38 A. E. and C. N.

DAVIDSON

The Anatomy of Margaret Atwood's

Surfacing
ARNOLD E. AND CATHY N. DAVIDSON

T HE protagonist in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing seeks, in

the northland wilderness of her childhood, some mythic
illumination through which she might establish peace
with both her previous existence and her present one. The
unnamed narrator in that novel would also return to her past
in the hope that the child she had once been might have a
message that bears on the desperate, self-deceived life she
now leads. In other words, her journey to her former home
ostensibly to look for her missing father is really a barely
rational excursion into the unchartered territory of her own
psyche and a search for her authentic self, for the "true
1
vision" that comes "at the end, after the failure of logic."
However, even though the protagonist in Surfacing undergoes
an enlightening rite de passage, she must ultimately settle for
something less. In the Quebec wilderness, at last initiated
into her own identity, she can cast off the demeaning
stereotypes her society imposes on a young woman. But when
she returns to her Ontario city must she take on a false
identity again? Certainly, she cannot continue to operate in
the realm of the mythic but must somehow transcend
transcendence.
In essence, we are arguing that Surfacing, a
self-consciously mythic novel, has a conclusion that is almost
anti-mythic. More specifically, Atwood's ending serves as a
modification of and addendum to one of the archetypal mythic
patterns so persuasively assessed by Northrop Frye in his
Anatomy of Criticism. In this seminal study of mythoi or
generic plots, Frye maintains that "the complete form of the
romance [the mythos of summer] is clearly the successful
 MARGARET ATWOOD'S SURFACING 39

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.

A traditional quest set in the modern world might itself

seem somewhat suspect. As Frye points out, not only do his
basic modes of comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony or satire
correspond to the four seasons of the turning year, but
Western literature has also run through its own temporal
cycle from the comedy of a medieval cultural spring to the
satire and irony that give expression to the winter of our
current age's discontent. In effect, "we are now in an ironic
5
phase of literature." The reader therefore is almost of
necessity conditioned to suspect that a modern mythic work
must be ironic, something in the nature of John Barth's
parodie Chimera. Indeed, Frye sees irony as "a parody of
romance" and observes that "the central principle of ironic
myth" entails "the application of romantic mythical forms to a
6
more realistic content which fits them in unexpected ways."
But the reader of Surfacing soon discovers that the central
myth of that novel is not subverted by its contemporary
context. Quite the opposite occurs. Portraying such crucial
events as the narrator's final vision of her dead parents,
Atwood must abandon the low mimetic mode of realistic
40 A. E. and C. N. DAVIDSON

fiction. In short, Surfacing is a romance in the high old style.

And in a romance, Frye observes, "the ordinary laws of nature
7
are slightly suspended."
So Atwood has set herself a task that is both formalistically
and ideologically difficult. She uses an old, archetypal form
and the ancient quest motif but does so in order to explore
distinctly contemporary questions. How does one find an
identity in an isolating, alienating world? How does a woman
prevent herself from being or becoming merely the shining
surface that serves to reflect her society's views of what she
should be — accomodating, subservient, identity-less? Such
questions become increasingly pertinent as the narrator's
search for her lost father becomes a search for her own true
self, as a missing person detective mystery devolves into a
quest of epic proportions.
The first stage of this quest, what Frye calls "the agon or
conflict" (the "perilous journey and the preliminary minor
adventures"), should serve to delimit the issues around which
the "pathos or death struggle" will center. Atwood, however,
begins her "romance" on a most "unromantic" note. A
daughterinsearchofalostfatherisseeminglyafterthestabilityof
an ordered old world, not the promise of a brave new one. Yet the
gradually revealed character of that missing father soon
demonstrates that he embodies no established ideal. To start
with, in a world at war, a man who models himself after Locke
and other eighteenth-century rationalists is simply an
anachronism. Furthermore, the small and rational world in
which her father wished to raise his family was a carefully
sustained fiction, an incongruity in the larger world of the
northern Quebec wilderness. And neither is her father a Fisher
King whose deliverance might bring fertility to a wasteland. He
had already sold out to the wasteland. Surveying land and
marking trees for the timber companies was hardly a way to
preserve his own little island of sanity against the encroaching
industrial world, against the "Americans", to use his daughter's
term.
 MARGARET ATWOOD'S SURFACING 41

