Surfacing
Margaret Atwood
1972

Introduction

Margaret Atwood's second novel, Surfacing, earned critical and popular acclaim in Canada and the United States after its publication in 1972. Surfacing is structured around the point of view of a young woman who travels with her boyfriend and two married friends to a remote island on a lake in Northern Quebec, where she spent much of her childhood, to search for her missing father. Accompanied by her lover and another young couple, she becomes caught up in her past and in questioning her future. This psychological mystery tale presents a compelling study of a woman who is also searching for herself. Readers praise the novel's style, characterizations, and themes. Critic Patricia F. Goldblatt comments in her essay on Atwood's protagonists that in her construction of the main character in Surfacing, Atwood proves

to her and to us that we all possess the talent and the strength to revitalize our lives and reject society's well-trodden paths that suppress the human spirit. She has shown us that we can be vicariously empowered by our surrogate, who not only now smiles but winks back at us, daring us to reclaim our own female identities.

Author Biography

Margaret Atwood was born November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to Carl Edmund (an entomologist) and Margaret Dorothy (Killam) Atwood. As she was growing up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto, she spent a great deal of time in the woods where, like the narrator of Surfacing, she developed an enthusiasm for environmental issues. She began writing when she was six years old. By the time she became a teenager, she had written poems, short stories, and cartoons for her high school newspaper, and she had decided that she wanted to devote her life to writing. She earned an undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1961 and her master's degree from Radcliffe College in 1962. After completing her education, she taught at several universities including the University of British Columbia, the Sir George Williams University in Montreal, and York University in Toronto. She and her husband, writer Graeme Gibson, live with their daughter Jess in Toronto.

Atwood has received much acclaim and several awards for her writing, including the Canadian Governor General's Award, Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. She has written more than thirty volumes of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, including children's books and short stories. Her work has been published in more than twenty-five countries. In addition to her best-selling novels and collections of poetry, Atwood gained recognition for Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, (1972) a ground-breaking critical analysis of Canadian literature and a proposal for Canadian writers to focus on native traditions in their works rather than identifying with Great Britain or the United States. Her works also include the best-selling novels Alias Grace and The Robber Bride.

Plot Summary

Part I

Surfacing opens with the unnamed narrator exclaiming, "I can't believe I'm on this road again." She is traveling with married friends, David and Anna, and her lover, Joe, to a remote island on a lake in Northern Quebec, where she spent much of her childhood, to search for her missing father. As they travel, Joe and David shoot a film that they will call "Random Samples," a compilation of shots "of things they come across." The narrator admits that she doesn't actually want to see her father; she just wants to make sure he is safe. She explains that she has had a strained relationship with him since her parents never forgave her for her hasty marriage, her subsequent divorce, and her abandonment of her child.

Anna confesses to the narrator that her marriage to David is troubled, which prompts the narrator to question her own relationship with Joe. She acknowledges,

I'm trying to decide whether or not I love him…. I sum him up, dividing him into categories…. I'm fond of him, I'd rather have him around than not; though it would be nice if he meant something more to me. The fact that he doesn't makes me sad; no one has since my husband. A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you.

She notes that she has never told Anna or Joe about her baby, explaining,

I have to behave as though it doesn't exist, because for me it can't, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.

Suddenly she becomes furious with her father for vanishing "unresolved, leaving [her] with no answers to give them when they ask."

One day, while looking through the cabin where she lived with her family, she comes across some unintelligible drawings her father made and concludes, "this is the forgotten possibility: he might have gone insane … and if insane, perhaps not dead." Later, David catches a fish and when it is killed, the narrator notes, "I feel a little sick, it's because I've killed something, made it dead; but I know that's irrational, killing certain things is all right, food and enemies."

Without consulting the women, David and Joe decide to stay on the island for another week. When the narrator becomes confused about what she remembers of the past, she decides

I have to be more careful about my memories. I have to be sure they're my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I'll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it…. To have the past but not the present, that means you're going senile.

She admits her brother did not really drown; her mother saved him at the last minute.

Part II

When Joe tells her, "we should get married," she notes, "I wanted to laugh…. He'd got the order wrong, he'd never asked whether I loved him, that was supposed to come first." She tells him, "I've been married before and it didn't work out. I had a baby too…. I don't want to go through that again." Disregarding what she said about the baby, Joe responds, "it would be different with us." When she will not agree, Joe turns angrily away from her. She thinks back to the day she and the father of her child got married, but the memory is distorted by the truth. She had never married and on that day, she had an abortion.

