Admin,+ariel Vol. 10 No. 3 - 38-54 PDF
Admin,+ariel Vol. 10 No. 3 - 38-54 PDF
Admin,+ariel Vol. 10 No. 3 - 38-54 PDF
DAVIDSON
quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the
stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor
adventures; the crucial struggle . . .; and the exaltation of
2
the hero." As we shall subsequently demonstrate, the
narrator of Surfacing, during the course of her quest
adventure, passes through precisely these three stages. Yet
Atwood's surfacer cannot complete her adventure with Frye's
third and final stage, what he terms "the anagnorisis or
discovery, the recognition of the hero, who has clearly proved
3
himself to be a hero even if he does not survive the conflict."
Precisely because this anagnorisis is a public recognition, a
general "exaltation of the hero," the protagonist of Surfacing
must come up with something different. Expecting
"exaltation" back in the city, she would not be judged heroic
4
but deemed mad. For the contemporary female hero,
continuing survival demands disguise and some descent from
the triumph achieved by successfully completing a mythic
quest.
married friends, David and Anna, and her own lover, Joe —
have brought with them to what should be an island refuge
the very tendencies and forces that render the larger world,
11
for her, appalling. Atwood thereby suggests that the pathos
in her protagonist's quest is that character's dawning
recognition that she must struggle to defend and define
herself even against her friends.
Her realization begins with a thematically important
recognition scene, the encounter, while portaging in to fish on
another lake, with a hung heron and the two "Americans"
who killed it. Coming upon the slain bird, the narrator at
once sees that there is a logic to senseless brutality. The deed
itself serves "to prove that [the perpetrators] could do it, they
had the power to kill. Otherwise [the bird] was valueless:
beautiful from a distance but it couldn't be tamed or cooked or
trained to talk, the only relation they could have to a thing
like that was to destroy it . . . It must have been the
Americans; they were in there now, we would meet them" (pp.
116-17). Soon the "astronaut finish" of the two Americans
proclaims what they are as much as did the dead heron: "the
faces impermeable as space-suit helmets, sniper eyes, they did
it; guilt glittered on them like tinfoil" (p. 121). Yet the
"Americans" also judge by surfaces, take the new arrivals for
Americans, and ask them from where in the United States
they come. They all thereby discover that they are all
Canadians. For the narrator, though, nothing has changed:
"But they'd killed the heron anyway. It doesn't matter what
country they're from, my head said, they're still Americans,
they're what's in store for us, what we are turning into" (p.
129).
With that insight, she can better "place" both David and
Joe. They, too, in her sense of the word, are "Americans,"
automatons seeking the conquests and trophies that might be
badges of their own existence. Therein lies her danger and, as
earlier suggested, the pathos of her quest. She can gain no
victory for herself if she becomes merely the token of
another's triumph. David especially would render the
MARGARET ATWOOD'S SURFACING 45
Joe also turns against her. Because he did not talk much,
because he was furry like the animals, she had seen him as
honest, direct, animal-like. But he also becomes an antagonist
she must resist. With Joe, too, sexuality is at issue. His
proposal, like David's proposition, constitutes an immediate
demand and also serves as a metaphor for a more pervasive
desire to dominate and control. He wants to marry her. She
is reluctant, but to "prove her love" she should comply with
his wish: "Prove your love, they say. You really want to
marry me, let me fuck you instead. You really want to fuck,
let me marry you instead. As long as there's a victory, some
flag I can wave, parade I can have in my head" (p. 87). Even
Anna, like both men, has a private parade in which she
thinks her friend should march. Desperate to preserve a
failing marriage, this wife accedes to her husband's arbitrary
rules and sexually demeaning comments and actions. Yet
when she is told that the narrator refused David, a refusal
partly prompted by concern for the wife, Anna is offended.
Because her own "compulsive need to conform to male
46 A. E . and C. N . D A V I D S O N
the stars, fertility is her sole object: " 'I love you,' he says into
the side of my neck, catechism. Teeth grinding, he's holding
back, he wants to be like the city, baroque scrollwork,
intricate as a computer, but I'm impatient, pleasure is
redundant, the animals don't have pleasure. I guide him into
me, it's the right season, I hurry." As "he trembles," she
continues, "I can feel my lost child surfacing within me,
forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has been
imprisoned for so long" (pp. 161-62).
In this passage, Atwood stresses the connection between the
lost father and the lost child. The drowned father, with his
camera cord around his neck, had resembled a fetus strangled
by its umbilical cord. The narrator must dive down into the
lake to find the dead father before she can surface to the
admission that she has no child. Metaphorically, she can
recover her dead child only after she discovers her dead father
— both in the "redemptive" lake. Furthermore, the metaphor
of the fetus-like father closes a symbolic circle. Re-emerging
from the lake (a classic female symbol), the daughter has
figuratively become her father's mother ready to conceive
herself. No wonder she can surface with a new concept of
fecundity. Her psychic journey back into her past has allowed
her to discover herself and to find within herself something
worth perpetuating. She is nearing the end of her mythic
journey.
