In “The Unnatural and Accidental Women” the scenes are described to have a “black-and-white picture feel”, animated by the “bleeding-in color” as the scenes unfold, allowing the reader or viewer’s imagination to illustrate the scene. “Colours of personality and spirit, life and isolation” create the women’s realty and create a particular landscape within the women’s worlds and hotel rooms.  Aunt Shadie and Rose are at the top level from the beginning, which represents their own spaces and their own world.  The elements of Act One are “trees falling, falling of women, earth, water flowing/transforming.” The falling down of trees and women is reminiscent of Lee Maracle’s idea that the violence against the earth is directly related to violence against women.  The environment or “place” in this play is quite dark and obscure, which not only represents the women’s reality living in the Downtown Eastside and the isolation which they experience in this context, but also allows the reader to project their understandings onto the scene. In the second act, the scenes take place in Rebecca’s apartment in Kitsilano, “but reflect the symptoms of urban isolation even without being on Hastings Street.”

Though the setting of “The Kiss of the Fur Queen” is quite different to that in “The Unnatural and Accidental Women,” the themes of repression and social isolation are also central.  The residential school which the boys go to has enormous rooms in which the boys lose their identity and cultural heritage.  When Champion arrives at the school, the narrator describes  “long, white passageway(s) that smelled of metal and Javex.”  The school is described as a “sprawling orange-brick edifice” with “two enormous gravel-covered, fenced in yards.”  These descriptions of the school emphasize the oppressiveness of the residential school and for me were reminiscent of a prison.  The “space” of the residential school is very different to the “space” in which the boys grew up in Manitoba where they had many more freedoms.  Later on in the novel, the city is described as a place with lots of violence as well as a space for the brothers to become artists and independent individuals.  As the lecture notes describe, cities in the novel are described as “the last frontier” and “uninhabited lands,” I think that in a way these descriptions speak to the effects which settlement has had through the changing landscape of the boys’ hometown.  “The last frontier” evokes the sentiment that this land is something to be conquered or taken over for settlement.

In both of these pieces, the characters are in radicalized spaces which as Goldberg says is a way to regulate city spaces by preventing minorities “from polluting the body politic  or sullying civil(ized) society.”  These marginalized individuals are also excluded from or experience oppression in white, middle-class areas and are either forced or given incentive to remain in marginalized and racilized areas.  In the case of “The Unnatural and Accidental Women,”  much of the play takes place in the Downtown Eastside which is home to many Indigenous women and in Highway’s novel, the boys go to Winnipeg after leaving residential school which has had the highest urban aboriginal population in Canada.