Tough as this young woman is, her survival is never guaranteed as she falls in with men who love her and men who abuse her. (And yes, they’re sometimes the same men.) You can’t help but share Margo’s raw hope each time she moves on, a little more wary, trying to figure out how to live. “She would count on no one to help or protect her,” Margo thinks, but wise as that decision may be — and it’s confirmed by her horrible experiences — it’s ultimately too lonely. In one of her darkest moments, she realizes that she had “let herself become a person who was no longer connected to other people.” Back on the water after another betrayal, “she climbed onto the boat’s back seat beside her rifle and curled there and thought about how nice it was to float, to let the river guide her.”
Margo may be paddling in the wake of Natty Bumppo, Huck Finn and Henry David Thoreau, but unlike those asexual heroes of the American wilderness, she’s a sexually active woman, which complicates our myth of the rugged woodsman considerably. It’s not long on her journey before “Margo had the feeling that her newly shaped body had a power that she needed to keep secret.” This is, after all, a story predicated on sexual violence, and when she can, Margo strikes back at one of her assailants in a singularly appropriate way. But what place is there — even in the wilds of Michigan — for a young woman who dares to live on her own and enjoy her own body? “Was it her worn jeans that made the woman call her freak?” Margo wonders. “Her worn Carhartt jacket? Was it her dark, heavy rowboat with its splintery oars? Or her gun visible on the back seat? Or was she a freak, plain and simple, a wolf girl, an aberration?”
Loading...
Comments