Surfacing: Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College. Paul is an old acquaintance of the family whom the narrator has known all her life. He appears to have been friends with her father and is the one who first noticed he was missing. Although he is a French-Canadian, he speaks English. Like the protagonist's father, Paul represents the simple life and, like her mother, he is closely linked with nature and growing things. Madame The hanged heron at the portage represents the American destruction of nature. The narrator obsesses over the senselessness of its slaughter, especially that it was hanged and not buried. The heron’s death emphasizes that the narrator defines someone as American based on his or her actions. She condemns any act of senseless violence or waste as distinctly American. That the bird is killed with a bullet and hanged using a nylon rope emphasizes the subversion of nature to technology. Also, the narrator thinks of the hanged bird as a Christ-like sacrifice, which reflects Christian ideology. By using Christian ideas to describe nature, the narrator emphasizes her near-religious reverence for nature. The narrator also compares herself to the heron during her madness, when she worries that the search party will hang her by the feet. By associating the narrator with the hanged heron, Atwood associates the way Americans destroy nature with the way men control women. Makeup A remote island in the Canadian wilderness, a missing family member, an abusive marriage, and an unstable narrator— Surfacing (1972) has all the makings of a horror novel, but the intensity of Margaret Atwood's (1939-present) novel is psychological, not physical. Atwood's second novel, Surfacing follows a group of characters who venture into an island near Quebec to find the narrator's missing father. Instead of uncovering the missing man, the narrator uncovers parts of herself that have long since been repressed. Surfacing examines themes such as the domination and alienation of women and the reclamation of identity. Keep reading for a summary, an analysis, and more. Surfacing Summary With the news of her father’s death, the narrator and her friends decide to go home. Instead of going with them, the narrator abandons them. She takes David’s film and destroys it and leaves by boat. Now she is alone on the island and she begins to become more unhinged as she destroys her own artwork, the furnishings of the cabin, and envisions her dead parents. She abandons her clothes, begins eating plants, and lives in a burrow.

Anna’s makeup, which David demands she wear at all times, represents the large-scale subjugation of women. The narrator compares Anna to a doll when she sees her putting on makeup, because Anna becomes David’s sexual plaything. At the same time, makeup represents female deception. Anna uses makeup as a veneer of beauty, and the behavior is representative of the way she acts virtuous (but sleeps with other men) and happy (but feels miserable). Makeup goes completely against the narrator’s ideal of a natural woman. The narrator calls herself a natural woman directly after her madness, when she looks in a mirror and sees herself naked and completely disheveled. The narrator comments that Anna uses makeup to emulate a corrupt womanly ideal. The Ring The woman feels anesthetized. She can describe her surroundings vividly, but they evoke little emotion in her. The remoteness and loneliness of the wilderness mirrors her inner reality. She talks about a husband and child, but they have never existed. The reality was that a man she loved abandoned her, after coercing her into an unwanted abortion. Commercial art, her profession, now seems a prostitution of talent. She calls herself an escape artist.He’s enjoying himself, he thinks this is reality . . . He spent four years in New York and became political, he was studying something; it was during the sixties, I’m not sure when. My friends’ pasts are vague to me and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for a year and the others wouldn’t notice. The novel, grappling with notions of national and gendered identity, anticipated rising concerns about conservation and preservation and the emergence of Canadian nationalism. [2] It was adapted into a movie in 1981. There is not much action at all. There is no fighting, no gun play, no tree masking, no aliens. For instance, in The Kurosawi Corpse Delivery Service which is a manga I have read there is mutilation, embalming and martial arts fighting, it is an exciting story. But in Surfacing there isn’t any of that. The Prot spends a lot of time looking for somethig, either the missing father or something else. If you ask me, I think it was excitement she was looking for.

This is my third Atwood book after The Handmaid's Tale (which I studied in college) and The Blind Assassin (which I read of my own accord at University). Atwood has always interested me as a writer but never particularly enchanted me. Here was the first time I was genuinely stunned by her control of language; the prose in Surfacing is wonderful, a true pleasure to read from start to finish. The story’s themes encompass not only the psychological consequences of separation but also Canadian nationalism, feminism and environmental concerns. In my view, the additional themes are simply touched upon. They are mere side commentaries to what is supposed to be an exciting mystery. I do not even think the central mystery of the missing father is adequately probed.And, I'm going to be honest here. . . I kind of hate her. Seriously, I don't know if a woman could be less relatable to me. She is wishy-washy, she is totally disconnected and unattached from her self, other people, and certainly as far distant from a spiritual being as a human can possibly be.

The central protagonist is a woman in her late twenties. She is unnamed and the narrator of the story. She is searching for her missing father, who had been residing on an island in a lake in northern Quebec. She travels there with a lover and another wed couple. It is on this island that she herself grew up. Returning there, leads her to reexamine her life. Paul explains that he and the police have looked all over but have seen nothing. He asks if her husband is here and she says yes, knowing he thinks a man should be here and doing these things. Joe is not her husband but he is a stand-in that will work. She is still wearing her ring; she never threw it out and obviously her parents mentioned the wedding to Paul but not the divorce. She is waiting for Madame to ask about the baby and she will tell her she left it in the city, but that is not the truth—he is in a different city with her former husband. And in case this sounds idyllic to any of you compost-your-own-waste types, it's not. It's agony. As far as this reader can tell, Mom was a distant/aloof type and Dad was occasionally cool but waaay out there in his thinking. Neither parent supported the natural social growth or adolescent curiosity of their offspring, and when the kids went to school in the city during the winters, they suffered as the subjects of a cruel scrutiny and social disdain. In both cases, the camera symbolizes how the value of women and nature is commodified by the patriarchy, alienating both from the society in which they exist. The narrator eventually destroys the film as an act of rebellion against the oppression, exploitation, and alienation of women and their identities. Surfacing ThemesA character who never appears in person. The narrator’s brother fled from his parents years before the novel takes place. The narrator finds it difficult to imagine him as an adult. He nearly drowned as a child, and the narrator constantly reflects on the image of his drowning. He was loving toward his sister, but he had a rather dark childhood. He kept a laboratory on the island, running experiments on animals in jars. The “Fake Husband” A young boy working at a generic bar attached to a new motel in the village. Claude gives fishing licenses to David and to other tourists and also guides American tourists on fishing expeditions. He speaks in a yokel dialect. Evans The couples go fishing and they catch something that I thought was a symbol, but I did not know what it was a symbol of. He works for the Detroit branch of the Wildlife Protection Association of America. He wants to buy the land and build a retreat on it. Evans