The third stage of her heroic quest concludes with the
protagonist, alone on her island, fully achieving her
anagnorisis. Earlier she had made a token sacrifice of a
sweatshirt to the "unacknowledged or forgotten" gods of the
land. Now they demand everything that pertains to her old,
false social life. By surrendering everything she becomes free
to be a natural woman totally at one with nature: "I lean
against a tree, I am a tree leaning" (p. 181). Guided by unseen
forces that transcend time, she runs naked through the woods.
She encounters her mother, a female Saint Francis figure
who, feeding the birds, is also in perfect harmony with nature.
She encounters her father, the wolf-like creature you turn
into when you've been too long in the wilderness, and
MARGARET ATWOOD'S SURFACING 49
recognizes that she is him too: "I place my feet in [his tracks]
and find that they are my own" (p. 187). So both visions image
different aspects of her own state. These emblems are also
confirmed by the symbolic drawings she created as a child. In
fact, her drawings and the Indian cliff paintings are
strikingly similar and prompt her to realize how much her
own origins go back to pre-history, how her own psychic
truths are engraved in the rocks of her native land. That
understanding, of course, cannot be rational. Nevertheless, it
allows Atwood to fashion a comprehensible ending for the
novel, one that begins to tie together the complex strands of
the narrator-protagonist's life. We note how the narrator
comes to reject human definition; we see her move briefly
beyond humanity; and then we observe how she realizes that
she must descend back into the world, must surface from the
mythic in order to survive.
When the narrator runs naked through the woods, her hair
a tangle, her fingernails caked with mud, a "new kind of
centerfold" (p. 190), she briefly destroys the only identity she
has ever been allowed by her society. She is the antithesis of
Anna; the antithesis of the traditional heroine, the captive
maiden waiting for the rescuing knight. But no new role is
provided. Although briefly governed by supernatural forces,
she cannot achieve the supernatural by being
metamorphosed, as she anticipates, into some animal god.
Alone on the island, without protection, she would freeze.
Part of her revelation is the revelation of death — the death
of parents, the cycle of life and death. She is certain that she
bears within herself a new life. That life cannot thrive if she
chooses to remain alone in the wilderness. She must reject the
paradigm of both her father and mother and return to the
city, to all that her mythic quest has just led her to abandon.
Yet she can do so with a new inner strength. She has
vanquished the lies that have dominated her life and has
relinquished her previous false myths, presumably
permanently. She has also seen that what she has learned
must be protected, fostered, but partly hidden when she
returns to society.
50 A. E . and C. N . D A V I D S O N
NOTES
'Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), p.
145. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically
within the text.
z
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; rpt. New York:
Atheneum, 1968), p. 187.
3
Frye, p. 187.
'Her illumination can too easily be seen as an excursion into insanity. Thus
Gloria Onley, in "Margaret Atwood: Surfacing in the Interests of
Survival," West Coast Review, 7, No. 3 (1973), 52, writes that the
protagonist in Surfacing "is clearly intended to be a representative
schizophrenic" who "approaches and returns from the verge of madness."
»Frye, p. 46.
6
Frye, p. 223.
7
Frye, p. 33.
The parallel between the two "violations" is drawn by Carol P. Christ, who,
in "Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women's Spiritual Quest and
Vision," Signs, 2 (1976), 320, observes: "Unable to come to terms with
[her first lover's] violation of herself and her body, [the narrator] focuses
her attention on the violation of the Canadian wilderness by the men
she calls 'Americans.' "
'As Carole Gerson, in "Margaret Atwood and Quebec: A Footnote on
Surfacing", Studies in Canadian Literature, 1 (1976), 118-19, notes:
"Wherever she looks, the narratorfindssigns that her childhood version
of Quebec is being violated by Americans and Canadians who have
assimilated the American values of material progress and self-centered
ecological destruction."
,0
Frye, p. 203.
"Annis Pratt, "Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and the Rebirth Journey,"
Margaret Atwood Special Session, MLA Convention, Chicago, 29 Dec.
1977, aptly observes that "the hero brings her own patriarchal space or
subconscious gender world with her in the form of David and Anna, a
couple hideously involved in normative 'male' and 'female' behaviour"
(p. 16, typescript). This observation is part of a most illuminating
modified Jungian reading of Surfacing and at a number of points
parallels our reading. See also Annis Pratt, "Women and Nature in
Modern Fiction," Contemporary Literature, 13 (1972), 476-90.
54 A. E. and C. N. DAVIDSON