These are insights that the daughter only gradually

achieves. But all along there are hints that her task has more
dimensions than she originally anticipated — that she, for
example, should see her father for what he was instead of
merely looking for him. In fact, the first indication of the real
agon in Surfacing is the narrator's regular suspicion that
there is more to her situation and surroundings than meets
her eye. Thus, while her companions seek disconnected,
meaningless manifestations of the quaint or ridiculous
(material for the artless movie, Random Samples, that they
are making with their rented equipment), she watches for
portents, for signs. They can find a sight such as the bottle
house to be a mere curiosity, whereas for her it becomes an
almost symbolic portal into her past, "a preposterous
monument to some quirkish person exiled or perhaps a
voluntary recluse like my father" (p. 11). Similarly, the early
encountered moose family is more than just a travesty of a
service station tourist attraction. "Father moose," "mother
moose," and "a little boy moose," are together near the
gasoline pumps, while a "little girl moose in a frilly skirt and
a pigtailed blonde wig, holding a red parasol in one hoof" is
up on the roof of the service station (p. 13). That
distribution of stuffed moose is an obvious image of the
narrator's own family status — the daughter separated from
father, mother and brother — as well as a hint of a plunge to
come.

Equally suggestive of things to come is the road itself, the

objective manifestation of a more perilous inner journey.
There is first the two-sided welcome sign, "BIENVENUE on
one side and WELCOME on the other" (p. 11), but both words
ominously underscored with bullet holes. That sign is a
correlative of the narrator's own fearful ambivalence: "Now
we're on my home ground, foreign territory. My throat
constricts . . ." (p. 11). Then, soon after she and her three
travelling companions have entered Quebec province, she
discovers that the narrow twisting highway she travelled as a
child has been replaced by a more modern one. The old "way
is blocked" (p. 12), yet it still remains as another indication of
42 A. E. and C. N. DAVIDSON

the "disease" of progress that is "spreading up from the south"

(p. 7). Furthermore, as a child, returning home on the old
road, the narrator was always car sick. The new road
precludes that ordeal, and she misses it: "They've cheated,
we're here too soon and I feel deprived of something, as
though I can't really get here unless I've suffered; as though
the first view of the lake, which we can see now, blue and cool
as redemption, should be through tears and a haze of vomit"
(p. 15).

The hardships of a rough winding drive have been removed.

But what were physical difficulties for the child have been
superseded by psychological problems for the adult. In fact,
the very fashion in which the narrator longs for the former
manageable single physical trial of a car ride with a definite
end suggests how different her present crisis is — mwriifold,
subjective, psychically overwhelming, and quite open ended.
No wonder she laments all change. Like her father, she wants
to preserve a myth of a pristine wilderness, even though the
surveyors, the powerboats, the discarded cans and bottles of
civilization are everywhere.

A longing for an unsullied world parallels a more desperate

and much more private dream. The story of the protagonist's
marriage, child, and divorce disguises (negates) the fact of her
abortion — an adulteration of her body that corresponds to
the adulteration of the native woods in which she was born
and raised. It is especially that private "violation" with which
8
she must "come to terms" but which she will not admit. Yet,
because the two desecrations are symbolically related, the
return to one past sets the stage for a return to another one.
After she witnesses what has been done to her native land,
the protagonist also comes to see that the abortion had
"planted death" in her "like a seed" and that her fantasy
marriage was merely a way of "layering it over," making that
seed "a cyst, a tumor" (pp. 144-45). As earlier suggested, the
agon in Atwood's romance is not any physical danger on the
narrator's way. It is the possibility that by travelling that
 MARGARET ATWOOD'S SURFACING 43

way, by returning to her past, she can begin to recognize the

consequences of a cystic seed, the malignant growth of
self-doubts and self-delusions that are surfacing in every
aspect of her life.
The journey by car is only the beginning of the narrator's
search for what she later calls the "evil grail" (p. 143). The
second basic stage of her quest, the "pathos or death struggle,"
comes after she has driven through civilization's wasteland
world — successive flimsy tourist towns, the pit where the
Americans installed their rockets — to a wilderness that is
9
being rapidly wasted. Just as the agon appropriately takes
place mostly on the road, the pathos occurs largely on the
island. As Frye observes, the "most common" setting for "the
point of epiphany," the site where the pathos ends in a mystical
illumination that harmonizes "the undisplaced apocalyptic
world and the cyclical world of nature," is a symbolically
significant location such as a mountain top, an island, a
10
tower. On her island, returned to her childhood home, the
narrator is seemingly somewhat isolated from the more
perturbing aspects of her present world. She can attend to the
immediate task of looking for her missing father. Yet that
initial search is not the pathos of her quest any more than the
drive itself was the agon.

