The Antelope Wife

The Antelope Wife (1998, 2012) by Louise Erdrich is a novel of magical realism. The book won the 1999 World Fantasy Award. In 2012, Erdrich released an updated edition of the novel. This edition features new cover art, interviews with the author, and some entirely new content, including extra chapters. She adds back the characters and storylines dropped from the original text and repairs some of the glaring mistakes she caught. The story is multi-generational, following the Roy and Shawano families as they intertwine and break apart over the years. Erdrich blends time and the voices of her large cast of characters in this nonlinear narrative, showing that the mistakes of the past have a way of haunting us. The plot and the connections between the characters are confusing, but the book contains a family tree in the front matter that helps clarify matters.

The novel opens with a cryptic folktale of two twins sewing the world into existence, trying to outdo each other and sew beads faster. Each of the four parts that the novel is divided into (Bezhig, Niizh, Niswi, and Niiwin) contains another short piece of the tale and the sisters’ rivalry. These are important to note because throughout the book there are two major recurring motifs: sets of disruptive and magical female twins; and images of women sewing or stitching pieces of beadwork.

The first part, Bezhig, is about the origins of the way the families meet. Scranton Roy, the son of a Quaker, enlists in the military and goes west. In a tragic misunderstanding, an Indian village is attacked, and Roy kills an old woman. Horrified by his actions, he escapes the village and chases after a dog with a baby strapped to it. He rescues the infant and raises her as his own, naming her Mathilda. When she is ten, the girl’s grieving mother, Blue Prairie Woman, finds and retrieves the girl, but dies of a fever before she makes it home. The girl is adopted by a herd of antelope and disappears with them. Years later, Roy and his son, Auguste, return to the place where Roy killed the old woman and find her friends and twin grand-nieces, who forgive him for his deeds. He dies by his own hand, but Auguste stays with the family, marrying one of the twins (who are Blue Prairie Woman’s younger children) although he cannot tell them apart and suspects that he probably married both. He has four children by both women, three sons and a daughter. His sons fight in the First World War, and all make it home.



The second part, Niizh, takes place in the modern day. The narrator is revealed to be a magic dog, the Wiindigoo Dog. He informs the reader of the fates of Auguste’s children, focusing on Auguste’s feckless grandson, Klaus, whom he allows to break into the narrative to tell parts of the story from his own point of view because, “unfortunately, and to his own shame, best qualified to tell what happened next” (60). Klaus, a powwow trader, sees the four elusive and beautiful antelope women (descendants of Mathilda Roy) who come to the powwow. He is instantly enchanted with them and abducts one away with him to Minneapolis, despite warnings to leave the antelope women alone and to bring back the one he stole. Always mute, she occasionally escapes but always comes back for lack of anywhere to go. Everyone thinks there is something off about the antelope woman, called Sweetheart Calico, and they find hoofprints where there should be footprints. Eventually, Klaus and his friend Richard Whiteheart Beads, convinced that they are wanted by the law for illegal carpet stashing, go on the run. They leave Richard’s wife Rozin, Rozin’s twin daughters, and Sweetheart Calico behind. Grandmas Noodin and Giizis (also twins), come to visit Rozin. After an outing with the twins, Sweetheart Calico goes missing.

Part three, Niswi, recounts the births of Rozin’s twins, Cally and Deanna. They do not have traditional Ojibwe names, because the ones chosen by Noodin and Giizis are Blue Prairie Woman and a name suggested by a dream-visit from Scranton Roy—both names with heavy, tragic histories—and Rozin rejects them. In the present, the lack of naming ceremony is wreaking havoc with the twins because they have taken to wandering away from home and keep getting sick. Sweetheart Calico becomes increasingly malevolent, and the twins think she is trying to kidnap them into her world, as they are all beginning to realize that she is not human. She still lives in Rozin’s house, although no one realizes it, and her behavior is increasingly uncanny. Rozin finds a letter addressed to Klaus, asking him to bring Sweetheart back because her daughters are angry and wreaking havoc all over town.

In part four, Niiwin, Cally and Deanna ask their grandmothers about the missed naming ceremony and ask for their names. Giizis names Deanna. She tells them of a dream she had of one of their ancestors, the old woman killed by a young soldier so many years ago. The soldier shot at children, so she attacked him with a rock. He wounded her fatally, but she saw her granddaughter being saved by the dog—she had given the child her own name and cursed him with it. It had haunted him so much that he carved it into his own arm with a knife and then later killed himself. The name was Everlasting Rainbow, after the bridge that connects our world with the other one. Noodin’s story was of seeing beads of such a beautiful blue that she had to have them but knew they could never be bought. In a dream, the woman who owned the beads came to her and they gambled for the beads—the woman was Blue Prairie Woman, and when Noodin won the beads, she also won the name. Noodin bestows the name on Cally, and tells her if she wants the beads, she’ll have to bargain with their owner, Sweetheart Calico. Sweetheart’s price is her freedom. Klaus gives her up, along with his own addictions, and she returns home.