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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Plague of Doves, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ancestry, History, and Interconnection
Punishment vs. Justice
Land, Ownership, and Dispossession
Passion vs. Love
Faith, Music, and Meaning
Summary
Analysis
Evelina examines the three pictures on her kitchen wall: one of President John F. Kennedy, one of the Pope, and one of Louis Riel, “the visionary hero of our people.” Even though Mooshum’s family lost their large, prosperous farm because they donated to Riel’s cause and harbored his family, they still worshipped this leader of the would-be indigenous nation. After Riel was killed, the Milk family fled south, but they were so discouraged by Riel’s death that they had little motivation to homestead again.
Louis Riel was an influential Canadian politician. After first trying to work within the system, helping to found the province of Manitoba, Riel eventually led an armed protest against the Canadian government, resulting in the violent crackdown that forced Mooshum’s family to flee. The fact that Mooshum’s parents never regretted aiding Riel, despite the tremendous impacts it had on their livelihood, points to the depth of pride and inspiration they took from Riel’s activism.
Themes
Mooshum has a younger brother named Shamengwa, who, unlike Mooshum, is neat and reserved. History had “affected them in different ways”: Mooshum tells stories, while Shamengwa plays old songs with his crooked arm. Still, the men love working together to taunt the pompous new priest, Father Cassidy (or Father Hop Along, as the brothers mockingly call him). Cassidy is always trying to get Mooshum and Shamengwa to confess to some sin or another.
Though Evelina never knew either her grandfather or her great-uncle Shamengwa in her youth, even their present-day mannerisms and differences seem to make history manifest. Father Cassidy, Pluto’s incompetent White priest, will quickly come to embody all of Mooshum’s doubts and frustrations about Catholicism.
Themes
Tickled by Cassidy’s determination to get them to admit salacious wrongdoings, Mooshum and Shamengwa feign innocence. Finally, Cassidy seizes on the idea of “impure thoughts,” hoping the brothers will admit to lust. Mooshum and Shamengwa joke about fornication and foreigners, making puns until Father Cassidy leaves the house in a huff. As he goes, Cassidy tries to pet one of the family’s horses, and it bites him on the arm, further humiliating him.
Cassidy’s desire to get Mooshum and Shamengwa to confess seems motivated not so much by selfless faith as by the priest’s own salacious interest in hearing about his congregants’ “impure thoughts.” Father Cassidy’s role as the novel’s comic relief is then further underscored by his embarrassing interaction with the horse.
Themes
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Though Evelina’s brother Joseph mostly keeps to himself, studying various animals and learning the Latin names for plants, Evelina admires him greatly. Together, the two of them collect salamanders in jars. One time, Joseph decides he wants to vivisect a salamander. The salamander survives for a few hours, even with all its insides hanging out.
Like Evelina’s father, Joseph is scientifically minded, approaching the natural world almost as its own kind of religious faith to study and decode. Evelina’s uneasiness with the salamander’s death here helps to set up the symbolic importance salamanders and other reptiles will hold in the story (as sources of both revulsion and power).
Themes
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Mooshum, inspired by Riel’s final revelations before he was excommunicated from the Catholic church, insists that he doesn’t think there is real fire in hell, so hell probably cannot be so bad. Evelina’s dad agrees (“scientifically speaking”), but Clemence, the most observant Catholic in the family, believes in heaven and hell. Still, even Clemence will make fun of Cassidy, calling him a “fat fool” under her breath.
Though he does not articulate it explicitly, in using Riel to critique Catholic doctrine, Mooshum is perhaps hinting that part of his issue with Catholic faith is in its colonial application. Each character has their own complex relationship with this faith; even Clemence, a devout Catholic, struggles with Cassidy’s hypocrisy.
Themes
For her part, Evelina tries her best to make sense of Cassidy’s warnings against birth control and sex before marriage. Clemence is hesitant to explain things to her daughter, so Evelina finds guidance from her aunt Geraldine, who tells Evelina about sex. When Evelina worries she has to confess to such impure thoughts, Geraldine comforts her by admitting that she herself doesn’t confess such things.
Geraldine is more frank and sexually open than Clemence, a divide that will become increasingly apparent as Geraldine navigates her own romantic affairs. Evelina’s anxiety around confession, even at a young age, hints to the spirals of shame and guilt that will plague her as an adolescent.
