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This essay examines Antonia Bird's film Ravenous (1999) as an appropriative text that invokes the Wendigo myth and evaluates cannibahstic discourse more broadly in order to critique Western cultural crisis. Initially, however, the essay will describe Margaret Atwood's interpretation of the role of the Wendigo in literature in her Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, reprinted in Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995), to establish a paradigm for reading Bird's film. In the lectures, Atwood defines the Wendigo as a mythical creature with a "ravenous hunger for human flesh" originating in the indigenous stories of "Algonquian-speaking people such as the Woodland Cree and the Ojibway" who lived in the "eastern woodlands" of the northern United States and Canada (1995, 66). Storytellers frequendy associate it with winter, "a time of scarcity, which gives rise to hunger, which gives rise to selfishness," and possession by a Wendigo signals a human's "spiritual selfishness" (67) and greed. The process of this psychic and monstrous possession is, Atwood states, known as "becoming or going Wendigo" (62). In non-native tales, the Wendigo often emerges during times of imperial assertion, since imperialism relies upon an uncompromising path toward domination and its negative impact on people and their environments. To ülustrate the usefulness of Atwood's interpretation for reading Ravenous, this essay will also investigate her contemporary Wendigo tale, Oryx and Crake (2003), as an application of her own theory. The essay will then analyze Bird's deployment of the Wendigo in her film - which, unlike Oryx and Crake, direcdy establishes a specific temporal and geographical setting - during the Mexican-American war, in the wilds of northern California - in order to consider how the Wendigo serves to critique Manifest Destiny and military resistance.
Marlene Goldman's essay "Margaret Atwood's Wilderness Tips: Apocalyptic Cannibal Fiction" is a critical departure point for the argument presented in this essay. Goldman identifies Wendigo stories as "disaster narratives" (2001, 167) diat emerge "in social systems in crisis" (169). Goldman understands Atwood's narrative adaptations of the Wendigo in Wilderness Tips as vehicles for exposing "western culture's very own disaster narratives . . ." and for "registering] the ongoing impact of imperiahsm" (167-68). For Goldman, the power of Atwood's adaptive practice, and I would argue of many of her other...