In Gay’s novel, readers find a parallel to Atwood’s dualities as Gay confronts both Haiti and the U.S. In fact, in many of Atwood’s poems and stories, the context for the exploration of dualism and borders subtly shifts back and forth from the personal or the interpersonal to the national (Hutcheon 1988).
As Rosemary Sullivan writes in her biography of Atwood, within Canada “national identity and gender were both predicated on second-class status” (Sullivan 1998: 128). and woman/man-as Classen and Howes explain:įrom Atwood’s perspective, Canada has traditionally occupied, and internalized, the position of the female in relation to the dominant, male land to the south (Atwood 1982: 389), and so the figure of the female is well suited to represent the Canadian character. And in both dualities, Atwood writes about the intersections, Canada/U.S. When Atwood writes about women, she is also writing about men. When Margaret Atwood writes about Canada, she is also writing about the U.S.
Toward the final pages of Roxane Gay‘s An Untamed State, the primary narrator, Mireille, admits about her response to the earthquake in Haiti in the wake of her own personal horror of being kidnapped and repeatedly raped and tortured over thirteen days of captivity: “We sent money instead and it was then I felt like a true American” (p.
