readers can clearly discern that “[t]he author’s design for a character is a design for discourse” (Bakhtin 1984: 63). For example, in a conversation with Mary, Sita is depicted by Erdrich as a vain and materialistic girl utterly influenced by the male-dominated ideology: “she would meet a young rising professional. They would marry. He would buy her a house near the county courthouse, on the street of railroad mansions not far from Island Park. Every winter she would walk down the hill to skate. She would wear . . . a short dress with puffs of rabbit fur” (Erdrich 2006: 76). Curiously, in her imagination, there is nothing about “love” being the premise of marriage, whereas there is a variety of standards related to wealth, “rising professional,” “county courthouse,” “mansions not far from Island Park,” and “short dress with puffs of rabbit fur.” Under the sway of the commodity culture, what Sita needs is not a marriage with understanding and support, but the satisfaction of her vanity in the shape of luxurious and exquisite possessions. As Beauvoir pertinently explains, “[t]hese contradictions indicate the worth of a pride that is only vanity” (Beauvoir [1953] 1956: 218). In the patriarchal society, for a submissive woman, “[i]nferior, pitiful - this is not enough,” because a man also “wishes woman to be contemptible,” with a lust for “wealth and refinement” (ibid: 219). In this respect, “[h]e asserts sometimes that the conflict between desire and contempt is a drama of pathos” (ibid: 219). In The Beet Queen, it is salient that the author Erdrich perfectly molds Sita into such a stereotyped female in the male-dominated context who has been intentionally developing her identity as an ideal woman for any man, alluring and delightful in appearance, inferior and pitiful in physical condition, shallow and abject in character. Analogously, a “perfect” male image is also created in the novel - Russell, a full-blood Chippewa veteran of World War I with desirable masculine power, who “represents the extreme construction of masculine gender” (Flavin 1995: 20). From his admirer Mary’s account, Russell is a “bull-chest boy with the soft voice, teasing eyes, the shaggy hair” (Erdrich 2006: 70). Particularly, with the scars and wounds from the battlefield, he “took on an unsettling dark grandeur,” not “ugly,” but “just the opposite” (Erdrich 2006: 70). Similar to Sita, Russell also purposefully forges his masculinity so as to assimilate himself into the white-dominated society. To achieve his goal, Russell, like other ethnic minority men, attempts to “adapt to social norms by developing an exaggerated masculine style” (Chae [2001] 2002: 21). In light of the slight possibility for a Native American to be readily acknowledged by the white society, Russell’s first move is following the Qianqian Chen and Joan Qionglin Tan 92 indigenous athletes who managed to attain fame and fortune and becoming a prominent sports star in his high school football team (Erdrich 2006: 70). His second move is heeding the state’s call, going to war, and returning as a war hero (Erdrich 2006: 70). In hopes of being treated equally and fairly, the Indian man chooses to contribute his physical force, his body, and even his life to the highly valued war for the white government. As a matter of fact, the historical data show that “[m]ore than 12,000 Indians served in the armed forces during the First World War,” which is interpreted as “evidence of their assimilation” (Calloway 2016: 411). Undoubtedly, this might be the best solution for the Native American man to overcome his inferiority complex and obtain a quick pass to enter the white-elite world. Accordingly, in such a way Russell has fulfilled his perfect masculinity. 2. Voices Given by Femininity and Masculinity In the Model of Gendered Power, sexual power, namely, femininity and masculinity, is one of the resources of an individual to develop a loud voice and “control patterns of social interaction” (Bradley 1999: 33). With the femininity and masculinity being well-acknowledged, one is inclined to use his or her voice as “dispositions, maneuvers, tactics, techniques, functionings” to exert an influence on other people (Foucault [1979] 1995: 26). This refers to gendered power, “the capacity of one sex to control the behaviour of the other” in varied forms, such as “class power, racial power, state power” (Bradley 1999: 33). Knowing her extraordinary strengths in femininity, firstly, Sita uses her voice to satiate her lust. At home, she unapologetically asks her parents for any object she desires, and then it is “handed right over” (Erdrich 2006: 30). Melted by her sweet voice, her parents treat her as a precious “baby” and deny her nothing (Erdrich 2006: 28). In class, she tells her teachers that she is glad to help collect erasers or copy poems. Touched by her generous voice, her teachers adore her and move her position up to the front. After school, her idle gossip attracts all girls in her class and all boys in the upper grade. Lured by her cute voice, her schoolmates deem her as a queen, which to a large extent gratifies her vanity. Moreover, Sita uses her voice to condescend to those “inferior” to her. Unsatisfied with her husband Jimmy Bohl who is an ordinary middle-class restaurant owner, Sita constantly blames him for his vulgar taste and is seen to taunt him with her harsh voice. Besides Jimmy, her childhood friends Mary, Celestine James and Russell also feel her contempt through her hand-written note of invitation to her new restaurant reminding them that “[t]ies and suitcoats are required wearing for men, and also that ladies must dress in appropriate fashion.” (Erdrich 2006: 115). By the words “are required” and “must” in her note, Sita sends a clear message with an Voices Lost with Femininity and Masculinity in The Beet Queen 