Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird's Ravenous

Margaret Atwood's interpretation of the concept of becoming or going Wendigo, discussed in her work Strange Things (1995), is useful to a reading of Antonia Bird's film Ravenous (1999). This essay will first investigate Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake (2003) as an application of her own conclusions regarding the Wendigo as a cultural metaphor. Then the essay will analyze Bird's deployment of the Wendigo in her film—which, unlike Oryx and Crake, directly establishes a specific temporal and geographical setting, during the Mexican-American war in the wilds of northern California—in order to consider how the iconic Wendigo serves as a symbol for a critique of Manifest Destiny and military resistance.