WILDERNESS TIPS
by Margaret Atwood, 1991

Because the prolific Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has published a considerable number of novels and poetry collections, critical evaluations of her work have tended to ignore or downplay her short fiction. "Wilderness Tips," which originally appeared in the magazine Saturday Night, is the title story of her seventh collection. Critical reception to the volume of stories was rather cool; a longstanding critic of her work, Sherrill Grace, reviewing it in the Canadian Forum, expressed some frustration with its replaying of by-now-familiar Atwoodian touches of irony and wit, even while she praised the stories for their sheer verbal pleasure.

"Wilderness Tips" counters Grace's charge in that it shows Atwood refining rather than mimicking her previous fictions. In particular it shows Atwood refining a subtle form of allegory by merging psychological study and political analysis. George, a Hungarian immigrant to Canada who is married to one of a trio of Canadian sisters but dallies intermittently with the other two, is a modern-day Paris set among three goddesses. The apple: his sexual attentions. The three sisters—the euphonic-sounding Portia, Prue, and Pamela—embody the various strategies women have traditionally adopted in order to placate men: Portia, the long-suffering angel-in-the-house wife; Prue, the risk-taking, blasphemous, sexual adventuress; and Pamela, the intellectual virgin—or so it seems at first. With the denouement (the sexual encounter of George and Pamela) this neat triad dissolves, however, and the reader is forced to reconsider such neat categories. "George realizes that a good deal of what she says is directed not to him or to any other listener but simply to herself. Is that because she thinks no one can hear her?… He wonders if she's ever had a lover." By the end of the story readers are "wondering" rather than categorizing.

But "Wilderness Tips" is rich because along with this Atwoodian concern with female scripts and revisionist mythology Atwood has constructed a troubling political allegory. The setting of this menage a quatre, Wacousta Lodge, echoes the title of a nineteenth-century Canadian text: Major John Richardson's Wacousta, in which a European man disguises himself as a Native American confidant of Pontiac and plays out an old sexual vendetta against a British comrade who has ousted him in the affections of a young woman. Richardson's text has frequently been read as an exploration of the uneasy Canadian negotiation of the wilderness-civilization opposition. So too in Atwood's story sexual jealousy that reaches out from these four characters' pasts raises the whole question of whether there are any "tips" for taming the "wilderness" within.

There are two approaches to this question in the story: George, as an immigrant, believes in the myth of the sacrosanct New World civilization. As Atwood's narrator points out, "He didn't want to desecrate Wacousta Lodge: he wanted to marry it." But the new generation of the lodge feels differently: a younger Prue wanted to "break some family taboo," to revel in wilderness by introducing George to the Waspish lodge and flaunting his exoticism—and eroticism—in front of the other inhabitants. Pamela finds odd nostalgic comfort in recalling the lodge of the war years. Portia is also trapped in the past, though her entrapment consists of replaying the family dramas: "I married a man like you," she informs the dour portrait of her great-grandfather that hangs in the bathroom, "a robber king." What we have, then, is a love quadrangle that also functions as an allegorical reading of Canada at the crossroads, neither willing to embrace change and new ethnic voices nor able to feel entirely easy at the thought of being stuck in the past. As the sisters' brother Roland reflects, he has never been able to conceive of Wacousta Lodge as anything but "the repository of the family wars."

Still George does desecrate Wacousta Lodge at the end of the story. In spite of his injunctions to himself to keep all dalliances with Prue confined to his city life, he ends up muddying the waters of the wilderness lodge—with Pamela. Just as the British officers of Richardson's Wacousta allow their loves and hatreds to spill over into the pristine New World, so too George's belief that he can be a peaceable intruder on Wacousta Lodge is revealed as the rationalization of a rather greedy man. Throughout "Wilderness Tips" his sexual appetite is consistently paired with financial greed. The paper that he casts aside before sleeping with his wife's sister is the Financial Post. And, years before, when he engages in one of his sexual skirmishes with Prue at his office, he spills papers from his desk that concern, he recalls, "a take-over plan." For Atwood those who wallow in nostalgia are all too likely to fall prey to a take-over plan of menacing proportions.

But Atwood inserts another variation on this Canadian nostalgia trip: the brother Roland's old desire to be an Indian. Like Richard-son's Wacousta, he "goes Indian," but in Atwood's fiction the attempt is sadly comic; the young boy runs about Wacousta Lodge with "a tea towel tucked into the front of his bathing suit for a loincloth," his face darkened with "charcoal from the fireplace" and "red paint swiped from Prue's paintbox." Even when the nonnative dons the feather, the accessories must derive from the kitchen, the guarded domestic hearth, and the paint-by-numbers box of European civilization. Still, for all of its comedy Roland's attempt wins Atwood's sympathy. Of Roland's Indian myth, her narrator asks, "How can you lose something that was never yours in the first place?" Margaret Atwood, setting her "Wilderness Tips" in the summer of 1990—the summer when the Canadian army was sent to "subdue" Mohawk men and women at Oka—asks this question for all nonnative Canadians, who lost something that summer too.

—Lorraine M. York