Margaret Eleanor
Atwood
A collection of some
thoughts about Surfacing
On Feminism – When an interviewer
asked her if she was one:

Feminist is now one of those all-purpose
words. It really can mean anything from
people who think men should be pushed
off cliffs to people who think it’s O.K. for
women to read and write. All those could
be called feminist positions. Thinking that
it’s O.K. for women to read and write
would be a radically feminist position in
Afghanistan. So what do you mean?
In Cat’s Eye her protagonist responds
to an interview about her work:
“Well, what about, you know, feminism?”
she says. “A lot of people call you a
feminist painter.”
 “What indeed,” I say, “I hate party lines, I
hate ghettoes. Anyway, I’m too old to
have invented it and you’re too young to
understand it, so what’s the point of
discussing it at all?”
 “So, it’s not a meaningful classification for
you?” she says.
 “I like it that women like my work. Why
shouldn’t I?”

No Essentialist Definitions of
“Woman”
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In her fiction, there are no essentialist definitions
of “woman” or “feminism” or even “Canadian,”
but instead representations of the endless
complexity and quirkiness of human behavior
which exceeds ideological labels and the
explanatory power of theory.
She’s interested in the dialectics of power and in
shifting structures of ideology. As a “true
novelist” she is interested in the dynamic powers
of language and story.
– There is no single, simple, static “women’s point of
view.” Let’s just say that good writing of any kind by any
one is surprising, intricate, strong, sinuous.
– Previous three slides from Coral Ann Howells – Margaret
Atwood.
But . . .

With her concern with living by eating, with that
quest for the self that has been at the heart of
major works by women from the past 150 years,
with her passion for becoming conscious of one’s
victimization and ceasing to acquiesce, with her
insistence on nature as a living whole of which
we are all interdependent parts, with her respect
for the irrational center of the psyche and the
healing experiences beyond logical control, her
insistence on joining the divided head and body,
her awareness of roleplaying and how women
suffocate in the narrow crevices of sexual
identity, she is part of that growing women’s
culture already, a great quilt for which we are
each stitching our own particolored blocks out of
old petticoats, skirts, coats, bedsheets, blood and
berry juice. (McCombs)
On motifs in the novel
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The elusiveness and variety of “language” in its
several senses
The significance of one’s heritage, including not
only personal ancestors but the gods and totemic
figures of primitive cultures
The search for a location (both in time and place)
The brutalizations and victimizations of love
Drowning and surviving.
The continuum between human and animal
The continuum between human beings and
nature
Atwood and the Environment
 Margaret
Laurence, another
Canadian writer of great merit,
writes about Atwood that her themes
express our most burning
contemporary issues – the role of
women, the facts of urban life, and
most of all, the wounding and
perhaps killing of our only home,
Earth.
...

Laurence says Atwood addresses all these
issues with out writing propaganda and
suggests that “she has been able to do
this partly because she has interwoven
these themes with the theme which is
central to our mythology, our religions,
our history and (whether we know it or
not) our hearts – human kind’s quest for
the archetypal parents, for our gods, and
for our own meanings in the face of our
knowledge of the inevitability of death.
Gods and other things
 What
does it mean that the gods
who finally empower the protagonist
of Surfacing are the native, prehistoric gods? It’s not Christianity –
which she rejects as inadequate and
alien – that will save her (or us).
How do you interpret that? How
does it fit in with the other themes of
the novel?
Atwood on the Writer’s Duty
 The
writer functions in her society as
a kind of soothsayer, a truth teller. . .
The novel is a moral instrument.
Moral implies political. . . By political
I mean having to do with power;
who’s got it, who wants it, how it
operates; in a word who’s allowed to
do what to whom, who gets away
with it and how.
Cixous and French on Power
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Cixous – The kind of power that is the will to
supremacy, the thirst for individual and
narcissistic satisfaction is always a power over
others. . . . Whereas . . . “woman’s powers” . . .
Is a question of power over oneself, in other
words a relation not based on mastery but on
availability.
French – Power-over is attributed to the
masculine world of domination and destruction,
which can accommodate only those that serve it.
Power-to characterizes the feminine world, is
constructive and seeks to create and to further
pleasure for everyone.
Power Over/Power To
 The
protagonist says “My brother
saw the danger early. To immerse
oneself, join in the war, or to be
destroyed. Though there ought to be
other choices.”
Atwood on Surfacing
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“You can define yourself as innocent and
get killed, or you can define yourself as a
killer and kill others. I think there has to
be a third thing again: the ideal would be
somebody who would neither be a killer or
a victim, who could achieve some kind of
harmony with the world. . . Now in
[Surfacing that is not] actualized, but . .
it’s seen as a possibility, finally, whereas
initially it is not.”
Gibson Eleven Canadian Novelists
Powerlessness is evil, too

