Throughout YOTF, I could not help but notice Ren’s fascination with, and maybe even love for, Amanda, and from thinking about this, I realized that neither of Atwood’s novels (so far) have included queer relationships. In O&C, Jimmy is woman-hungry, going from woman to woman without any real regard to their feelings, aside from Oryx. The Crakers participate in a 4-men/1-woman “orgy,” but with that ritual being ingrained into them by Crake/Glenn, one can debate that their relationships are not relationships at all. In YOTF, the Gardeners have both single and married members, but those in relationships are in heterosexual ones. (Yes, “straight” relationships could contain queer members in them, but there does not seem to be any evidence to support this claim.) The only relationship, queer one that is, that stands out to me is Ren and Amanda.
Though one hopes Ren’s love to be reciprocated, her adoration for Amanda, for the most part, seems to be one-sided, as even Ren knows that Amanda does not tend to show emotion. In the final scene of YOTF, when Ren and Toby rescue Amanda from the two painballers, Amanda starts crying hysterically, which really threw me off. As Ren says, “it takes more than a lot to make Amanda cry” (420). When they both reunite after the Flood, Amanda tells her, “I knew you weren’t dead…You get a feeling when someone’s dead. Someone you know really well,” (323) and that felt like Amanda letting herself show emotion for someone she cares deeply for.
When Ren finds out that Amanda is dating Jimmy, though in the novel she emphasizes her heart being broken by Jimmy, my ~queer heart~ believes that she is also distressed over Amanda dating someone else. I think the combined turmoil of having your best friend, whom you have a crush on, dating the first boy you ever fell in love with, who also broke your heart, must be tough. When Ren explains her sadness, she says that “It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn’t how it was going to be for me.” (301)
I could not help but think of Jimmy’s perspective from O&C, where a major part of the novel was him whining about Oryx, and so reading Ren’s relationship issues, being from a female’s perspective, was a sort of breath of fresh air. Whereas Jimmy’s problems were rooted in a white savior complex where he needed to rescue the damsel in distress, while also exploiting and mistreating the other damsels he encounters along the way, Ren’s dilemma is very relatable, as a young, queer woman living in a patriarchal society, one that exploits a young woman’s sexuality and uses violence as a means of entertainment and personal gain, just as the Pleeblands do.
It is also interesting how different Ren and Amanda are, and even Ren recognizes it. Throughout the novel, Ren is seen as fragile, by Jimmy, Toby, and even herself. She lays her heart out, not holding back with her emotions, making herself vulnerable to her peers and to the reader. Seeing as Ren is one of the two main narrators, we get a much clearer insight into her life than we do with Amanda, who we have only seen through Jimmy and Ren’s lenses so far. Ren’s inner turmoil with her relationships with others leads her to Scales and Tails, where she feels comfortable in her body and her sexuality, while Amanda, who knows how to use her body in previous trades for drugs, uses art to express herself after departing from the God’s Gardeners. When Ren is trapped in Scales and Tails after the Flood, she creates her own reality, one with Amanda “smart and strong…smiling…[and] singing” (284).