93 overtly condescending tone in her voice that her poor relatives do not belong to her superior social class, and they are literally uninvited. Next, Sita also uses her voice to manipulate people. When the unwelcome friends show up at her restaurant as guests, Sita immediately orders them in an authoritarian voice to work in the kitchen. After hours of hard labor, the only reward “her low-class former friends and relatives” receive from her is not sincere thanks, but her icy voice telling them “I suppose I should thank you” and a view of her back when she turns around and walks out of the kitchen (Erdrich 2006: 115, 123). The goal towards which Sita has striven for years is the upgrade of her social status, from the daughter of a butcher to the wife of a respected member of the elite. Marrying the distasteful restaurant owner and meeting her unpresentable friends are an unbearable reminding of her inferior birth. With an arrogant voice, she dissociates herself from her former social status and moves herself up to a higher level in the social hierarchy. In a word, Sita’s femininity is the tool she uses to develop her voice, seize her power, and ultimately insinuate herself into the elite world. Different from Sita’s controlling voice, Russell’s voice is characterized by silence. Trinh T. Minh-ha stresses that silence is “a will not to say or a will to unsay, a language of its own” (1991: 151). As a way of empowerment and defense mechanism, Russell exercises his will of silence to hide his inferiority complex. The quick success and fame brought by his excessive masculinity embedded in his scars and wounds, along with the decent bank-clerk job offered by the government, puff the Native American “returning home-town hero” (Erdrich 2006: 70) up with pride, who assumes himself completely assimilated into the upper class as a member of the elite. In social gatherings, his deliberate reticence is “hardly even civil,” showing “no manners or consideration,” making people around him feel uncomfortable and humiliated (Erdrich 2006: 70-71). When receiving Mary’s get-well letter with apparent love, he remains rude and “unaffected,” giving Mary no reply, “nothing, not a word, not a hello” (Erdrich 2006: 70). Russell’s silence, to Mary and the people around him, is even more hurtful and powerful than any criticizing or patronizing voice. Preoccupied with the mainstream male-superior values, Russell has no interest in Mary, the short and stout girl without any femininity. Instead, he has a far more desirable target, the beautiful Sita who is reputable for her perfect femininity. With his masculinity and his title and his promising future, Russell has full confidence that he can possess this pretty and lovable creature. However, in the white-dominated society, his presumed social status and success, remain negligible in the woman’s eyes. Facing the Native American’s burning love, Sita does not even bother to speak, but simply shows her scorn with total silence and distant body language. She “tipped her head away and her red lips tightened. She pulled a white hankie from her sleeve, turned a cold cheek, and let him know that Sita Qianqian Chen and Joan Qionglin Tan 94 Kozka was off limits to his type” (Erdrich 2006: 72). The white handkerchief she pulls symbolizes her white race, indicating the vast barrier between white women and red men. The white woman’s voiceless rejection and her proud gesture with the white handkerchief are the loudest voice to awaken this self-content Indian man, smashing his confidence that a single man like himself, in possession of good fortune and elite status, must deserve a perfect wife. In the face of such a woman full of ambition and arrogance, Russell comes to discern his marginalized position as the Other and the inferior, no matter how much he has done to achieve his assimilation. 3. Objectification of the Woman and Man with Perfect Femininity and Masculinity In the context of gender study and social psychology, “objectification” refers to “an instrument of subjugation whereby the needs, interests, and experiences of those with less power are subordinated to those of the powerful” (Gruenfeld et al. 111). Objectified women strive for perfect femininity to please the men in power, whereas objectified Native American men struggle for perfect masculinity to assimilate themselves into the whites in power. As a typical example of the submissive women in The Beet Queen, Sita’s efforts to develop her beauty, frailty, and vanity pave the way for her objectification. Ironically, brought up in the patriarchal surroundings, Sita is the first one to regard herself as an object from an Other perspective. To prove she has something that Mary does not, teenage Sita takes off her undervest and “cupped [her] breasts in [her] hands” to show to Celestine, wishing to defeat unfeminine Mary and win Celestine (Erdrich 2006: 35). Her behavior of taking advantage of her physical features as an object to reach her goal signifies her self-objectification. Upholding male-dominant values, Sita does not even have the slightest awareness that she has deemed herself as a tool or a gadget. Instead, she grows more accustomed to trading her body for profits after realizing that “personal or sexual power resources by women” can be used as “a survival strategy for ‘getting on’ with men” and “receiv[ing] some material benefit” (Dawson 2018: 140). For instance, despite her disgust at Jimmy, she dates him to recover from a three-year affair with a married doctor. And to cover her restaurant food poisoning scandal, she seduces Louis Tappe, the state health inspector, and turns him into her second husband. As marketable merchandise, the woman sells her alluring femininity to the male customers who crave her body. As a result, at the buyer’s market, the men in power evaluate