Later, she looks through a family scrapbook, explaining, "I searched through it carefully, looking for something I could recognize as myself, where I had come from or gone wrong." She finds her scrapbook filled with pictures of housewives and models, what she had wanted to be when she grew up. She also finds a picture of rabbits and thinks, "perhaps it was a vision of Heaven."

That night Anna admits that David has been frequently unfaithful to her and concludes that he behaves this way to prove "she can't stop him." The next day the narrator finds letters that show her father had not lost his reason, that the disturbing drawings he had made were copies, not originals, of primitive paintings he found on the island. Now she acknowledges, "I had the proof … indisputable, of sanity and therefore of death. Relief, grief, I must have felt one or the other. A blank, a disappointment." She determines to find one of the paintings and "verify, match the drawing with reality." As the four of them look for the paintings, they come across a dead heron that someone has hung upside down and tied to a tree branch. David and Joe film the scene.

That night Joe tells her, "Okay … I give up, you win. We'll forget everything I said and do it like you want, back to the way it was before," but she feels that it is too late to reconcile and tells him no. She feels as if she has "already moved out." Joe seems as if he is going to hit her, but he turns away.

On their sixth day on the island, David browbeats Anna into taking her clothes off for the camera. The narrator sets out on her own to look for the painting. After she dives into the water, sure she will see it on a submerged ledge, she sees her father's dead body but confuses it with a vision of her aborted child. Later, David tries to seduce her, but she refuses, telling him she would get pregnant. David tells her Anna is having sex with Joe.

When David tells her they have found her father's body in the lake, she thinks he and Anna are making it up to get back at her for the sexual incident with David. She finds what she considers to be her mother's gift to her, a picture the narrator had drawn of both her mother and of herself as a baby inside her mother's womb. She decides that the pictures she finds are her "guides."

Part III

That night she and Joe make love out of doors, and she hopes he will impregnate her. She decides she will stay on the island alone and so escapes in a canoe when the others come to tell her it is time to leave. After the others leave, she goes back to the cabin and thinks she sees her mother feeding the birds. However, the vision quickly disappears. After she enters the cabin, she smashes everything she can and tears her clothes and linens, determined to live outside of civilization. The next day she sees a vision of her father, but when she gains a closer look, she concludes

he was not my father. It is what my father saw, the thing you meet when you've stayed here too long alone…. I see now that although it isn't my father it is what my father has become. I knew he wasn't dead.

She begins to understand that she is losing touch with reality and acknowledges, "that is the real danger now, the hospital or the zoo, where we are put … when we can no longer cope." Yet she determines that she will never be a victim again. Thinking of the welfare of her unborn child, she dresses and decides, "I reenter my own time." Soon Joe and Paul come to the island, looking for her. She watches from a distance as Joe calls for her, and acknowledges that "he won't wait much longer."

Characters

Anna

Anna is David's wife and the narrator's "best woman friend" for the past two months. Although she appears "always cheerful," Anna

was desperate, her body her only weapon and she was fighting for her life…. She was fighting [David] because if she ever surrendered, the balance of power would be broken and he would go elsewhere. To continue the war.

Her battles with her husband have prompted her feelings of both love and hate toward him. She continually complains to the narrator about his efforts to humiliate her, but when he propositions her friend, she forms a temporary alliance with him. She also shows little regard for her friend when she has sex with Joe to get back at David. The narrator explains another possible motivation for her behavior: she concludes that Anna thinks, "by screwing Joe she's brought us back together. Saving the world, everyone wants to; men think they can do it with guns, women with their bodies."

David

David is Anna's husband. David teaches communications classes in an adult education program with Joe. Although he tries to pass himself off as a "man of the people," the narrator eventually sees through him. He is a misogynist (one who dislikes women) who torments his wife by continually trying to humiliate her. He tells his wife about his various affairs with other women to prove to her that she cannot control him. When the narrator confronts David after he has just propositioned her, he claims that Anna's own infidelities have forced him to be unfaithful to her. He insists that he is "for the equality of women," but then concludes that Anna "just doesn't happen to be equal." David tries to humiliate his wife when he shames her into taking off her clothes for the camera.

David's cruelty and manipulative nature emerge in the strict set of rules he forces Anna to follow. One rule is that Anna must always wear makeup. Anna explains to the narrator, "he wants me to look like a young chick all the time, if I don't he gets mad." She also admits that if she breaks any of his rules

he'll get me for it. If I break one of them I get punished, except he keeps changing them so I'm never sure. He's crazy, there's something missing in him…. He likes to make me cry because he can't do it himself.

When the narrator exclaims that she cannot believe David would be so demanding about makeup, Anna agrees, concluding, "it's something for him to use. He watches me all the time, he waits for excuses." Anna tells the narrator that sometimes she thinks he wants her to leave. "It used to be good," she notes, "then I started to really love him and he can't stand that, he can't stand having me love him…. Sometimes I think he'd like me to die."

