64 pages • 2 hours read

The Mighty Red

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Parts 3-4

Part 5-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Books: Eat Pray Love, Madame Bovary, and The Road

Both Hugo and his mother Bev work in her bookstore, and the town of Tabor has a lively book club. Louise Erdrich weaves several novels into her book, using intertextuality to enrich her narrative and craft subtle points of engagement with the theme of Love’s Many Forms. Erdrich’s interest in love and human relationships underpins much of her work and forms a critical connection between The Mighty Red and many of her other novels. Books read by both the book club and Kismet, each in their own way, also investigate different forms that love can take, and they thus provide a window into the way that Erdrich’s characters understand their feelings and relationships. One of the book club’s first books is Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. This text traces the post-divorce journey of a woman who is learning to love herself after her marriage comes to an end. Many of the women in this novel wrestle with how to practice self-love, including both Kismet and Crystal, but also Winnie, whose marriage to the man whose father bought up her own father’s failed farm has an undercurrent of anxiety despite its happiness. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which Hugo gifts to Kismet, is a classic tale of love and adultery that becomes a catalyst for Kismet’s own self-understanding and reshapes the way that she conceptualizes romantic love. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, although overtly a post-apocalyptic disaster tale is, as Kismet points out, ultimately “about” a parent’s love for their child. Crystal’s own fierce love for Kismet is at the core of this novel. One of Erdrich’s key arguments about the nature of love, writ large, is that romantic love is not always superior to the love of a mother (or father) for their child, and that it should not be privileged above familial love. Each of these texts gestures toward key facets of Erdrich’s broader conversation about the nature of love, and their inclusion is an important aspect of this novel’s craft.

Plants and Pesticide

Plants, both those native to the Red River Valley and those introduced through agriculture, form a key motif within The Mighty Red, as does pesticide. Together, they help Erdrich to establish the importance of setting in her novel and to explore the theme of Industrialized Farming’s Environmental Impact. The Mighty Red is rooted in the history of the Red River Valley, the region in which Louise Erdrich herself grew up. Although a novel interested in love and human relationships, it is also attuned to the way that various social, economic, and environmental issues impact “ordinary” individuals in small communities. Erdrich notes the interwoven nature of settler-colonialism and farming in the Red River Valley at multiple points in the text, pointing out the way that agriculture fundamentally altered both life in the valley and the valley itself. Through her depiction of both the Pavlecky and Geist family farms and history, she tells the real-life story of the valley’s transition from the site of Indigenous staples such as amaranth and lambsquarters to an agricultural center for wheat and then sugar beet production. Sugar beets especially became a monocrop, and their cultivation (on an increasingly larger and larger scale) required heavy pesticide usage. The pesticides are harmful to people, native plants, and animals, and through her depiction of their use, Erdrich points out that environmental damage also harms individuals and communities. The novel ends on a hopeful note with the re-introduction of native plants, the gradual return of agricultural land to prairie, and the slow phasing out of pesticide use reflecting contemporary interest in mitigating the impact of environmental damage and gestures toward the possibility of regrowth and renewal.

Money

Money is a recurring motif in The Mighty Red. Its depiction of investments, family finances, and financial hardship grounds the novel within the history of the 2008-2009 financial crash and helps Erdrich explore the theme of Economic Instability’s Impact on Individuals and Small Communities. Money is mentioned throughout the text, from descriptions of the Geist family’s wealth juxtaposed with Crystal’s under-resourced household to the role that Martin’s lost church fund investments play in the novel’s complex plot. Each instance showcases the impact that large-scale economic issues and economic inequality have on working- and middle-class Americans, particularly those in small communities like the one depicted in this novel. The Geist family’s considerable wealth is only possible because Diz’s father bought Winnie’s family farm for pennies after they lost it. That loss was the direct result of Reagan-era economic and agricultural policies that forced small farmers to repay governmental loans at accelerated rates. Many families like Winnie’s lost their farms during this era, and Winnie’s family’s experience grounds the text within the history of small farmers all over the country. The death of this broad network of small family farms ushered in the era of corporate farming, and the Geist family’s large conglomerate is a reflection of that shift. Within the broader arc of this narrative, it is the small family farm that loses out and the large corporate farm that benefits. The 2008 crash’s impact was similar: Crystal notes time and time again in the novel that the government bailed out large banks while leaving ordinary Americans (whose investments those banks lost) without help or recourse. Here, too, conglomerates win, and individuals lose. Those individual losses in turn impact small communities: Towns like Tabor have less money, provide fewer economic opportunities to their inhabitants, and experience decline. Crystal’s strained finances are, although in part the result of Martin’s spendthrift habits, also the result of the Red River Valley’s economic inequality and the limited resources that were available to the region’s workforce. The money in Tabor is concentrated in the hands of families like the Geists while those who work to pick and process the sugar beets that they grow have no clear path to wealth or even true financial stability. Through these kinds of depictions, Erdrich raises awareness for the issues that small, rural midwestern communities face and illustrates the impact that large-scale governmental financial policies have on working and middle-class Americans.