her, price her, purchase her, return her, and destroy her. For example, Jimmy evaluates Sita as a sex toy; Jimmy’s relatives regard her as overpriced; Louis purchases her as a profitable asset; Jimmy returns her for he is displeased; and finally, Jimmy’s relatives and Louis destroy her and discard Voices Lost with Femininity and Masculinity in The Beet Queen 95 her as a piece of garbage. In a word, the white woman’s self-objectification goes hand in hand with men’s objectification of her. Sita is objectified by her first husband. Firstly, she is deemed as an image of sexuality. Jimmy loves Sita’s modeling silhouette and her “fuzzy” newsprints in which she poses in ballgowns and swimming suits (Erdrich 2006: 83). In the eyes of the man, Sita is no more than a nude female body to give him sensual pleasures, and it makes no difference to him who the model is in his pictures. What he cares for is not Sita as a lively human being with soul or identity, but the sexuality and appealing appearance of any woman. As long as the woman is a sex-appealing creature under his ownership, he is satisfied. Besides, she is regarded as food. Jimmy never calls Sita by her name. Instead, the chef calls her by terms of his favorite desserts, like “[c]akes,” “[s]weetpie,” “[m]uffin,” and “[s]ugardonut” which are sweet, edible, passive, manmade food (Erdrich 2006: 86). From the nicknames, it is evident that Sita in the man’s mind is nothing but some dough or some raw material that can be easily shaped, burned, deep-fried, ready to be cut, or devoured at his free will. For the man, his wife is nothing but food and sex to meet his basic physical desires. Who she is, what she is thinking, and how she is distinctive from other women, are never under the man’s consideration, which is naturally reflected by his disrespect for the woman. For instance, when dating, he never gets out of his car to ring Sita’s doorbell, but he just pulls up “outside” and sits “on his horn” (Erdrich 2006: 85-86). His rude behavior is precisely the way to train an animal who would respond to the whistling of her trainer or master. Without any courtesy, Jimmy objectifies Sita as an easily manipulated lowly animal, coming at his call and ready to be used. Sita is also objectified by her second husband. Louis is Sita’s ideal spouse she has been looking for, a knowledgeable, intelligent, gentle professional who could help her to improve her social status. Facing such an “upper-class” man, Sita, the daughter of a butcher and the ex-wife of a restaurant’s owner, puts herself in an inferior position, which in turn aggravates Louis’s objectification of her. On the one hand, Louis further spurs Sita’s self-abasement. For instance, she is encouraged to grow “ornamental shrubs, perennials, and climbing vines” in her backyard (Erdrich 2006: 144). These plants share a common feature: low and dependent. Louis’s plan symbolizes his objectifying opinion of Sita: a subordinate and reliant entity. As a docile woman in the male-dominated society, Sita, from her looks, her fragility, to her snob value, has purposefully cultivated herself “to accept masculine authority” (Beauvoir [1953] 1956: 569). When tending the low plants in her “large backyard,” she has little knowledge that she is like a yardbird confined to Louis’s yard-like prison, nor does she feel inferior to her upper-class husband. Instead, she delightfully accepts his arrangement and considers it as Louis’s kindness. On the other hand, Louis objectifies Sita. Naturally, as an expert, he does his research by observing plants and worms and keeping an archive about them. But it is more than Qianqian Chen and Joan Qionglin Tan 96 whimsical that he records all his wife does in his notebook as well. In Louis’s scientific studies, the plants, worms, and Sita all belong to his “specimens,” about which Sita has no complaints (Erdrich 2006: 153). In other words, she is completely satiated with her specially created identity, the beautiful, frail, vain, inferior self, and she is even more pleased to see that this self has been accepted and appreciated by men. To sum up, Sita is objectified, and she enjoys being a submissive object. As for objectification, Sita does not stand alone. Russell is also “dehumanized” and “reduced to objects” (Meisenhelder 46). After Sita’s contempt and rejection, Russell’s dream of assimilating himself into the elite society is shattered. “For the Indian male,” however, “the only route to be successful, to be good, to be right, and to have an identity was to be as much like the white man as he could” (qtd. Old Dog Cross 20). Russell’s way of establishing his identity as an elite is to develop more masculinity, which to him, in light of his former experience of achieving fame, popularity, and a nice job after being a war hero, means to go to war again. When he comes home from Korea, Russell seems to obtain what he wants - the title of “North Dakota’s most-decorated hero” (Erdrich 2006: 111). Nevertheless, this honor is at the sacrifice of his startling face “all sewn together” with “ravaged cheeks” and “even more wounds than before,” and especially his left leg, “the one with the old spiral fracture and shrapnel wounds” that “ache[s] from the fall he’d taken coming down the bank.” (Erdrich 2006: 111, 118, 155, 196). What is preposterous about his award and his contribution can be clearly seen from the irony in his younger sister Celestine’s words, “I think it’s stupid, that this getting shot apart is what he’s lived for all his life. Now he must wait until some statehouse official scores the other veterans, counting up their wounds on a paper tablet, and figures out who gave away the most flesh” (Erdrich 2006: 111). Since in her occupation as a butcher Celestine is involved in the meat business, her remarks can be understood in this way: the word “statehouse” sounds very much like “steakhouse,” and the phrase “counting up their wounds on a paper tablet” is analogous to “weighing the beef on a scale.” Thereupon, the official, or the state behind him, is the butcher, and the veterans are cattle or pigs or sheep. As the process of objectification is thought to “involve a kind of instrumental fragmentation in social perception, the splitting of a whole person into parts that serve specific goals and functions for the observer” (Gruenfeld et al. 2008: 111), Russell and his fellow veterans are cut into pieces as steak. These livestock-like former soldiers have contributed their flesh and blood to the country and then receive some titles and medals in return. And even more absurdly, their sacrifice is measured by the number of their physical wounds. If the scars and wounds Russel obtains from the first war are the gilding on his identity, then his wounds from the second war are devastating: he becomes disabled and loses his bank job. The result of his second tour of military service is far from Russell’s expectation: he is not admitted to the superior Voices Lost with Femininity and Masculinity in The Beet Queen 97 white society; on the contrary, losing his physical masculinity, he is Othered and marginalized even further. Russell is also objectified as museum exhibits. His experience of objectification is recounted by Celestine again, “his two dress uniforms were asked for by the county museum. They now hang off a tailor’s dummy in a display case along with a list of Russell’s medals and a photograph. That picture shows him as he was when he came back from Germany, before Korea, when his scars were more attractive than now” (Erdrich 2006: 117). Whether it be his flesh, his wounds, his outfits, his photo, or his medals, every fragmented piece of Russell is usable. Museum visitors can appreciate the war hero’s parts, his uniforms and his image, or count how many medals he has earned. What the museum and the visitors value are the items sealed in the glass chests rather than the Native American in person or his Indian soul, which is useless and pointless to the country and the white citizens. Along with other exhibits in the museum, objectified Russell is dead, mute, dehumanized, and spiritless, who, in pursuit of ultimate masculinity, ends up in the cold display case. In this respect, through Russell’s experience of climbing to a higher social class, Erdrich exemplifies “objectification” as “a normative and functional concomitant of social hierarchy” (Gruenfeld et al. 2008: 124-25). 4. Voices Lost under Gender and Racial Oppression Aside from objectification, Sita and Russell are oppressed, which directly brings about their loss of voice. Sita becomes voiceless twice due to her “marginality and powerlessness” (Lakoff 1973: 45), which is how her oppressors expect her not to speak. For the first time, Sita is verbally and sexually oppressed and muted on her wedding day. Kidnapped by Jimmy’s brother and cousins who hate the way she criticizes Jimmy, Sita is flung to the backseat of a car, wedged between two men whose ceaseless deafening sex jokes threw her “into a state of repulsion that she lost her voice” (Erdrich 2006: 98). The abduction, confinement, and coercion of Sita is far more than a prank, but severe violence, which, according to The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women adopted by the United Nations in 1993, is defined as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, encompassing threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life” (World Health Organization 1997: n.p.). Being greatly frightened, disgusted, and humiliated by these men’s violence, Sita is terribly strained: her voiceless “hoarse croak” (Erdrich 2006: 98) is drowned out by the men’s roaring and thundering voices. This voice loss signifies her loss of power, freedom, and dignity. The car setting is precisely a miniature of the male-dominated society in reality where voiceless women are abused by voiced men, ending up Qianqian Chen and Joan Qionglin Tan 98 with the same result Sita experiences: being dumped like a piece of trash “onto reservation land, unfenced, fallow, deserted” (Erdrich 2006: 99). In these white men’s patriarchal mindset, women such as Sita are useless and lowly and deserve to be cast away as trash on the filthiest garbage dump, the Indian reservation. Finding herself at such a forbidding place, Sita “tries to scream,” but the only sound she can make is to faintly whisper “jackass” (Erdrich 2006: 99). From the moment her voiceless situation and her powerless status overlap, Sita’s fate begins to go downhill. Metaphorically, the woman is also sexually oppressed and silenced in the abduction. When Sita stands in the storm, the harsh and freezing wind “tore at her veil,” and “opened her dress suddenly from behind, turned it inside out” (Erdrich 2006: 99-100). And then, she is seen in the close-by Indian bar with her “[t]wo bare spike-heeled legs scissored,” “slashing lethal arcs,” “tearing one old man’s jacket,” and keeping up a “muffled and inhuman croaking” (Erdrich 2006: 100). Here, the “wind” symbolizes the men abducting Sita, the rapists; Sita’s “torn veil,” “opened gown,” and “scissored legs slashing lethal arcs” refer to the sexual assault; her “tearing the old man’s jacket” suggests her resistance to the rape and her wrath towards the violent rapists and indifferent onlookers; her “muffled and inhuman croak” implies her disempowerment and objectification under the circumstance of sexual oppression. The whole scene is an authentic revelation of a woman being gang-raped in public, which is brutal, vicious, ferocious, and inhuman. According to the official report, “the likelihood of a woman being raped or having to fight off an attempted rape is high” in industrialized