Father

The narrator's father is dead at the beginning of the novel, but she strongly feels his influence throughout her time on the island. She admits both of her parents were innocents who had cut themselves off from reality. She notes, "they were from another age, prehistoric, when everyone got married and had a family." As a result, she never told them the truth about her affair with a married man or her abortion.

She describes her father, "islanding his life, protecting both us and himself, in the midst of war and in a poor country, the effort it must have taken to sustain his illusions of reason and benevolent order, and perhaps he didn't." Her father's devotion to logic and reason emerged in his belief that "with the proper guidebooks you could do everything yourself" and in his admiration for "what he called the eighteenth-century rationalists."

Joe

Joe is the narrator's often untalkative lover. She admits that "speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks." In his Introducing Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, critic George Woodcock characterizes Joe as "the most enigmatic character in the book" and wonders, "is he deep or is he just dumb?" Henry C. Phelps in his article on the novel in the Explicator concludes that Joe exhibits "a seeming solicitude toward women that masks a more fundamental antipathy." Phelps notes that Joe's behavior reveals a "blend of overt concern and strained hostility toward women." For example, "relief gleams through his beard" when Joe does not accept the narrator's offer to search for her father. He also appears relieved when she does not have an emotional response to her inability to find her father: he asks her about her search "in a neutral mumble that signals he'd prefer it if I [the narrator] kept from showing any reaction, no matter what has happened."

He reveals his own lack of emotion when he asks the narrator to marry him. "We should get married," he remarks. "I think we should … we might as well." When she refuses, he becomes hostile. Later, when she continues to rebuff his attempts to reconcile, he seems as if he is about to hit her. Phelps notes, though, that Joe is the only one of the group who comes back to the island to find her. Yet, his antipathy again surfaces at this point in the novel as the narrator notes his "annoyed" voice and acknowledges that he will not wait very long for her to appear.

The narrator offers an explanation for his animosity toward women when she describes Joe as having

the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction. That's how he thinks of himself, too: deposed, unjustly. Secretly he would like them to set up a kind of park for him, like a bird sanctuary.

She concludes, "he didn't love me, it was an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone to join him." Marriage, to him, would have been a kind of "victory."

Mother

The narrator's mother is also dead when the novel begins. Her influence in her daughter's life becomes evident as the narrator begins her withdrawal from civilization. The narrator's mother was a selfless woman who concealed her cancer pain until it became unbearable. She adapted her exterior and interior life to that of her husband's, as evidenced by the diary that she kept every year, in which she would only record the weather and the work done on that day, "no reflections, no emotion." The narrator concludes, "my father explained everything but my mother never did, which only convinced me that she had the answers but wouldn't tell." Quietly supportive but finally enigmatic, her mother spent her time

collecting the seasons and the weather and her children's faces, the meticulous records that allowed her to admit the other things, the pain and isolation and whatever it was she was fighting against, something in a vanished history.

Narrator

The narrator is the novel's main character, a young woman returning to the remote island on a lake in Northern Quebec, where she spent much of her childhood, to search for her missing father. The abortion she reluctantly agreed to, coupled with the loss of both of her parents, has caused her to suppress her emotions and shut herself off from her world. At one point in the novel, she admits, "I realized I didn't feel much of anything, I hadn't for a long time. Perhaps I'd been like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch." When she looks at the pictures she had made as a child, searching for some answers to her present condition, she finds

no hints or facts, I didn't know when it had happened; I must have been all right then; but after that I'd allowed myself to be cut in two…. There had been an accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal … numb.

She acknowledges that she "rehearses" emotions, "naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate, react, relate, what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and memorized it." She suggests, "in a way it was a relief, to be exempt from feeling."

Media Adaptations

• Surfacing was made into a film by a Canadian production company in 1981. It starred Joseph Bottoms and Kathleen Beller, was directed by Claude Jutra, produced by Beryl Fox, and adapted from Atwood's novel by Bernard Gordon.

The narrator explains that as a youth, she memorized survival manuals, realizing "that is was possible to lose your way." She has tried to form a relationship with her lover Joe, but only halfheartedly. When he asks her if she loves him, she responds, "I want to…. I do in a way," but ultimately, she can not give him what he needs, a confirmation of himself. She concludes

David is like me…. We are the ones that don't know how to love, there is something essential missing in us … atrophy of the heart. Joe and Anna are lucky, they do it badly and suffer because of it,… or perhaps we are normal and the ones who can love are freaks.

