Untamed

Use these activities to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity. 

ACTIVITY 1: “Doyle’s Advice to a Fictional Character”

In Untamed, Doyle explains four “keys” that she believes can lead to freedom from the “cage” of gender expectations. In this activity, you will choose a fictional character whom you see as being trapped by society’s gender expectations and, writing from Doyle’s perspective, compose a letter to the character offering some advice about how to break free.

Part A: Choose a character.

• Your character can come from any work of fiction in any medium—comic books, television or web series, books, video games, etc.
• Choose a character from a source that you know reasonably well.
• The character you choose can be either female-presenting or male-presenting—do not choose someone whose presentation is androgynous.
• Choose a character whose life is significantly confined by social expectations for their gender—that is, someone pushed into a stereotypical performance of gender that does not seem to make them happy or fulfilled.

Part B: Write a letter of advice to the character, from Doyle’s perspective.

• Your letter should be at least a page in length.
• Consult the text of Untamed for typical features of Doyle’s voice, style, and tone; then try to mimic these as closely as you can. If you are not sure what these terms mean, consult this University of Maryland page; follow the hyperlinks for more detail on each term.
• In your letter, identify specific details of the fictional character’s gender performance that seem to limit their happiness and satisfaction, and give them advice about how to make positive changes in their life.
• Consult Untamed for ideas about how Doyle might approach giving advice to your chosen character:
• Is one (or more) of the four keys she talks about relevant to this situation?
• Is the situation similar to anything Doyle has first-hand experience with?

Teaching Suggestion: In this activity, students are asked to apply Doyle’s ideas to a new situation; this offers them a chance to demonstrate their understanding of Doyle’s text as well as to think creatively about how to generalize her ideas into a novel context. Mimicking Doyle’s voice, tone, and style will offer students insight into how and why these authorial choices impact readers.

Paired Text Extension

After reading Alice Munro’s short story “Boys and Girls”, ask students to discuss how Doyle’s advice to characters in this story might be similar to or different from the advice they dispensed in the letters they wrote to their own chosen fictional characters.

Teaching Suggestion: As students discuss how and why Doyle’s advice might change from situation to situation, ask them how their own advice might be similar to or different from Doyle’s, and why.