countries, and, even worse, in developing countries, rape is “an ever-present threat and reality for millions of women” (World Health Organization 1997: n.p.). Erdrich, through the metaphoric portrayal of Sita’s being raped by her groom’s relatives, uncovers a bloody fact of sexual oppression: “[A] high percentage of rapists are acquaintances, ‘friends,’ relatives and those in positions of trust or power,” and many sexual assaults “are perpetrated by more than one attacker” (ibid.). Erdrich’s narration of the mass rape is her serious accusation of the rapists, the indifferent watchers, and most essentially, the patriarchal oppression of women. Based on Tamsin Bradley’s study, “43% of GBV (gender-based violence) survivors said they decided to keep quiet out of fear” (Bradley 2020: 197). In a similar way, Sita is also mute, partly out of fear and indignity, but mainly due to disempowerment. Apart from silence, one of the most severe consequences of sexual assault is the survivor’s “disintegration of the self” and destruction of “personal identity” (Brison 2019: 13). This is what happens to Sita: her face is “loose and raging, distorted, working horribly in silence” (Erdrich 2006: 100). After being raped, Sita’s physical self, signified by her deformed face, is destroyed, and worse still, her psychological self, symbolized by her silence and inability to express her fury and outrage, is devastated. She is no longer the beautiful, confident, powerful woman with perfect femininity, but a men’s broken sex toy, speechless and selfless. Voices Lost with Femininity and Masculinity in The Beet Queen 99 Sita is oppressed in her second marriage and loses her voice again. This time, her disempowerment is not attributed to sexual violence or verbal abuse, but more horridly, a crime, or a well-planned murder. After the abduction and restaurant poisoning scandal, Louis claims Sita has a nervous breakdown and gives her professional medical treatment. Behind his kindness lies Louis’s scheme of murdering the rich woman and seizing her property. The man’s first step is locking Sita up and keeping her under control by advising her to sell her restaurant and stay at home. Then he moves into Sita’s mansion and keeps a record of her daily behavior. Next, he severs her bond with the community, especially the church, hence he becomes the exclusive master of her mind as well as her body. The fourth step is his subconscious implantation into Sita’s mind of the dominant idea of inferiority and dependence, such as advising her to grow the low plants. With all this done, Sita is alienated from the real world and merely relies on him, which is the appropriate timing for him to play his trump card in this murder plan - persuasion and medication - the privilege of a licensed health inspector, to drive the woman insane. Being fully aware of the symptoms of sexual victims who tend to suffer from “seemingly justified skepticism about everyone and everything” (Brison 2019: 13), Louis lures Sita into a state of hallucination with his persuasive words. One of the most malicious examples is his instigation of Sita’s skepticism. When her cousin Karl Adare visits Sita, Louis uses his “earnest voice” to arouse Sita’s doubt: “Remember how the little scissors used to vanish from the dissecting kits? ” (Erdrich 2006: 151). After this thought-provoking question, he pushes Sita to further link Karl with theft, “Girls stole them to manicure their nails? ” (Erdrich 2006: 151). Stimulated by Louis’s emphasis on “stole” and seeing the evidence that Karl has taken Celestine’s Bible, Sita reports to the police about Karl’s “theft,” accusing him of stealing her expensive jewelry. Naturally the sheriff becomes a witness of Sita’s mental illness. In addition to his reinforcing voice, Louis also uses painkillers to aggravate Sita’s posttraumatic syndrome. With his easy access to prescribed drugs, he offers Sita painkillers enough to make her addicted and thus to worsen her hallucinations. As expected, after taking excessive dose of tranquilizers, Sita envisions herself walking over the dead on the Day of Judgement. “Paralyzed with fear,” she confesses her sins by repetitively gasping, “Mea culpa, Mea maxima culpa,” 1 and “We wake when we die. We are all judged” (Erdrich 2006: 153). From her words “Mea culpa, Mea maxima culpa,” it is salient that the perfect woman has wholly surrendered to men and the male-dominated society, and held herself responsible for all mistakes and misfortunes in her life. And the words, “We wake when we die” and “We are all judged,” are Erdrich’s omen to foretell Sita’s destiny: she is going to die, and she will not be released from her perpetually drugged state until the day she dies, and she will be judged by others, alive and dead both. In light of her hallucinations and mad ravings, it is manifest Qianqian Chen and Joan Qionglin Tan 100 that Sita has followed Louis’s plan, losing her senses, suffering the patriarchal oppression, heading for destruction due to her pursuit of perfect femininity. The woman is the voiceless victim of patriarchal dualism. As Alison Data Gallant pertinently observes, “traits are assigned (strength and weakness) that define the relationships (domination and submission) between categories. Subsequently the male locus becomes centralized and the female locus marginalized, the male the norm, the female the deviant, the male the self, the woman the other” (Gallant 1993: 66). So is the case of Sita. Getting accustomed to Louis’s centralized status, Sita is willing to be othered and marginalized, and she even chooses to be submissive. For four months, she has pretended that she has lost her voice, enjoying the utter dependence on Louis for everything until the moment she is sent to a ward, and Louis presents to the psychiatrist all of the years of archives of