Themes
Father Cassidy returns, and this time, he and Mooshum become embroiled in a debate about Riel. As Mooshum discusses how Indian land rights were violated by the U.S. government, his mangled ear flares with rage. Mooshum and Shamengwa discuss the meaning of “respect”: Mooshum argues that respect means respecting every part of oneself (including the “the male part”), while Shamengwa is more focused on the importance of political respect. The two brothers raise a glass: “To our nation! To our people!”
In this fascinating exchange, Mooshum explicitly links the kind of political respect Indians are often denied with the more personal “respect” he associates with sexual intimacy. In toasting to the Chippewa nation that the U.S. and Canadian governments have worked to destroy, Mooshum and Shamengwa are subtly challenging the power structures that Cassidy (and the Catholic church) represent—just as they challenge Cassidy by insisting on sex as pleasurable rather than shameful.
Themes
Mooshum has a crush on Neve Harp, Evelina’s paternal aunt. Neve calls herself “the town historian,” and she is always showing up at Evelina’s house, looking overdressed and fussy. Neve has two ex-husbands, one of whom is now in prison. But even in her advanced age, Neve boasts that she will soon have a third husband, and Mooshum, constantly writing her letters, is hoping it might be him.
Like Evelina’s father, Neve is White, a fact that sometimes makes her role as the self-appointed “town historian” fraught for Evelina and her family. Yet, in a testament to the novel’s constant contradiction and nuance, Mooshum also desires Neve even as he finds her frustrating or hurtful.
Themes
Evelina reflects on her family’s relative comfort and wealth on the reservation. Though the entire family is mixed-race (French and Chippewa), and though Mooshum eventually abandons the church entirely, they still all live in Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) housing. Unlike Geraldine, who lives in the “old house,” Evelina has plumbing and electricity.
Evelina’s musings here suggest that class on the reservation is determined mostly by one’s proximity to the U.S. government (as represented by the BIA), one more legacy of settler-colonial power. The “old house” where Geraldine lives is on the allotment where Mooshum and Junesse raised their children.
Themes
Later that summer, on an especially drizzly day, Joseph and Evelina return to catching salamanders. They are midway through this activity when Father Cassidy arrives. As Clemence pours the priest a drink, Cassidy mutters that some priests believe that salamanders represent the devils. Cassidy then asks Mooshum how he lost his ear, a question Mooshum “never answered the same way twice.”
Though Cassidy’s superstitions are often treated as foolish by the story’s other characters, the idea that salamanders (and other reptiles, namely snakes) have otherworldly power is on the narrative will frequently return to. Mooshum’s tendency to retell stories with new embellishments (“never […] the same way twice”) emphasizes that factual accuracy is different, at least in Mooshum’s mind, from emotional truth.
Themes
Sometimes, Mooshum says his ear got pecked away by the doves in 1896. Now, he tells Cassidy the fearsome story of “Liver-Eating Johnson,” an evil trapper who tried to eat Indians alive. Mooshum was too fast, however, and Liver-Eating Johnson only got a bite of his ear before Mooshum retaliated by biting off Johnson’s pinkie.
By choosing to tell Cassidy the (implausible) story of Liver-Eating Johnson, Mooshum teasingly hints that he will literally bite back at those who disrespect him (and, implicitly, indigenous people as a whole).
Themes
At the end of his story, Mooshum takes out a leathery piece of gunk from his pocket, which he triumphantly claims is Liver-Eating Johnson’s nose. When Cassidy is horrified (pronouncing this “positively pagan”), Mooshum reminds the priest that they eat Christ’s body at every mass. Father Cassidy is enraged by this comparison, and he storms out. In his eagerness to leave, however, Cassidy trips on a salamander, giving Mooshum even more fodder for his mockery.
Mooshum’s comparison between the gunk he (falsely) claims as a nose and the act of communion underscores Mooshum’s doubts about the underpinnings of Catholicism. In a funny twist, after muttering that salamanders are a symbol for the “devil,” Cassidy trips over one, almost as if the reptilian creatures were taking their revenge.
Themes
Soon after this incident, Mooshum really does defect from the church—he stops attending mass and instead attends the traditional ceremonies at the edges of the reservation (a fact he keeps secret from Clemence). When Evelina asks her grandfather to explain this change of heart, he jokes that he was motivated in part by a hope that there would be more single women at the ceremonies than in church. He winks at Evelina, knowing she goes to church only to see Corwin.
Mooshum’s rebellion against the Catholic church (and the settler-colonial history it is entangled with) is once again linked with sexual and romantic desire, as he explains to Evelina that part of his decision to change religious practices centered on meeting a woman. Again, therefore, both political and religious belief emerge as inextricable from love and lust, another testament to the Milk family’s “deathless” focus on romance.
Themes