Toward the end of the novel, she suffers a breakdown and tries to strip off all the trappings of civilization that she blames for her despondency. Yet when she realizes she must care for the unborn child she believes she is carrying, she pulls herself back to reality and finds the strength to insist, "this above all, to refuse to be a victim…. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone."

Paul

Paul, the narrator's father's friend, is reserved, like her father and "saves everything useful." He is kind to her when she comes to the island looking for her father. Her father trusted him, and admired the fact that he could "build anything and fix anything."

Themes

Appearances and Reality

One the novel's main themes involves the tension between what appears to be and what is. Closely related to that is the theme of deception. The truth about the narrator's past emerges slowly because she has avoided much of the pain she experienced during an abortion she had a few years ago. The pain has been so great that she has deceived herself and others into thinking that she had been married and that she gave birth to a child who she subsequently gave up to her husband. A hint of the truth emerges when she notes that she has never told Anna or Joe about her baby, explaining

I have to behave as though it doesn't exist, because for me it can't; it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.

The narrator never provides an adequate rationale for giving up her baby, revealing her inability to face reality.

Memory and Reminiscence

As the novel progresses, another theme, memory and reminiscence, emerges in Atwood's characterization of the narrator. After she returns to the island where she grew up, the narrator begins to al-low memories of her past to emerge. She acknowledges, though, that her memory is fuzzy:

I have to be more careful about my memories. I have to be sure they're my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong to, I'll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it.

Her confusion about her past stems from her suppression of her abortion and the painful relationship she had with the man she refers to as her husband.

Topics for Further Study

• Investigate the history of relations between Canada and the United States. Why do you think the narrator has such a strong dislike for Americans?
• Henry C. Phelps, in his article on the novel in the Explicator, writes that the novel presents a "remarkably insightful portrait" of the sixties. Research the social changes that took place during this decade and either support or refute Phelps' statement. Write a report or essay supporting your take on his statement and include the facts and details you discovered in your research.
• Write a poem or a short story about a time when you felt victimized. What tone do you think will best help you present this feeling? Consider carefully your tense and point of view.
• Compare and contrast the themes of Surfacing with another novel by Atwood. What themes do you find that appear in both novels? Why do you think Atwood seems to explore similar issues in her novels? Provide support for your presentation.

Apathy and Passivity

For the narrator to successfully suppress her memories, she must maintain a passive state. She has not allowed herself to form any close personal relationships with others. Anna, the narrator insists, is her "best friend," but she admits that she has only known her for a few months, and she continually holds Joe at arm's length. For most of the novel, she refuses to define her feelings about him, and when he tries to get too close by asking her to get married, she rejects him and decides she will move out.

Identity/Search for Self

When her suppressed memories begin to emerge and she struggles with the truth of her past, the narrator embarks on a journey of self-discovery. For most of her adult life, she has blocked important information about her family and herself to avoid the painful realities of her experience. However, when she is confronted with the loss of her father, and Joe pressures her to redefine and strengthen their relationship, she is forced to begin to face her emotionally traumatic past. Her subsequent search for herself will involve questions of sanity and insanity and will eventually lead to change and transformation.

Sanity and Insanity

When the narrator questions the sanity of her father, she foreshadows her own struggle to preserve her mental stability. When she finds strange pictures drawn by her father, she uses the possibility of his descent into insanity as evidence that he might still be alive and so be able to help her with her own search for self. However, when she discovers that the paintings are copies of wall paintings on the island, she realizes that he is dead, which triggers her own mental decline. She decides to stay on the island alone after the others leave to strip off all of the trappings of civilization that she feels have corrupted her. After seeing visions of her dead parents, however, she begins to understand that she is losing touch with reality and acknowledges, "that is the real danger now, the hospital or the zoo, where we are put … when we can no longer cope."

Change and Transformation

The narrator's painful process of reminiscence, which requires that she face the traumatic experience of the abortion, helps her to change and ultimately discover some sense of herself. Her conclusion that she has become pregnant with Joe's child and that she must survive for the child to survive, pulls her back into reality and to a reestablishment of her ties with civilization. By the end of the novel, her future with Joe is uncertain, but she has made one significant change: she insists that she will never be a victim again.

Style

Point of View

The novel is related through the narrator's point of view. Atwood never provides her protagonist with a name, which helps readers submerge themselves into her subjective world. Structuring the novel from the narrator's point of view also helps Atwood develop her themes, especially her focus on appearance, reality memory, reminiscence, and a search for self. Since readers understand the development of the plot from the narrator's limited point of view, we see firsthand her struggle to establish an identity as she tries to piece together the reality of the past. As she recalls fragments of the truth about the abortion, readers become engaged in the reconstruction process, which offers a more personal and therefore more complete understanding of her character.