her eccentric behavior he has built up. This time, Sita is panicked. She “opened her mouth to try and say something in an ordinary tone,” but “nothing happened” (Erdrich 2006: 205). Louis’s encouragement of her voice loss and her reliance on him results in Sita’s authentic aphasia. When Sita pleads with him using facial expressions not to leave her in the mental institution, her voice of “the Other” is “simply silenced, not to be heard” (Krupat 1989: 3). Louis “took her hand off of his arm,” “sat her down” in her room, and firmly rejects her, “I can’t, I’m not even supposed to try and understand you unless you verbalize your thoughts” (Erdrich 2006: 206- 07). As a professional, the man is fully aware of the effects of his language and painkillers on the woman and is sure that Sita has been half crazy and she does not stand a chance of voicing her ideas. Louis’s bodily refusal and verbal rejection both cut off his bond with Sita and extinguish her hope of returning to normality. Following the nurse, “Mrs. Tappe” finds the green hallway like “an aquarium,” “a glass tank lined with algae” (Erdrich 2006: 206). Here, similar to the objectified names Jimmy calls her, Sita loses her name again. The woman is nothing but the attachment to Louis Tappe, and without the man, she does not even exist. Besides, Erdrich’s metaphor of the “aquarium” and “a glass tank lined with algae” compares the ward to a prison, and voiceless Sita in the ward to silent fish in the aquarium, both confined and restricted in a sealed place without freedom. As stated above, “arbitrary deprivation of liberty” (World Health Organization 1997: n.p.) is considered sexual violence, and this violence is committed by her “trustworthy” husband. Though aware of the conspiracy of Louis and trying hard to get out of the asylum, Sita “opened her mouth, moved muscles in her throat, but no sound came out” (Erdrich 2006: 209). Eventually, her pretended muteness becomes real voicelessness, and she is literally disempowered. Losing her name, her voice, and her freedom, Sita loses her identity. Ironically, Sita still keeps her perfect femininity even when she is dead. Taking the rest of her pills, she deliberately plans her death to keep an Voices Lost with Femininity and Masculinity in The Beet Queen 101 ideal appearance. To avoid being seen to die on the bed, she poses herself standing among her favorite bushes, wearing Adelaide’s ruby necklace, carefully dressed, eyes wide open, lips “in exasperation, as if she has just been about to say something and found out her voice was snatched in death” (Erdrich 2006: 291). In response to her previous omen, “We wake when we die,” at the last moment of her life, she is finally awake, trying to see more clearly the abominable world, attempting to speak out the truth of gender oppression. Sadly, however, her voice is sealed permanently by men and the society she did her utmost to please. Simultaneously, as for the other omen, “We are all judged,” dead Sita is still favorably judged by two men on her well-preserved femininity who exclaim with admiration that “age had made her more attractive by refining her features to the bare minimum” (Erdrich 2006: 321). From the men’s perspective, as long as “the mere presence of [a woman’s] flesh swells and erects the male’s sex” (Beauvoir [1953] 1956: 568), they do not bother to care who the woman is and what she is. It is even more hilarious that they are not even interested in whether the woman is alive or lifeless. The muted and deceased Sita being judged by the talkative and vigorous men manifests women’s repressed status in the male-dominated world - women are rated, manipulated, toyed, raped, and even murdered. Though women look alive physically, their minds and their self have long been dead. Women like Sita, though maintaining flawless femininity till death and conforming to the patriarchal social norms set by men, gradually lose their voice, identity, and life, wholly devoured by the gigantic binary oppressive conceptual framework. Analogous to the white woman Sita, the Native American man Russell loses his voice soon after his return from the Korean War. Far beyond his expectation of becoming the elite of the society, the Korean War he has committed to is publicly unnoticed. Two reasons can account for the public indifference towards the war. For one thing, having no confidence in the justice and rightness of the war, bearing more scars and wounds in their minds than in their bodies, the veterans chose to be silent about their formidable and ferocious war experience “with feelings of shame and humiliation” (Keene 2011: 1098). For another, American civilians were greatly concerned with the domestic economy and their livelihood, aggravated by the enormous cost of military spending (Pierpaoli 234). Thus, when coming home, the veterans realized that a sense of inadaptability and displacement insulated and alienated them from the world they had been familiar with. This is what happens to Russell, the representative of Indian veterans of the Korean War. The pride in his masculinity and past achievements makes him a man of few words, but the loss of his masculinity and glory makes him a man of no words. In addition to his posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a paralyzing stroke deprives him of his masculinity, which deals him a severe blow and brings about his “silence, or maybe even worse, his speech” (Erdrich 2006: 196). Qianqian Chen and Joan Qionglin Tan 102 There is a vast difference between “silence” and “speech.” In Cambridge International Dictionary of English, “silence” is defined as “a state of not speaking or writing or making a noise,” which is the choice one positively makes not to speak; conversely, “speech” is “the ability to talk, the activity of talking.” Russell’s loss of speech