Atwood suggests that belief in one’s own
powerlessness amounts to evasion of the
responsibility which power involves. In an
interview with Graeme Gibson Atwood
says
– If you are defining yourself as innocent, you
refuse to accept power. You refuse to admit
that you have it, then you refuse to exercise it,
because the exercise of power is defined as
evil, and that’s like people who refuse to get
involved in politics because it’s dirty.
Surfacing is also about . . .
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The symbolic journey
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Hero: can be male or female or even animal
The Call to Adventure: the call invites the hero to an adventure
Supernatural Aid: often accompanies hero to the “threshold”
The Threshold: metaphoric line between what is known and
unknown
Threshold Guardians: protects us from taking journeys before
we are ready; or challenge us to prove we are ready.
Helpers and mentors: individuals, creatures, or spirits who
assist the hero in her journeys.
Challenges, obstacles, temptations: The hero faces these to
test his courage and mettle
The Abyss: Symbolic death and rebirth; accompanied by
revelation and understanding
Transformation: The result of the hero overcoming the
challenges: the hero changes in positive ways
The Atonement: Change leads to self-discovery and
forgiveness; at one with yourself
A gift from the Gods: Symbolic reward for meeting all
challenges
Return: Hero returns changed, with a new understanding
Surfacing is about . . .
 Using
the symmetry of drowning by
water/drowning by air and death of
the parent/death of the child in
Surfacing, Atwood . . . Imaginatively
condenses the implications of the
contemporary schism between flesh
and spirit, secular and sacred,
conscious and unconscious; the
destroyed fetus is the anomalous
buried half of these necessarily
complementary pairs.
...
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The frequent references to mutilation,
amputation, anesthesia, and the robotlike, mechanized or wooden reality of the
narrator’s own immediate past are now
seen as consequences of the abortion. In
removing life, “they had planted death in
me like a seed . . . Since then I’d carried
that death around inside me, layering it
over, a cyst, a tumor, black pearl. . .”
...
 To
interpret this image simply as a
political statement against abortion
would be to misunderstand the
significance of the fetus as Atwood’s
metaphor for the self-destructive
diseases of contemporary life, and
the incomplete development of the
self.
 (read p. 31 of CLC)
Legacies of the Parents
 She
has to learn, not only to deal
with the future, but also how to deal
with the past.
 What legacies does her father leave
her?
 What
her?
legacies does her mother leave
Ontogeny/Phylogeny
Ontogeny -- the development or course of
development especially of an individual
organism
 Phylogeny -- the evolution of a genetically
related group of organisms as
distinguished from the development of the
individual organism
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One critic claims that this is a repeated
chorus in the novel – agree/disagree?
Where’s the evidence for this claim?
Genre
You could call it an adventure thriller set in
the wilds of Northern Quebec.
 You could call it a detective story
centering on the search of the main
character’s missing father.
 You could call it a psychological novel, a
study of madness both individual and
social.
 You could call it a religious novel which
examines the origin and nature of the
human lust to kill and destroy.
 Which one would you call it and why?
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Theme
Is it a novel about women and their
oppression in patriarchal cultures?
 Is it a novel about Canadian Nationalism,
about postcolonial issues?
 Is it a novel about the evils of capitalism?
 Is it a novel about the necessary journey
into the self to achieve wholeness?
 Other possibilities?
 Which do you choose? Why?
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