Jerome H. Rosenberg, in Twayne's World Authors Series Online, concludes that Atwood's construction of the narrative in the present tense causes problems for the reader who struggles to sift "fact from fabrication." He notes that Atwood's construct compounds the difficulty in its lack of "retrospective contemplation that authenticates what is being said." Atwood allows no omniscient narrator to evaluate the narrator's concept of reality. Rosenberg concludes that, as a result, the narrative becomes "the act of discovery itself—seemingly random, incoherent, and unresolvable—as the narrator engages in a conversation with herself and with the reader."

This narrative style does not allow the reader to get a clear picture of the main character and her experience. The repetition and variation of images of the narrator's marriage/relationship and child/abortion makes it difficult for the reader to privilege any one version. Thus, by the end of the novel, readers are not quite sure what the future will be for the narrator, nor do they have a complete vision of her past. Rosenburg addresses this cognitive problem by insisting the novel has "an irrefutable inner logic." This logic becomes clear by the end of the novel after most of the pieces have been put together. At this point Atwood has provided readers with a compelling portrait of a woman struggling to establish a clear sense of herself.

Symbols

Tom Marshall, in "Atwood Under and Above Water", in his Harsh and Lovely Land: The Major Canadian Poets and the Making of a Canadian Tradition, concludes, "In Surfacing the repeated imagery of bottled, trapped and murdered animals builds powerfully to the key scene in which the father's corpse and the aborted foetus are encountered." The heron that has been killed and strung up by hunters becomes the most dominant symbol of death and of the narrator's past. As she walks the island, she keeps inevitably returning to the spot where the dead heron is hung, much the same way she keeps returning to the memory of the abortion. Her feelings of guilt emerge when she kills a fish that David has just caught. She admits, "I feel a little sick, it's because I've killed something, made it dead; but I know that's irrational, killing certain things is all right, food and enemies." Her father's corpse finally symbolizes for her the dead fetus and so sparks the final stage of her search for herself.

Historical Context

A Woman's Place

Women's struggle for equal rights in the Western world gained slow momentum during the middle decades of the twentieth century. During World War II, women were encouraged to enter the workplace where they enjoyed a measure of independence and responsibility. After the war, they were expected (and required) to give up their jobs to the returning male troops. Hundreds of thousands of women were laid off and expected to resume their place in the home.

Compare & Contrast

• 1970s: Canadians, as well as their American neighbors, struggle over the issue of abortion. Although abortion is legal, courts try to find ways to restrict it, as one Canadian judge did when he determined that a woman would not have the right to an abortion without her husband's permission.
  
  Today: American President Bush has admitted that he is anti-abortion and many pro-choice supporters fear he will try to overturn Roe v. Wade. Abortion is also still a controversial topic in Canada.
• 1971: This year begins a period of rapid decline in the birthrate in Canada, which in 1971 is 3.2 children per family. By the late 1980s, the average will have dropped to 1.7 children per family.
  
  Today: Many Canadian women, like their American counterparts, are marrying later in life, which has helped keep the birthrate low.
• 1970: The resurgence of the French-Canadian separatist movement in the sixties reaches a crisis point this year when the Quebec Liberation Front conducts terrorist acts. The terrorism includes the kidnapping of British Trade Commissioner James Cross on October 5 and the kidnapping of Quebec's Minister of Labor, Pierre Laporte, on October 10. The Quebec Liberation Front kills Laporte on October 17, perhaps in response to the institution of the War Measures Act on that day by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, declaring martial law. As a result of the terrorism, the organization is banned.
  
  Today: Some reforms have been granted to the separatist movement, including the establishment of French as the official language of Quebec in 1974.

Training began at an early age to ensure that girls would conform to the feminine ideal—the perfect wife and mother. Women who tried to gain self-fulfillment through a career were criticized and deemed dangerous to the stability of the family. They were pressed to find fulfillment exclusively through their support of a successful husband. Television shows (for example Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best), popular magazines (GoodHousekeeping), and advertisements all encouraged the image of woman-as-housewife throughout the 1950s. The small number of women who did work outside the home often suffered discrimination and exploitation as they were relegated to low-paying clerical, service, or assembly-line positions. Women would have to wait until the 1960s and 1970s to gain meaningful social and economic advancement.

The Women's Movement

In the 1960s, the Women's Movement reemerged and gained most of its strength in the United States. The National Organization for Women (NOW), formed in 1966, and other groups like the National Women's Political Caucus gained support for abortion reform, federally supported child care centers, equal pay for women, and the removal of educational, political, and social barriers to women. Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisolm, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and others helped influence Congress to pass the Equal Rights Amendment bill in 1972 that banned sex discrimination at the national level though the bill was never ratified.