indicates, rather than his unwillingness to speak, his inability to give voice to his thoughts. When Mary visits him in the hospital, she is panicked to see that Russell “opened his mouth and huge shattered vowels poured out,” which are “urgent sounds” that she “tried to understand” (Erdrich 2006: 196). Here, it can be seen that Russell has a strong will to speak: “open” is an active behavior meaning he is ready to talk, and “huge” implies that he has a great deal to express. But his “shattered” language suggests his impotent speech, his broken body, and his smashed masculinity. In panic, he makes “urgent sounds,” trying to make himself heard. However, Mary, the representative of the white society that he has done his utmost to enter, fails to understand him. Realizing that he has lost his voice and he is misunderstood by the white girl, Russell goes “dim and silent once more,” and this silence falls into “a quiet that [Mary] could not crack” (Erdrich 2006: 196). His “dim” reaction stands for his vanished hope of assimilation, which has gone along with his masculinity and his voice. Meanwhile, his “silen[ce]” and “quiet” show his acceptance of voicelessness and powerlessness. Russell’s despair at his personal development in social hierarchy indicates that he is no longer the promising war hero, but a hopeless fragmented Indian. His flesh has been taken away by the state. His uniforms, medals and photo have been taken away by the museum. And now, it is time for his speech and voice to be taken away. With the disappearance of all his masculine features, his power and spirit to support his body are also gone. Piece by piece, part by part, Russell is losing every bit of his self. Therefore, muscular Russell, shrinking and sinking, is gone. With the loss of their voices, the perfect woman and man “immediately turn to us their objectivized side: they fall silent, close up, and congeal into finished, objectivized images” (Bakhtin 68). Russell’s last hope of assimilation is wrecked by the final scene at the Beet Festival parade. Transported by a windowless van as some sort of goods, knocked over and left ignored and helpless when hundreds of marchers pass by, Russell, decorated with all his medals, is positioned on a float of a graveyard surrounded by a white cross, plastic grass, and red poppies (Erdrich 2006: 299). As the float moves and people cheer in the parade, no one cares about the most-decorated war hero sitting in the burial ground. What makes the scene preposterous is that Russell, a lively human, is placed in the middle of tombs alongside the white cross and red poppies, the symbol of honoring dead veterans. This scenario gives a strong suggestion that Russell has already been deemed a dead man. Devastated by his invisibility and the man-made death at the banquet of honor, Russell sees his dead sister Isabel Kashpaw and follows her on old Chippewa’s Voices Lost with Femininity and Masculinity in The Beet Queen 103 “four-day road, the road of death,” speaking in a voiceless way, “I’m dead now” (Erdrich 2006: 300). This is the only utterance of Russell with the first person “I” in The Beet Queen which is overwhelmed by the chaos of the parade. Beginning with “I’m,” the sentence structure reveals who he is, namely, his identity. In the last episode of Russell in the novel, his identity is concluded by one word, “dead.” As ridiculed by Erdrich, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” (2009: 91). In other words, if an Indian is dead, he would not speak, nor think, nor resist, nor rise. In his subconsciousness, Russell realizes that this is the moment of his death, his voice sealed, his body paralyzed, his identity lost, and his life pushed to an end. The American Indian who has gone out of his way to fit into the mainstream society through his masculinity, at last meets the expectation of this community with his death and ultimate silence. 5. Voices Found in Resistance to Objectification and Oppression After demonstrating Sita and Russell’s failure to fit into the white-maleelite society with femininity and masculinity, Erdrich points a way out of these dead ends to women and Native Americans by illustrating Russell, Mary, Celestine and Dot Adare’s successful experience of gaining their voices. For instance, Russell’s construction of his voice and identity comes after his destruction: At first he was sorry that it had happened in public, instead of some private place. Then he was glad, and he was also glad to see he hadn’t lost his sense of humor even now. It struck him as so funny that the town he’d lived in and the members of the American Legion were solemnly saluting a dead Indian, that he started to shake with laughter. (Erdrich 2006: 300) What makes dying Russel amused is the ridicule of the scene that the American Legion in the town is “solemnly saluting a dead Indian.” Their celebration is not to honor his contributions to the country, but to cheer for his death. Russell finally wins respect and gets accepted by the white world as a good, dead Indian. Realizing that he has attained the goal he has been striving for all his life in such an absurd way, Russell cannot help laughing out loud. “Laughter,” as argued by Bakhtin, “embraces both poles of change” and “deals with the very process of change” (Bakthin 1984: 127). Russel’s laughter, on the one hand, signifies the relinquishment of his former pursuit of vanity. Now he comes to discern that no matter how hard he has strayed from his indigenous identity to satisfy his craving for access to the “superior” hierarchy, he is still utterly rejected by the “white elites.” Recognizing this brute fact, Russell understands his social-climbing has been nothing but a joke, and his most-decorated-hero title is nothing but a trick. Thereupon, by announcing “I’m dead now,” Russell renounces his old Qianqian