Discordant Display Of Self: A Psychological Analysis Of Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum

Abstract

Individuals always tend to compare their real or actual self with the ideal or ought self. When their real self or actual self fails to meet the expectations in the ideal or ought self, characterised by the significant others or the individuals himself, people will tend to experience some emotional turmoil, leading to various kind of mental health issues. Louise Erdrich, an indigenous writer, portrays the native American lives, lifestyle, traditions, customs and rituals through her stories and characters. Being a native American herself she proudly presents the healthy lifestyle and the bond native American people share among their clan through her writings. Erdrich along with the external factors in the life of native American people, records the psychological terrors and issues faced by the people in her novels, through each characters. She also focuses on the struggles faced by the native people due to colonization and their idea of ethnic cleansing. Erdrich through each characters of her novel focuses on how individuals struggle to maintain the self, induced by the society and the so called norms of the society, while their actual self is in real discrepancy. The select novel, The Painted Drum, analyses the discrepancy between the actual self and the ought self through the character of Faye Tavers and her emotional turmoil. The novel delves deep into the darkest corners of the mind of Faye and records the fragmented self that yearns to assert the actual self. The present paper, Discordant Display of Self: A Psychological Analysis of Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum, analyses the select novel within the framework of Self-Discrepancy theory by Edward Tory Higgins and explicates the struggles and emotional imbalances faced by the individuals because of the inconsistency between their real self and ought self.