Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature

Shannon Hengen is an associate professor of English at Laurentian
University and the author of Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors,
Reflections and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry.

Delivered at Oxford University as the Clarendon Series, these lectures
represent Atwood’s views on the subject of the Canadian North in
Canadian literature. She takes pains in her introductory paragraphs to
remind her audience that she is interpreting texts as a writer, not as a
scholar, and that “as we all know, the insides of writers’ heads
resemble squirrels’ nests more than they do neatly arranged filing
cabinets.”

The first of the lectures treats the Franklin Expedition, and what
Atwood claims has become a dominant attitude toward the North among
Canadian male authors as a result of that failed venture (“the North
was uncanny, awe-inspiring in an almost religious way, hostile to white
men, but alluring”). The second lecture treats another attitude that
emerges in Canadian literature, “the desire among non-Natives to turn
themselves into Natives; a desire that becomes entwined with a version
of wilderness itself ... as the repository of salvation and new life.”


Lecture three treats the Wendigo (one aspect of “being driven crazy
by the North”);

working from texts in which this fearsome creature appears, Atwood
suggests that Native and non-Native ways of going insane in the north
show a kind of “cross-pollinating [of] one

another’s inner landscapes.” The Wendigo stories she recounts are,
with one exception, told by men. Her final lecture treats female
author’s views of the Canadian North and concludes that authors cast
the wilderness as female when their protagonists are male, but as
neutral when they are female; it ends with her belief that “Canadians
have long taken the North for granted and [that] we’ve invested a
large percentage of our feelings about identity and belonging in it”
while not fully acknowledging environmental threats to its future.

Strange Things mirrors Atwood’s earlier book of Canadian literary
criticism, Survival, and is open to the same kinds of criticisms. Her
choice of texts on which to base her interpretations seems quirky. Her
tone is hard to determine—somewhere, apparently, between ironic
detachment and passionate attention. She may at times mislead through
overgeneralization. Still, her intelligence and wit prevail.