Sexuality

Traditional attitudes about sex began to change during this era. Dr. Alfred Kinsey's reports on the sexual behavior of men and women (1948, 1953) helped bring discussions of this subject out in the open. Despite their puritanical ideas about sexuality, Americans could not ignore questions concerning what constituted normal or abnormal sexual behavior. The public was intrigued by movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, who openly displayed their sexuality, and Playboy magazine, begun in 1953, gained a wide audience. Hugh Hefner, publisher of the magazine, claimed that the magazine's pictures of naked women were symbols of "disobedience, a triumph of sexuality, an end of Puritanism." Playboy itself promoted a new attitude toward sexuality with its "playboy philosophy" articles and its centerfolds of naked "girls next door." In the 1960s, relaxed moral standards would result in an age of sexual freedom.

In his article on Surfacing for the Explicator, Henry C. Phelps argues that the novel contains "a remarkably insightful portrait of that legendary decade, the Sixties." He finds a depiction of "the sad aftermath" of the decade's changes in morality, behavior, and social and gender roles. Phelps concludes

The pervasive sense in the later novel of wasted opportunities, deepening bitterness, isolation, and empty … lives casts a consciously dark shadow over the era of so-called freedom and liberation. Atwood's skillful embodiment in a single character of the perniciousness of these changes both displays an unexpected facility for implied social commentary and offers a new perspective for examining her already intriguing narratives.

Critical Overview

When Surfacing, was published in 1972, it earned recognition in Canada and in the United States from scholars and from the general public. Most critics applauded the novel's style, characterizations, and themes. Edward Weeks, in a review for Atlantic, writes that Atwood's "sense of the place, of the lake in its various moods, or the animal life retreating before the intruder, is beautifully conveyed…. [There are] passages of fine writing in this book and scenes of considerable power, such as the diving under the cliff and the discovery of the dead heron." Paul Delany, in the New York Times Book Review, determines that

at a time when many novelists restrict themselves to a single mode of expression, such as documentary realism or unrestrained fantasy, Miss Atwood has undertaken a more serious and complex task. Denying Emerson's maxim that the true art of life is to skate well on surfaces, she shows the depths that must be explored if one attempts to live an examined life today.

Barbara Godard, in her piece on Atwood for Feminist Writers, asserts that the novel

exhibits equally complex irony as it explores, through the narrative of a canoe journey into northern Quebec, the convoluted power relations between Anglophobe and Francophone Canadians in an era of intense Quebec separatist activity and between descendants of European immigrants and the culture of the aboriginal inhabitants they have displaced, both complicated by the invasion of American technology.

Praising her characterizations in the novel in her review for Canadian Forum, Ellen Godfrey comments that Atwood's "frightened and deadened characters are … extremely interesting" and concludes that "[she] reveals them with skill and wit. "Henry C. Phelps in his article on the novel for the Explicator argues, "Atwood's skillful embodiment" in Joe of the "perniciousness" of the cultural changes that took place in the 1960s "both displays an unexpected facility for implied social commentary and offers a new perspective for examining her already intriguing narratives."

Tom Marshall, in "Atwood Under and Above Water," in This Harsh and Lovely Land: The Major Canadian Poets and the Making of a Canadian Tradition, finds "a certain shallowness of characterization." He adds

Everything must be filtered through the mind of the Atwood protagonist, who is usually supposed to be both shrewd and confused, a combination that is possible but which tends in certain cases to put some strain on the reader's credulity.

Marshall does, however, commend the author for her "evocative description." He concludes that the problematic characterizations do not interfere "with the powerful flow of the novel as one reads it."

Focusing on the novel's themes, Sherrill Grace, in Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, praises the novel's complexity, arguing that Atwood is "constantly aware of opposites self/other, subject/object, male/female, nature/man and of the need to accept and work within them." Margaret Wimsatt in an article for Commonweal echoes this assessment when she writes, "The novel picks up themes brooded over in the poetry, and knits them together coherently."

Marshall, however, finds fault with Atwood's thematic development in some parts of the novel. He asserts

the repeated imagery of bottled, trapped and murdered animals builds powerfully to the key scene in which the father's corpse and the aborted foetus are encountered…. It is just that all of this seems too intellectually worked out, too far removed from any very deeply felt or imagined experience of the kind that stood in, so to speak, for any very searching exploration of human character…. Though a serious emotional resonance seems quite clearly intended, it is not achieved, mainly because recurrent poetic imagery is finally no substitute for depth of characterization. This is the major limitation of Atwood the novelist. Also, the reader may suspect that Atwood is indulging herself a little in this book, even to the extent of succumbing somewhat to the old-style woman's fiction she parodies.

