Ladies in exotic costumes, sausage rolls of hair across their foreheads, with puffed red mouths and eyelashes like toothbrush bristles: when I was ten, I believed in glamour, it was a kind of religion and these were my icons.
This quote depicts the physical aspect of society’s expectations of women when the narrator was growing up. Her idea of beauty as a child was formed by the models and actresses of her time and she pinned up their pictures all over her room to admire. These images were her first impression of femininity, despite being completely unrealistic. When the narrator later critiques Anna's version of femininity, it is this same sort of false, sterile image.
“God," she said, "what’m I going to do? I forgot my makeup, he’ll kill me... He’s got this little set of rules. If I break one of them I get punished, except he keeps changing them so I’m never sure.”
This quote depicts the fact that David is in charge in their relationship and that Anna adheres to his wants over her own. This quote also illuminates the pseudo-parental relationship they have in which David bosses her around like a father to a child, and shows the unrealistic and demeaning set of ideals women are expected to live up to in a way in which men are not.
But they’d killed the heron anyway. It doesn’t matter what country they’re from, my head said, they’re still Americans, they’re what’s in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus…
This quote portrays the narrator’s views on Americans and what they stand for within the novel. Even though the two men she thinks killed the heron are actually Canadian, she sees them as American because of what she believes they’ve done. Committing a senseless act of violence against nature, such as killing the heron, represents her view of Americans as being violent, greedy, and all-consuming. The sentiment of the group within the novel is that Canada is falling victim to America’s commercial greediness and the narrator fears the destruction of Canada’s nature at the hands of the Americans.
Nothing is the same, I don't know the way anymore.
The narrator is deeply disconcerted when she returns to her hometown and sees that things are different than they were before she left. A new road in particular symbolizes the disruption, making her literally unable to traverse the familiar path and leaving her discombobulated and anxious. This will eventually track with our knowledge of the narrator's fragmented sense of self, always caught between old and new, past and present, truth and lie.
During the night I have a dream about them, the way they were when they were alive and becoming older; they are in a boat, the green canoe, heading out of the bay.
This is a simple, serene image that reveals the narrator has made peace with her parents. She has faced them, questioned them, seen them for who they are, forgiven them, and moved on. Importantly, they are together, which is how she always viewed them; they are in the canoe, a non-mechanized, unobtrusive mode of conveyance; they are going into the bay, which symbolizes the vast unknown; and they are about the age before the narrator's personal life became complex and not something she wanted to share with them. They are moving on and so will she.
What he means is that a man should be handling this; Joe will do as a stand-in.
The narrator knows that Paul expects the narrator's husband to be in charge of the search for her father since he is a male and is thus ostensibly more suited to the endeavor's difficulty and danger levels. He doesn't even know or care that Joe isn't actually her husband; what matters is that he is a man. The fact that the narrator does not even bother to correct him is a subtle and effective reference to the way women experience casual sexism even in the most mundane of encounters. There are accepted expectations for what women can handle, and Atwood shows how men (and some women as well) often do not bother to interrogate the validity of those expectations before voicing their thoughts.
We could have lived all year in the company town but he split us between two anonymities, the city and the bush.
The narrator sees herself as a woman divided—a magician's assistant cut in half, a person with a "break" in their life, a separated head and body. This quote reveals that her father may have had something to do with her unstable sense of self, dividing his children's time between two very different locations. Children often have difficulty socially when they are not able to establish roots and form a community (her father's derision of the villagers also comes into play) and this fact, coupled with her father's and mother's representation of oppositional ideals and characteristics, offers insight into the narrator's troubled personality.
That's a lie, my own voice says out loud.
This moment in which the narrator corrects herself that an assertion she made mentally—that she always felt safe here on the island—is actually a lie may be the first time many readers start to wonder about the narrator's credibility—is she to be trusted? Does she trust herself? When she gives us her memories, is she able to present them accurately? From this moment on, readers ought to be aware that the narrator herself is working through her memories and trying to decide what is real and what isn't, and that it is important to be careful in assuming the infallibility and veracity of any of the narrator's claims.
I slip the ring from my left hand, non-husband, he is the next thing I must discard finally...
Alone on the island, the narrator purges herself of the parts of the past that no longer serve her. Most importantly, this past includes her "non-husband," he who did not love her, encouraged her to get an abortion, and made her question herself so fundamentally. The ring is a symbol of that relationship, and in her discarding it, she shows that she is ready to come to terms with the choices she made and release them from occupying her psyche so completely.
I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place.
The narrator has undertaken her visionary quest and no longer considers herself a human being. Being human is painful and messy and ends with death; it also means often being at odds with nature. Thus, she experiences a dissolution of her self, first feeling herself transform into an animal and then, in her last form, becoming something more foundational, more primitive than even an animal or a plant.
