CHAPTER II Surfacing (1972)

CHAPTER II SURFACING: ORIGINS AND IDENTITY Surfacing (1972) is celebrated as the work that most closely associates Atwood’s novel writing to her poetry, with which it shares “a considerable thematic and stylistic territory”,1 containing echoes of The Circle Game (1966) and Power Politics (1971). From the light, detached irony of The Edible Woman, which owed much of its theme to Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, to the frequently elliptical Surfacing with its “terse, laconic style”2 and consciously poetic imagery and metaphor, more subtly employed than the striking but slightly clumsy cake metaphor of The Edible Woman, there is a great distance. Concurrent with this stylistic shift is a significant expansion of thematic concern, and Surfacing provides a notable example of how Atwood’s dialogue with feminism is mediated through a number of alternate and occasionally dissonant political concerns. Surfacing continues and develops The Edible Woman’s preoccupation with the female protagonist and her alienation from social expectations, but introduces issues of ecology, nationalism, spirituality and ancestry to Atwood’s canon of political focus. These issues were initially treated with disregard by feminists, but later became significant within feminist theory, almost to the point of commanding distinct genres, such as, for example, ecofeminism, and post-colonial feminism. In Surfacing, Atwood begins to articulate concerns that are later to be theorised by feminist academics. Specifically, feminism, ecology and nationalism begin to converge for Atwood, as she discovers in them a common theme of guilt and innocence. In the novel, she begins to examine the implications of identifying one’s self as an innocent individual within a framework of collective guilt, and Atwood charges both feminists and Canadians with perpetuating their victim status, yet struggles to reconcile her instinctual liberalism with a simultaneous belief in communal guilt 1 Sherrill Grace, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, ed. Ken Norris, Montreal, 1980, 97. 2 Stanley Fogel, A Tale of Two Countries: Contemporary Fiction in English Canada and the United States, Toronto, 1984, 110. 36 Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction and mutual responsibility. As the novel progresses, she exposes an apparently impossible paradoxical triangle between her liberal politics, feminist leanings, and postmodern sympathies. A peculiarly Canadian feminism Early North American readings of Surfacing were distinctly culture- specific. Atwood has said that the American reviewers interpreted the novel “almost exclusively as a feminist or ecological treatise”, whereas in Canada it was reviewed “almost exclusively as a nationalistic one”.3 It would seem that, at least initially, both countries viewed nationalism, feminism and ecology as unrelated issues. With the progression of feminist theory, however, came the development of a more comprehensive school of thought, and it was during this period, when Surfacing was being published, that Canadian nationalism and feminism first began to significantly interact around issues of autonomy and identity. For Atwood, the parallels between the movements were self-evident, as she explained in a 1981 lecture on Canadian-American relations: The cultural nationalism of the early ’70s was not aggressive in nature. It was a simple statement: we exist. Such movements become militant only when the other side replies, in effect, No you don’t. Witness feminism.4 Similar ideas had already been touched on in The Edible Woman, in which Marian had fought, largely subconsciously, for Peter’s acknowledgement of her existence separate from his. In Surfacing, this fight for autonomy is extended beyond sexual politics as Atwood addresses Canada’s struggle to escape cultural domination by America. In the early 1970s, second-wave feminism, particularly Canadian second-wave feminism, was still in its infancy, and dominated by English, French and American thinking. The Feminine Mystique and The Second Sex were still two of the most influential critical texts, and consequently, de Beauvoir and Friedan were much referred to in a 1972 anthology of Canadian feminist writing, Women Unite! Many of the contributors contradicted the philosophies of the two theorists on 3 Atwood quoted in Hammond, “Articulating the Mute”, 117. 4 Atwood, Second Words, 385. .

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