Chen and Joan Qionglin Tan 104 identity as a soldier, as a veteran, as a war hero. On the other hand, his laughter symbolizes his new change, giving him “voices of an unfinalized and open dialogue” (Bakhtin 1984: 166). Russell is not a dead man. Instead, after discarding his false identity that has spawned his voice loss, he revives his voice again by laughing out so loud with the indigenous sense of humor that he “fell off the road, opened his eyes before he’d gone past the point of no return and found himself only at the end of the parade” (Erdrich 2006: 300). At this moment, he is reborn in his long-abandoned identity, a Chippewa. With this newly regained identity, Russell relinquishes the idea of joining the parade and assimilating into the white world with his muted voice and fragmented body, and he returns to his own roots and goes down his own road. Since Russell is alive, the four-day road does not refer to the road of death, but the way for living Chippewas to preserve old culture and customs and to develop the unique ethnicity of the Indian nation. In the face of the “too narrow” road, Russell is determined to stumble on and follow Isabel, who “continued forward and wouldn’t double back to help” (Erdrich 2006: 300). The way to foster the traditional Indian culture in such a context of racial barriers is so bumpy and rough that the predecessors are no longer able to assist the contemporary Native Americans. Still, Russell’s resolute laughter shows that Russell-like Indians will struggle and go on persistently and perseveringly however difficult the way is. Erdrich also guides women to offer up their voices. Interestingly, unlike Sita, the successful females including Mary, Celestine and Dot, the narrators in ten out of the sixteen chapters in the novel, are all devoid of femininity. Mary is never known as a woman, but is “opposite” of “delicate,” and is “built like a cement root cellar” (Erdrich 2006: 5, 333). Celestine is tall and “monumental,” with her body “more solid than the tree” (Erdrich 2006: 166, 143). Dot is “broad” and “solid,” using “loud volume of her voice” (Erdrich 2006: 181) to convey her “repressed rage and fantasies of revenge” (Farry 2006: 7). Without any aspiration to adjust themselves to the expectations of men, these women manage to resist gender objectification and oppression, establish their identity as masters of their own destiny, and speak loudly in confident voices. In The Beet Queen, the multiple voices of Mary, Celestine and Dot demonstrate Erdrich’s belief that women deserve a right to express themselves freely. In Bakhtin’s view, the characters’ voices “sometimes almost merge with the author’s voice” (Bakthin 1984: 72). Erdrich, in the interview by Eithne Farry, asserts that “Dot is definitely me, for sure” (Farry 2006: 7). In Erdrich’s biographical narration, Dot uses her “loud booming voice” to challenge the norms of male-elite supremacy in a “wild and unruly” way (Erdrich 2006: 215, 220). For example, knocking schoolboys down and grinding their faces in the dirt, she makes them her boyfriends; facing the defiance from the boy she has a crush on, she smashes the boy’s costume and openly disobeys the school play rules; screaming “I’ll kill you,” she Voices Lost with Femininity and Masculinity in The Beet Queen 105 opposes her godfather’s arrangement of being elected as the Beet Queen (Erdrich 2006: 333). Through the rebellious behavior of her alter ego to confront the male-elite ideology in her fiction, Erdrich “allow[s] her true nature to show” (Farry 2006: 6). By protesting against authorities without compromises and showing a true self, Erdrich uses Dot’s voice and her own voice to prove to men that women are able to be independent and successful. With her characters’ and her own loud voice, Erdrich illuminates the way forward for all women in the world of objectification and oppression - to be who they truly are and never stoop to please men with femininity. Conclusion In The Beet Queen, it seems on the surface that Erdrich is telling the stories of Sita and Russell, but in truth, she exposes the tragedy of white women and Native American men who have been impacted by the white-male-elite ideology and are committed to developing their sexuality to assimilate themselves into the so-called superior social class in postcolonial America. By building up their femininity and masculinity, they manage to exert influences over others and satiate their lusts. However, under the patriarchal and racial oppression, they lose their voices, their power, and their identity. The white woman, though maintaining perfect femininity, dies voicelessly in the male-dominated world. Conversely, the Native American man, though losing masculinity, by relinquishing his vain desire and returning to the Chippewa culture, is reborn with a loud voice that asserts its independence from the white-dominated world. In the meantime, other women’s experiences of making their loud voices heard manifest that women, whether white or of color, can be successful if they forge their true self without conforming to the men-set norms. The voices lost and found in The Beet Queen articulate Erdrich’s condemnation of the binary conceptual framework of gender and race, her opposition to fitting into the upper class with femininity and masculinity, and her fervent belief that “a word is spoken, or a song is sung not against, but within the silence” (Momaday 808). Notes 1. “Mea culpa” is from Latin used as an interjection, meaning “my fault,” or as a noun, defined as “an acknowledgement of one’s responsibility for a fault or error.” “Mea cupla, Mea maxima culpa” is an expression “from Catholic ritual that assigns blame to oneself” which means “through my most grievous fault.” (dictionary.com: online). 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