Weeks criticizes the novel's conclusion, commenting, "I think it a pity that at the end, when she hides and strips herself for a fresh start, the heroine's behavior and her future with Joe are so hard to believe.

Most critics and readers found much to praise in Surfacing, which helped cement Atwood's reputation as one of Canada's best writers.

Criticism

Wendy Perkins

Perkins is an associate professor of English at Prince George's Community College in Maryland and has published several articles on British and American authors. In the following essay, she traces the narrator's search for identity in Atwood's novel.

In her most popular and critically acclaimed novel, The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood traces her heroine's efforts to cope, endure, and survive the oppressive totalitarian regime that governs her life. In a similar vein, Atwood places the unnamed narrator in Surfacing into a more realistic, contemporary setting that does not threaten her physical safety. Yet, she too must reconstruct herself to preserve a strong sense of self.

The narrator in Surfacing has been victimized and disabled by a society that promoted male superiority and domination. She entered into a relationship with a married man who forced her to abort their unborn child. This experience so devastated the narrator that she has suppressed her memory of it and has cut herself off from any real contact with her world. At one point in the novel, she admits

I realized I didn't feel much of anything, I hadn't for a long time. Perhaps I'd been like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch; but if that was true I wouldn't have noticed the absence. At some point my neck must have closed over, pond freezing on a wound, shutting me into my head.

When she looks at the pictures she had made as a child, searching for some answers to her growing sense of unease, she finds

no hints or facts, I didn't know when it had happened; I must have been all right then; but after that I'd allowed myself to be cut in two…. There had been an accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal … numb.

She acknowledges that she "rehearses" emotions, "naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate, react, relate, what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and memorized it," and that "in a way it was a relief, to be exempt from feeling."

She has tried to form a relationship with her lover Joe, but only halfheartedly. When he asks her if she loves him, she responds, "I want to…. I do in a way," but ultimately, she cannot give him what he needs, a confirmation of himself. She concludes, "David is like me…. We are the ones that don't know how to love, there is something essential missing in us … atrophy of the heart."

For the first half of the novel, she allows herself to be victimized to a lesser degree by Joe. While she does refuse to marry him, she quietly accepts his bullying. Henry C. Phelps in his article on Surfacing for the Explicator concludes that Joe exhibits "a seeming solicitude toward women that masks a more fundamental antipathy.' Phelps notes that Joe's behavior reveals a "blend of overt concern and strained hostility toward women." For ex-ample, "relief gleams through his beard" when Joe does not accept the narrator's offer to search for her father. He reveals his own lack of emotion when he asks the narrator to marry him, couching his proposal in what Phelps considers "tepid, even antagonistic terms": "We should get married," Joe remarks. "I think we should … we might as well." When she refuses, he becomes hostile: "Sometimes," he complains, "I get the feeling you don't give a s—about me." Later, when she continues to rebuff his attempts to reconcile, he seems as if he is about to hit her.

In an effort to suppress the painful memory of the abortion, she creates a fictional past that provides a more comfortable explanation for her inability to commit to a relationship with Joe. She tells him that "I've been married before and it didn't work out. I had a baby too…. I don't want to go through that again." She has convinced herself that she had a baby with her "husband" and that for some unnamed reason she gave the baby up. Yet she notes that previously she had never told Anna or Joe about her baby, explaining

I have to behave as though it doesn't exist, because for me it can't; it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.

Jerome H. Rosenberg, in his article on the novel for Twayne's World Authors Series Online comments on the narrator's fictionalization of her past:

We do not perceive these "facts" as deliberate lies; rather, they are related to us as elements of the narrator's most profound belief regarding her past. If we recognize them as falsehoods at all, we realize that they are the protagonist's psychological defense, her means of avoiding yet one more death, one more sign of mortality—but this one a result of her own actions, her own decision to act, her own assertion of power. It is this secret, what she later calls this "death … inside me," that she has layered "over, a cyst, a tumor, black pearl." And it is this repressed guilt that she must bring to the surface, must exorcise, before she can become whole.

