Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. [Vol. 5.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 25)

Studies - Robert Murray Davis: Multiple Voices in The Death of Bernadette Lefthand

white outsider's attitude towards Indian culture. Querry gives her individualizing traits (pills, drink, lovers, a crazy husband), partly in order to show that the white world is far from ideal, partly to make her seem more than a mere convenience. But she is clearly useful. Bored and lonely in Dulce, which she finds stark and ugly, she collects Southwestern art, jewelry, and clothing. Curious about Indian life and culture, she has to gather information from reading because "Lord knows you couldn't get them to tell you anything about themselves" (31). She employs Bernadette as a maid, is drawn to her beauty of body and spirit, thinks of her as the only friend she has in Dulce, and regrets, far more than Bernadette or any of the Indians, the poverty in which she lives. Recognizing Bernadette's sadness as her husband's health and spirits decline, she offers to pay to send him to a "real doctor" because she has no faith in or understanding of Navajo healing ceremonies and regards belief in witches as mere superstition. In her last monologue, however, Starr is willing to admit that her inability to accept these ideas is "more a result of my own culture than of any unwillingness on my part to be open-minded" (183). Finally, speaking from feelings rather than superior while knowledge, she is both accurate and sympathetic: "Bernadette Lefthand is dead, and that something unspeakably evil and ugly happened to her" (183, 184). The major representative of the white world's impingement on the Indians, she is at the end far more sympathetic than the trooper who refers to Indians frozen from exposure as "popsicles" and thinks that, in contrast to "Your Mexicans and coloreds...Indians would rather kill themselves" (162) or than the white bigots from Lubbock in search of "some local Indian color" (39) who are lured into biting on a very old joke about how Indians get their names. Starr is literally alienated from her surroundings, but Gracie Lefthand, whose account (except for the epigraphs) begins and ends the book, is so much at home that she hardly seems to judge. Perhaps not all of American literature comes, as Hemingway asserted, from Adventures of Hucklebeny Finn, but Gracie certainly does. Like Huck, Gracie has little education, narrow experience, and an inherent shrewdness; like him, she does not think of herself as a victim; unlike him, she is not naive, nor does she admire or identify with the 61