Margaret Atwood's Insanity

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The Insanity of Civilizing Nature Alone When I was 11, my family moved to the Yukon and I heard the term cabin fever for the first time. It is the insanity that sets in after people have spent too much time alone in the woods. The conflict of man versus himself, and man versus nature is a theme many Canadians are able to relate to. Margaret Atwood, a Canadian author, spent most of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec. Atwood’s childhood experiences and views on nature led her to write The Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer, which, explores the conflict of man versus himself and nature. Atwood’s utilization of thought development, diction, figurative language, and structure reinforce the concept of a man being driven insane…show more content…
The amount of words with dark, lost connotations are staggering: nameless, nowhere, darkness, resisted, absence, unstructured, deluge, disintegration. Furthermore, the range of emotions the settler displays such as: arrogance, dominance, paranoia, disgust, frustration, defensive, obstinate, exhaustion, uphold the concept that the man is emotionally unstable. Moreover, the settler’s contradictory emotions are another way Atwood presents psychological deterioration. The settler’s change from aggressive, where he is “proclaiming himself the centre” and “asserted into the furrows,” to trapped and tiny, and shouts “Let me out!” He then beings to feel paranoid, imagining animals pattering across his roof and believing “everything is getting in,” as well as determined not to submit to nature by resisting. From paranoia, the settler shifts to frustrated where he states “…not order but the absence of order,” and thinks “in that country only the worms were biting,” but at the same time obstinate as he continues to think “the land is solid and stamped.” At the end, with “eyes made ragged by effort” he is exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically by his conflict with nature and succumbs to madness. Nature “the green vision, the unnamed whale” reclaims the land that the settler had thought to be just an…show more content…
One way, is through the use of repetition. Phrases such as: “in the middle of nowhere,” “not order but the absence of order…was an ordered absence,” “refused to name themselves; refused to let him name them,” repeat to bolster the perception that the settler is thinking in circles. Furthermore, the personification of nature as an adversary also exemplifies the settler’s mentality. When the “ground replied with aphorisms,” and implies “an ordered absence,” it refers to the absurdity of his conflict with nature. Additionally, Atwood’s utilization of metaphors maintains the image by shaping them to become more obscure as the poem progresses. In the first stanza, Atwood delivers a very clear and concise metaphor where “He stood, a point on a sheet of green paper…” Afterwards, the stanzas degrade in clarity. All the way to the end, where Atwood employs an intricate and ambiguous metaphor “the green vision, the unnamed whale
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