Patricia F. Goldblatt notes that "After enduring, accepting, regurgitating, denying, and attempting to please and cope, Atwood's protagonists begin to take action and change their lives." In Surfacing, the narrator's search for herself is ironically triggered by her search for her father. As she tries to recall the details of her past while she looks for clues on the island about her father's disappearance, the truth of her own life begins to emerge. When she dives below the surface of the lake, she symbolically submerges into her own past and allows her emotional response to the abortion to surface. Goldblatt concludes, however, that before the narrator can establish a strong sense of identity, she hits "rock bottom…. Fed up with the superficiality of her companions, [she] banishes them and submits to paranoia." Alone on the island, she tries to strip away the trappings of civilization to discover a sense of self:

Everything I can't break … I throw on the floor…. I take off my clothes … I dip my head beneath the water … I leave my dung, droppings on the ground … I hollow a lair near the woodpile … I scramble on hands and knees … I could be anything, a tree, a deer skeleton, a rock.

What Do I Read Next?

• Margaret Atwood sets The Handmaid's Tale (1986) in the futuristic, totalitarian society of the Republic of Gilead, where women are valued only for their ability to breed. This novel also focuses on a woman's struggle to define herself not as a victim but as an individual.
• In Edible Woman (1965), Atwood presents another powerful portrait of a woman who suffers under social limitations.
• In the play A Doll House (1879), Henrik Ibsen examines a woman's restricted role in the nineteenth century, and the disastrous effects those limitations have on her marriage.
• The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin chronicles the tragic life of Edna Pontiellier as she tries to discover a true sense of self in America at the beginning of the twentieth century.

What finally brings her back to reality and to a refusal to allow herself to be victimized any longer is her belief that she is pregnant with Joe's child. She considers the possible new pregnancy as a way to absolve herself from the guilt she feels over the abortion. After she and Joe have intercourse, she insists, "He trembles and then I can feel my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me." She must return to civilization and contact with others because her child "must be born, allowed." This "act of healing" as Rosenberg terms it helps her reconstruct herself by establishing a strong sense of who she is and what she wants. Rosenberg concludes

To renounce power, to remain a passive victim of others, she sees, is an exercise in futility: if she wishes to survive in the historical, struggle-ridden world into which we are all born, she must "join in the war, or … be destroyed." She wishes there were "other choices" but sees there are not. What is morally essential, however, is for her to acknowledge her power, accept her imperfection, take responsibility for her actions, and "give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone."

By the end of the novel, when she determines to reenter society and perhaps establish a strong relationship with Joe, she accomplishes these goals.

Commenting on Atwood's focus on the "plight of women in society" in her novels, Goldblatt concludes that Atwood:

has reconstructed this victim, proving to her and to us that we all possess the talent and the strength to revitalize our lives and reject society's well-trodden paths that suppress the human spirit. She has shown us that we can be vicariously empowered by our surrogate, who not only now smiles but winks back at us, daring us to reclaim our own female identities.

In Surfacing, Atwood illustrates for her readers, through the transformation of the main character, the indefatigable nature of the human spirit.

Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on Surfacing, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Sources

Delany, Paul, Review in New York Times Book Review, March 4, 1973, p. 5.

Godard, Barbara, "Atwood, Margaret," in Feminist Writers, edited by Pamela Kester-Shelton, St. James Press, 1996, pp. 29-33.

Godfrey, Ellen, Review, in Canadian Forum, Vol. 52, January 1973, p. 24.

Goldblatt, Patricia F., "Reconstructing Margaret Atwood's Protagonists," in World Literature Today, Vol. 73, No. 2, Spring 1999, p. 275.

Grace, Sherrill, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, Vehicule Press, 1980.

Marshall, Tom, "Atwood Under and Above Water," in Harsh and Lovely Land: The Major Canadian Poets and the Making of a Canadian Tradition, University of British Columbia Press, 1978.

Phelps, Henry C., "Atwood's Edible Woman and Surfacing," in Explicator, Vol. 55, No. 2, Winter 1997, p. 112.

Rosenberg, Jerome H., "Margaret Atwood: Chapter 4," in Twayne's World Authors Series Online, G. K. Hall, 1990.

Weeks, Edward, Review, in Atlantic, Vol. 231, No. 127, April 1973, p. 127.

Wimsatt, Margaret, Review, in Commonweal, July 9, 1973.

Woodcock, George, Introducing Margaret Atwood's "Surfacing," ECW Press, 1990.

Further Reading

Blais, Marie-Clair, "Afterword," in Surfacing, Anchor Books, 1972.

Blais comments on the novel's themes and style.

Buxton, Jackie, "Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor)," in Contemporary Novelists, 6th ed., edited by Susan Windisch Brown, St. James Press, 1996, pp. 52-56.

Buxton offers a study of Surfacing's "powerful mythic dimension."

Gibson, Graeme, "An Interview with Margaret Atwood," in Eleven Canadian Novelists, 1973.

In this interview, Atwood discusses the novel's themes.