When two days on the island demonstrate that her father is

not to be found, the narrator is ready to depart. Her two male
companions, however, decide that they will all extend their
vacation for another week, which provides the protagonist
with a new task. Instead of continuing to look for her father,
she now wants to avoid any encounter: "I wanted to get them
off the island, to protect them from him, to protect him from
them" (p. 83). She fantasizes that her father is possibly
watching them, probably mad. But she is primarily motivated
by a growing sense that her friends should not have
accompanied her. Even during the drive she had felt that
"either the three of them are in the wrong place or I am" (p.
8). Soon it becomes clear who is in the wrong place, literally
and figuratively. The narrator sees that the other three — her
44 A. E . and C. N . D A V I D S O N

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

protagonist into something little better than the heron, the

ocular proof of his victory, of his potency, even though that
potency is only a pathetic pretense at exercising power. When
the complex game of sexual put-downs that he inflicts on his
wife gets out of hand and she makes love with Joe, he
demands, "tit for tat." The narrator knows that his
proposition is not prompted by even the vaguest desire for her
as a person: "Geometrical sex, he needed me for an abstract
principle; it would be enough for him if our genitals could be
detached like two kitchen appliances and copulate in mid-air,
that would complete his equation" (p. 152). After she refuses
to be reduced to a copulating genital, he turns on her
violently: "you tight-ass bitch . . . I'm not going to sit up and
beg for a little third-rate cold tail" (p. 152). That reaction
enables the narrator to "see into him," to recognize that "He
was an imposter, a pastiche," with "second-hand American
. . . spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen" (p.
152).

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

expectations," as Gloria Onley notes, "fills her with

unconscious self-loathing," Anna must condemn her friend for
12
being different.
Joe silently, Anna and David verbally, they all three turn
on the narrator, who sees that she is being judged: "A ring of
eyes, tribunal; in a minute they would join hands and dance
around me, and after that the rope and the pyre, cure for
heresy" (p. 154). The execution that she anticipates is an
obvious exaggeration but the verdict is not. She is guilty of
the heresy of failing to think and act according to the dictates
of others. They cannot tolerate that and try to negate her
identity. She is charged with hating men, with wanting to be
a man, with not being a "real" woman. "God, she really is
inhuman," Anna concludes. As she is thus excluded from their
"human" circle a long term process comes into sharp focus. All
her life the narrator has been pressured to become a proper
woman, proper to be determined by others. For example, the
first of the childhood scrapbooks which she examines, looking
for where she "had come from or gone wrong" (p. 91), is filled
with mostly "illustrations cut from magazines" of ladies in
different poses or dresses — images of the surface she should
acquire. She has now seen, with only her "friends" and
isolated on her island, how pervasive are the forces that
would turn her into the "right" kind of hollow vessel. The
second stage, the struggle or pathos, is nearing its completion.

Frye observes that romances generally assume a "dialectic

structure." The questor meets other characters along the way
who fall, basically, into two simple categories: good and evil,
those who obstruct and those who aid. Individuals who hinder
13
the quest are "caricatured as simply villainous or cowardly."
It is not therefore surprising that the narrator's companions
all increasingly take on the qualities of caricature — a
stereotypical "dumb blonde," a parody of the "good liberal" of
the sixties, a "paralyzed artist" whose art lies in mangling his
pots. Atwood has been criticized for thus simplifying her
subordinate characters, and yet, because of the mythic (high
mimetic) structure of the novel, this flattening should be
expected. The narrator must come to see these others as
 MARGARET ATWOOD'S SURFACING 47

enemies — as "second-hand Americans" and victimizers

despite their pretense of being the victimized female or the
victimized Canadian — before she can reach the third stage of
her journey. She will see them once again as simply human,
neither angels nor demons, in the fourth and de-mythifying
stage."
Before the surfacer can come to any kind of relativistic
conclusion, however, she must pass through the third stage of
anagnorisis or enlightenment. Typically, that process entails
various supra-natural phenomena including a descent into
the underworld. Indeed, in this section of the novel, we enter
a projected world, one in which "reality" reflects the
narrator's psychic needs. Thus the presence of ghosts and the
15
possibility of visions. There are suddenly "rules" of seemingly
divine origin that are incomprehensible by any normal
human standards. The protagonist must continually feel her
way, attempting to discern the superhuman (or subhuman)
logic behind these intuited taboos. Yet gradually she realizes
that just as her search has been a search for herself, so too, in
best mythic fashion, she almost must embody the grail that
will be the proof of her success.

