Material symbols and objects in Love Medicine

Love Medicine is a short story that connects many material objects to concepts related to love and spirituality.    Louise Erdrich wrote Love Medicine with the use of symbology to define many of the important plot elements of the story.  The title foreshadows a central theme by being named after type of material object (love medicine) t within the story that is used as a symbol throughout.  It is important to note that how physical objects within the story are tied to nonphysical concepts in the play related to life and death.  

One of the objects in Love Medicine with a spiritual connection was a wristwatch owned by Lamartine’s cousin who was also named Wristwatch.   Wristwatch inherits the watch from his father as a child and wore it for the rest of his lifetime.  The unusual thing about the watch is that it never actually worked after Wristwatch inherited the watch from his father (60).  He died later in his adulthood after eating dinner at his cousin’s dinner table and magically the watch he wore started to tick again after his death.  The watch a magical mechanism that is attached to human life and the watch responded to the death of Wristwatch.  Lipsha Morrissey, the main character, told this story to develop the concept of magical objects to relate it to his experience with love medicine.

The actual love medicine in Love Medicine was an important symbol that represents love, life and death.  Lipsha Morrissey tries to create love medicine in the story in order to reignite the love between his grandparents in the story; he creates the love medicine and his grandfather ends up perishing after consuming the Lipsha’s concoction.   The love medicine was a turkey heart from the store combined with holy water.  The “love” that the medicine was to produced was shown in a way that was more indirect than Lipha had originally planned.  Instead of his grandparents rekindling their relationship, the grandfather dies and brings the rest of the family together in order to grieve his death and express their love for one another.  This is a backfire, as the death of grandfather Kashpaw caused grief and sadness and ultimately lead to the loss of love.  

Lipsha is known to have magical hands in the story that are believed to have healing abilities that heal other characters in the story.  He loses faith in his ability to heal others, as his grandfather dies in his arms.  On line 160, Lipshas grandmother performs a ritual on him that is meant to restore his healing abilities in his hands.  She places beads in his clasped hands and ends up causing pain to Lipsa to point where tears start to form in in his eyes.  This pain is another representation of how the healing ability of his hands are actually causing more pain.