A Contemporary Siren’s” Bird Suit”: Negotiating Belonging in The Year of the Flood

Abstract

This article reads Ren as a contemporary Siren by examining the “bird suit” in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood alongside its appearance in her poem “Siren Song.” Drawing on Entwistle’s account of dress as embodied practice and Gill’s analysis of neoliberal individualism, it traces Ren’s changing experiences of clothing across different communities and examines how she negotiates recognition and belonging. The analysis reveals a persistent gap between visible membership and emotional acceptance. At Scales and Tails, costume and performance enable Ren to claim bodily space, manage personal disclosure, and gain recognition. These forms of situational agency nevertheless operate within an institutional hierarchy that distributes protection according to commercial value. Read alongside the Siren’s plea to escape her costume, Ren’s attempts to use the bird suit reveal how promises of independent self-creation mobilize women’s desires for recognition while making acceptance conditional on a marketable appearance. The recurring costume thus materializes the tension between personal choice and conditional belonging. Atwood’s mythic rewriting exposes how women’s active self-fashioning can remain entangled with bodily commodification, complicating a linear narrative of movement from oppression to liberation.