The third stage of Atwood's romance begins when the

narrator discovers her father's dead body. In a very real sense,
she can then release herself from her father — from his logic,
his concept of an ordered universe, and even from her
suspicion that his rationalism has given way, in the
immediate past, to an insanity which may have always been
present in his obsessive retreat from the rest of the world.
More to the point, she can begin to re-discover herself only
after she has become, both literally and symbolically, an
orphan.
The immediate consequence of the narrator's dawning
recognition of her essential "aloneness," of her independence,
is her decision to make love again with Joe — but this time on
her terms. Earlier, she had,forestalled his crudely physical
advances by claiming that she would get pregnant. But now,
when she draws him out into the night to make love under
48 A. E. and C. N. DAVIDSON

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

It is at this point that Atwood's novel departs from the

archetypal romance pattern described by Frye, or, rather,
begins to transcend the mythic to accommodate the mundane.
Frye's categories, like myths of old, simply do not allow for
16
women heroes. In the standard romances, female characters
play secondary roles. Polarized into the virtuous maiden or
the evil temptress, they mostly help or hinder the male
protagonist. The first can point the hero on his way; the
second tries to turn him from it. But mostly maidens serve as
prizes. As Frye dryly observes, "the reward of the quest
17
usually is or includes a bride." To be just a bride, of course,
is to be defined by someone else. It is to exist for the hero, not
as the hero. In both the old myths and the modern society,
there is therefore a definite place for an Anna, but not for a
female mythic hero.
If Frye's formulations do not fully accommodate the
protagonist in Surfacing, Atwood elsewhere provides a
category that does. Victimization, she argues in Survival: A
Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, can end with the
fourth Basic Victim Position: "to be a creative non-victim"
who is "able to accept your own experience for what it is,
rather than having to distort it to make it correspond with
18
others' versions of it." Of course, as Atwood admits, this is
not a Victim Position at all: "In Position Four, Victor/ Victim
games are obsolete. You don't even have to concentrate on
rejecting the role of Victim [or spiritual guide or temptress or
19
bride] because the role is no longer a temptation for you." In
fact, the very term "creative non-victim" suggests both a
de-elevation from the category of "hero," one whose heroism is
proved by his triumph over others, and an ascendence from
the more typically female (and Canadian, Atwood insists) role
of being truimphed over by others. In a different sense than
20
Frye, Atwood resolves her work on a middle ground. The
narrator knows that to remain naked in the woods, heroically
free "from all falsely defining images of herself" and, in
Onley's memorable phrase, "a microcosm of the biosphere,"
21
would also mean physical annihilation. Unsung heroes serve
no useful function, mythic or otherwise. Moreover, if psychic
 MARGARET ATWOOD'S SURFACING 51

insight and spiritual heroism can be won only at the cost of

physical annihilation, the victory is Pyrrhic indeed. Yet the
alternative, to return to the city and society, seems to negate
the triumph, the epiphany, the female protagonist has
achieved.
The narrator, at the end of Surfacing, is presented with two
alternatives. She can stay on her island. Or she can leave.
The setting reflects that simple choice. "The lake is quiet, the
trees surround me, asking and giving nothing" (p. 192).
Nature asks nothing because, finally, it gives nothing. As all
mythic heroes must eventually learn, nature takes little
account of the most heroic of human deeds: ubi sunt. The
protagonist really has only one viable course. She will return
with Joe who stands, like Charon, ready to usher her back to
the other world — in some ways, with imperfect relationships
and predictable failures, the real nether world: "If I go with
him we will have to talk . . . we can no longer live in spurious
peace by avoiding each other, the way it was before, we will
have to begin. For us it's necessary, the intercession of words;
and we will probably fail, sooner or later, more or less
painfully. That's normal. . ." (p. 192).
Still, considering what the heroine has gone through in the
course of her novel, her "surfacing," there is something heroic
in this return to normality. Although at the end of the book
she remains poised on the dock "which is neither land nor
water," we must see that this is not a typical contemporary
ambiguous conclusion. If the ending is uncertain it is because
the protagonist, who has confronted and solved the riddles
that she set herself, has no society in which to report back her
success. Even more obviously, no society will be saved by her
success. She is the Fisher King without a kingdom. She is, of
course, also her own grail/knight, for she has rescued herself
by recovering her real grail. And here we must emphasize
22
that this grail is the second fetus. The narrator's desire to
bear a baby (significantly referred to as a genderless "it")
indicates her awareness that, although there may be no place
for her — as a female hero — in her society, she does now
possess the knowledge that will help her child move along its
own "untravelled paths."
52 A. E . and C. N . D A V I D S O N

