Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s reflections on the short fiction of Alice Munro represent commentary from one Canadian literary great on another. Fittingly, Atwood provides any number of insightful reflections on Munro’s work, each of which could be the basis for further study. I would like to focus briefly on just two of these: sex and sexuality as they are represented in Munro’s works, and Atwood’s observation that in Munro’s works “a thing can be true, but not true, but true nonetheless.” Taken together, both of these observations allow us to better understand Herb Abbott, the kindly but ambiguous foreman in “The Turkey Season.” Herb is naturally a character of interest to readers and critics, in part because he is a character of interest to the narrator …show more content…
Quite apart from what relationships Herb may have had with men, his failure to marry and seek a family makes him an outsider to the world of heterosexual married couples, the dominant cultural group in this society. Even if Herb was what we might consider heterosexual, his lack of conformity with the expected mores is enough to lead to speculation about his sexuality, and perception (specifically, an individual’s ability to “pass” as straight, or as a particular gender) plays an important role in the shaping of queer identities. Put simply, Herb is written as a character whose experience mimics that of many LGBT people, both historically and in more contemporary settings, because––in his cultural context––Herb is a sexual minority. That the narrator refuses to label Herb’s experience only reifies this. By refusing to offer an explanation, Herb is and isn’t a homosexual. Paradoxically, both are true and neither is true. This experience of being both and neither is one that continues to circulate in contemporary LGBT discourses, as non-heteronormative people increasingly challenge the narrow definitions of queer sexuality put in place by a patriarchal and repressive