There is no question that Atlantic Canada’s social, cultural, political, and economic values, ideologies, and expectations are structured around the physical and imagined geographical space and historical reality of the region. Evidently, in the contemporary world, with abundant changes to discourse and, in turn, deconstructive ideologies, it is important to understand what structuralist models are most impactful in the broader socio-cultural world to be able to change them. Atlantic literary works, such as Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and David Adams Richards’ Nights Below Station Street, illustrate the all too real complexity of the regional lived experience and in doing so expose the basis of the structuralist model in which…show more content… In the physical sense, these characteristics usually include a large, stocky build and in the mental, a sort of aggressive confidence in speech, presence, attractiveness, and the ability to challenge and protect. This is often achievable through employment or financial/economic stability as expressed in the lived reality of these characteristics. Nonetheless, as suggested, each of these male characters exists both inside and outside of these patriarchal structured ideologies, and the reader’s ability to define their strangeness confirms Atlantic Canada’s patriarchal structure. In other worlds, these authors use their male protagonists to both address and challenge the patriarchal structures that exist in the Atlantic region as explained and understood by and through the theories of Mulvey and Gregory. As briefly discussed, these structured ideas of masculinity exist due to the physical geography of the Atlantic region that assuredly determines traditional masculine occupations and the “required” behaviours and skills to perform such occupations effectively. For instance, as Power suggests, “despite the low wages experienced by many inshore fishers, their peculiar semi-proletarian position offered men the opportunity to be their own boss, to work outdoors, and exercise a certain amount of autonomy” (Power, 104). Fishing is a crucially pertinent example of regional or geographically based occupations of the Atlantic region, but more so is this suggestion of agency with this work which is, as Mulvey’s theory suggests, in perfect correspondence to masculinity as defined and expected by patriarchal structures of Atlantic Canada. merely, men are the head of work, responsible for financial income, and,