A woman who returns to Ontario obviously in a state of

mythic and mystical enlightenment would not, as earlier
observed, elicit universal acclaim. So the woman returns
pregnant. She will have a baby, which should provide her
with a conventional enough occupation. In Survival, Atwood
herself has observed that Canadian authors regularly bring in
"the Baby Ex Machina" at "the end of the book to solve
problems for the characters which they obviously can't solve
28
for themselves." In Surfacing, however, that often forced
plotting device is made to serve several legitimate functions.
To start with, as Roberta Rubenstein notes, "the narrator's
spiritual malaise" was partly "a product of her separation"
from both "the future (the unborn child)" and "the past (her
24
dead parents)." But in the final chapter, the protagonist
convincingly assets, "I re-enter my own time" (p. 191). She
has recovered her parents and reconceived her child. She
thereby achieves a different order of time than the one she
previously suffered in that she can now acknowledge her past,
anticipate her future. In fact, only by descending to the role of
expectant mother does she fully achieve Frye's "cyclical world
of nature." Pregnant, she embodies the picture of herself as a
fetus she had drawn as a young girl. When she recognizes
that that picture, a gift to her mother, has become her
mother's gift to her, she has reconciled birth and death; her
past and her present; the infant she was, the infant she
aborted, and the infant she will bear.

The breach in time in not the only one that is bridged by a

prospective baby. As Catherine McLay observes, "the child
heals the division in the mother between the self and the
25
world, mind and body." But equally important, the child also
provides a needed break. It is and enforces an end to the
narrator's mythic quest: "I assume it: if I die it dies . . . . It
might be the first one, the first true human; it must be born,
allowed" (p. 191). She will henceforth "refuse to be a victim";
she will "give up" the "lie" that she "is powerless," for
"withdrawing is no longer possible and the alternative is
death." The old "games" are over and new ones, such as a
different relationship with Joe or her own style of
 MARGARET ATWOOD'S SURFACING 53

motherhood, will "have to be invented" in the quotidian world

(p. 191). Essentially, the fetus within her finally attests that
she must now struggle to survive in society, not just on the
perilous journey and through a pathos elsewhere — a
continuing hazard never envisioned by knights of old.

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

"Gloria Onley, "Power Politics in Bluebeard's Castle," Canadian Literature,

No. 60 (1974), p. 28.
"Frye, p. 195.
"Catherine McLay, in "The Divided Self: Theme and Pattern in Margaret
Atwood's Surfacing," Journal of Canadian Fiction, 4, No. 1 (1975), 94-95,
makes much the same point and observes that just as the narrator
"comes to see others [including her first lover] no longer as the enemy
but human too, fallible like herself," she also comes to see her parents as
"no longer superhuman."
"Atwood has suggested that the novel can be read as a ghost story of "the
Henry James kind, in which the ghost that one sees is in fact a fragment
of one's own self that has split off." See Graeme Gibson, "Margaret
Atwood," in Eleven Canadian Novelists Interviewed by Graeme Gibson
(Toronto: Anansi, 1972), p. 29.
"It should be here emphasized that Atwood is not criticizing Frye himself.
His schemata are most broadly descriptive, not prescriptive, but what
they describe is a male-centered literature. As Surfacing shows, a
mythic woman hero does not quite fit into the same pattern that will
accommodate a male one.
"Frye, p. 193.
"Margaret Atwood, Survival (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), pp. 38-39.
"Atwood, Survival, p. 39.
ao
For Frye the middle ground is simply "our world," positioned between an
"upper world" of a "mythical Messiah or deliverer" and "the demonic
powers of a lower world" (Anatomy, p. 187, emphasis in the original). For
Atwood, however, the resolution is more a harmonizing of earthly
opposites: "the ideal would be somebody who would neither be a killer or
a victim, who could achieve some kind of harmony with the world, which
is a productive or creative harmony, rather than a destructive
relationship towards the world" (on Surfacing in Gibson, p. 27).
"Onley, "Power Politics," p. 38.
"It should be noted that Atwood incorporates several references to the grail
romance in Surfacing. For example, the narrator's employer is Mr.
Percival. But that former grail knight has been metamorphosed into a
cautious publisher of children's folk and fairy tales. Far from saving the
protagonist, he merely provides her with further exercises in
inauthenticity.
za
Atwood, Survival, p. 207.
"Roberta Rubenstein, "Surfacing: Margaret Atwood's Journey to the
Interior," MFS, 22 (1976), 395.
25
McLay, p. 93.