Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is considered to be one of the most significant Canadian female writers of the twenty-first century.  She is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. In addition to this she is an active supporter of women’s rights and Native Rights and she is also involved in the struggle for better environment. All in all, Margaret Atwood is a very favourite person in Canadian society. She becomes aware of the real problems which have been faced by the Canadian people. Her most of the novels deal with the Canadian consciousness and the cultural conflicts between the Canadian people. It is very praiseworthy that she got various awards for her literary contributions. Her contributions to Canadian literature were most recently recognized in 2000 and she was awarded with Britain’s highest literary award namely the Booker Prize. She donated the Prize amount of $47, 000 to environmental and literary causes.

Surfacing:

Surfacing (1972) is the second novel by Atwood. It has been called a companion novel to Atwood’s collection of poems, Power Politics. The novel grappling with notions of national and gendered identity, anticipated rising concerns about conversation and preservation and the emergence of Canadian nationalism. The book tells the story of a woman who returns to her hometown in Canada to find her missing father. Accompanied by her lover and another married couple, the unnamed protagonist meets her past in her childhood house, recalling events and feelings, while trying to find clues for her father’s mysterious disappearance. Little by little, the past overtakes her and drives her into the realm of wildness and madness. It was adapted into a movie in 1981.

Surfacing is structured like a journey of the nameless protagonist in which through her association with the people and nature, she becomes aware of different victims and victimizers. The novel probes into the matter of artistic death of women and abortion. The novel has the theme of submersion or drowning and surfacing. Symbolically it is the inward journey of a woman to explore or understand herself. After submersion there occurs a process of surfacing. Her quest for identity and self-discovery is social as well as psychological. Besides, the novel explores the theme of woman as victim and her evasion of destruction. She leads a life with all its short-comings after her evasion of destruction. She accepts life with all its short-comings after her confrontation with civilization and wilderness and past and present. The novel is divided into three parts. Part one describes the physical background and introduces the characters. The protagonist’s father’s disappearance and her search for him is described in this part.

In the process of discovering the circumstances surrounding her father’s death, she regains touch with her past and her hidden emotional life. The narrator’s father is a pacifist and rationalist. A botanist and tree scientist by profession, he retires to the family cabin where he begins studying Indian rock paintings. He wants to preserve the myth of pristine wilderness but failed to protect the island against devastation. He cannot see truth but with his maps, drawings and pictograph he can show the way to the place of the gods. It was to protect his family from evil and the irrationalities of civilization that he had secluded them in the Canadian wilderness where he thought that World War II would be just a subject for the game of children. He does not wish to reason away evil alone but religion too. He thinks that one has to struggle in order to survive. The journey the protagonist undertakes to locate her father “is not only to her parents’ land but into her own past, into her own history, her origins” (Avtar Singh 77). The protagonist’s journey to the family cabin touches her with past and hidden emotional life. The narrator finds that Canada is now a victim of Americanism. She remembers all features of the city at the time of her childhood. The narrator then goes to the village musing to herself how she had an unhappy childhood at the time of war. She passes a dam that controls the lakes, and it triggers a memory from her childhood. She and her parents were canoeing out to their cabin in a thick fog when they realized they had lost direction and were nearing some rapids. What the narrator remembers most clearly is a feeling of total safety. She visits the house of Paul, her father’s friend, and is shocked to see the new technical modification there.

In the second part, the narrator offers bread crumbs to the birds and is reminded of her mother who showed love for the birds. She also thinks of an occasion when her mother drew away an attacking bear. Joe now suggests the narrator that they should get married soon. But as her first marriage culminated in divorce, the narrator does not want to repeat the same mistake. Joe expresses doubts whether his relationship with the narrator is profound and meaningful.        During the fishing trip, they see a dead heron kept hanging upside down from a tree branch to which it was fastened by a blue nylon rope. First the narrator suspects that the Americans have senselessly killed the bird. She considers them as a threat to the environment. Her paranoia about her father following or threatening them is now replaced by a fear of Americans. She suspects them to being spies. She finds the idea that they are still in the area very threatening. She remembers stories she heard as a child about Americans. The narrator later realizes that the killers are Canadians who are anxious to imitate the Americans. She is afraid that Canadians are turning into ‘Americans’. The narrator dislikes killing of any kind.

In the last part, the narrator wants to make amends for the past action by bearing a child for Joe. She surfaces now after realizing the truth about herself. She faces the truth about her situation. She was never married, therefore, the question of divorce did not arise; that she had not lost her husband in the court; that her pregnancy was terminated against her wishes as she was not married to the person who had impregnated her; and that she, too, was indirectly responsible for terminating her pregnancy. The narrator realizes that in the past she has avoided taking responsibility for her actions by pretending that she was powerless and could not hurt anyone. By accepting the truth about her past, especially about her abortion, she has also come to accept responsibility for herself and her actions. She is not a passive victim now. She refuses to be a victim. Running away and distorting the truth is no longer a way of dealing with herself and others. Thus, the novel ends on a note of optimism. The protagonist, at last, “has found what she needs to begin a new, complete, and free life”. One can say safely that the protagonist emerges as a newly integrated and realized self in harmony with the world by the end of her journey.