Creation and Criticism

Through a close reading of Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing, this paper argues that the means by which the unnamed female narrator of the novel eventually achieves wholeness is by developing a ‘minority consciousness’ involving empathy for aboriginal Canadians and the aboriginal Canadian worldview. This is a perspective that has not been delved into by mainstream critiques on the novel, as the connection between the worldview of aboriginal Canadians as a source of the narrator’s transformation is not overtly present in the novel; rather, it has to be unraveled which is what this paper attempts to do. It is only after developing empathy for the marginalized aboriginal Canadians and their worldview that the narrator is able to complete her transformative journey towards wholeness and self-empowerment both as a woman and human being. This paper presents this argument within the context of the narrator’s journey from the center to the margin and vice versa, unraveling various levels of center-margin dynamics as part of the narrator’s transformative journey.

Keywords: Center-Margin, Colonialism, Aboriginal Canadian, Feminism, Transformation.

Introduction

The unnamed narrator of Margaret Atwood’s remarkable novel Surfacing, who is also its female protagonist, returns to Quebec (Francophone province of Canada) after years of absence to search for her missing father. She is accompanied by her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, Anna and David. The narrator-protagonist’s search for her missing father takes her on a deeper journey, one that leads her to locate her ‘missing self.’ She has lost her ‘true self’ or become split from it due to a traumatic event in her life - an abortion on account of her affair with a married man, which however, is dressed up as a failed marriage, and the loss of her foetus, a separation from her child.

When the narrator in Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing commences her journey, she exists on the margins, both in a socio-political sense and in terms of self-awareness and self-empowerment. When she reaches the end of her journey, she is at her center, where she reconciles her two selves or her lost self, and is on her way to becoming whole, no longer marginalized. She is an empowered woman, ready to return and begin anew her journey back to civilization. Although much criticism exists on the nature of the transformative journey the female protagonist undergoes in Atwood’s novel Surfacing, it has not made a connection between the aboriginal Canadian worldview as a key source of the narrator’s transformative journey. Carol Christ describes the protagonist’s journey as a spiritual quest which begins in the wilderness, at the end of which she experiences an “awakening” (325) and emerges transformed through the power of the gods she encounters:

This awakening could be called a “conversion” to a new religious world view, in conventional religious terminology. However, "awakening" or "surfacing" seem to be better metaphors for describing this spiritual experience, which is more the emergence of what is known but suppressed than the radical turning around or adopting of an alien world view implied by the conventional term. (325)

The “new religious world view” that Christ alludes to, in my view, is none other than the Canadian aboriginal worldview. I posit that it is the expansion of her sympathies for aboriginal Canadians, and the aboriginal Canadian worldview, although barely glimpsed in the novel, which eventually accomplishes her transformation into an empowered self. It is only when the narrator comes to possess what might be termed as a ‘minority consciousness’ towards the aforementioned worldview, that she is able to undertake her transformative journey towards wholeness. Why the narrator finds herself marginalized, how she journeys from the margin to the center and vice versa, and what this journey means, is presented under three headings, that provides the framework for the discussion of my aforementioned thesis.

Margin-Center Dynamics: Socio-Political Hierarchies
Margin-Center Dynamics: Gender Hierarchy
Towards empowerment

1. Margin-Center Dynamics: Socio-Political Hierarchies

Marginalization is the process whereby something or someone is pushed to the edge of a group or community and accorded lesser importance. This is predominantly a social phenomenon by which an individual or group is excluded, kept in an undesirable societal position, and their needs or desires ignored. In Atwood’s novel Surfacing, the group which is marginalized is woman, and the female narrator-protagonist is a representative of it.

Margin-center dynamics in the novel in relation to the female protagonist can be viewed on two levels. The first is the socio-political; and the second, is in terms of self-identification. In terms of the socio-political hierarchy, white America is the dominant power, therefore at the ‘center’. White Canada is shown to be complicit with this center in the person of David, a foul-mouthed Canadian who wields domination over both woman and nature.

The white Canadian way of life is shown to be impacted by the American. In fact, the Americans are viewed as rapacious colonizers of Canadian space. The narratorial voice satirizes and belittles American commercial interest, crass materialistic ways, their disrespect for the environment and their propensity to violence. The signs of continued territorial conquest are everywhere - in the improved road, commercialization, and tourism. Wherever the narrator looks, she finds signs that furnish proof that her childhood version of Quebec is being violated by Americans, as well as Canadians who have assimilated the 'American' values of material progress and ecological destruction. As the narrator of Surfacing puts it:

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. (165)

The narrator sets herself apart from the American way of life by showing herself as frequently disposing off garbage, unraveling David’s film Random Samples, and wondering about Anna’s artificial face. She appears to be a sort of cultural nationalist out to prove that Canadians, although complicit with Americans in their destruction of nature and mad rush towards automation, still have the potential to resist the American ways:

my country, sold or drowned, a reservoir; the people were sold along with the land and the animals, a bargain, sale, solde. (169)

There is also an internal power dynamic within Canadian territorial space hinted at in the novel, that between the French and the English. The novel is filled with references to competing territorial claims. The narrator's family home is located in “border country” (28), presumably an area of northern Quebec near the Ontario border, and her admission that her “home ground” is also “foreign territory” (9) alludes to Canada's history of struggle between the English and the French colonists. Although the humorous image of her mother and Madame "trying with great goodwill to make conversation" (21) is a domesticated version of English-French non-communication, the narrator is conscious that Quebecois resentment of “[l]esmaudits anglais, the damned English,” (68) has some justification. Considering herself as an Anglophone outsider, even an intruder in Quebec society, the narrator expresses no affinity for Quebec culture.

The narrator and her friends replay Anglophone prejudices against the French, emphasizing their antiquity and simplicity. The narrator is disappointed when she discovers that although Paul's wife has traded her wood range for an electric stove, demonstrating a preference for modernity over tradition, she continues to revere the traditional notion of a ‘couple’ which the narrator views as a stereotype, likening it to the originals of the habitant carvings sold “in tourist handicraft shops” (20).

2. Margin-Center Dynamics: Gender Hierarchy

In socio-political terms, there are multiple margins and centers in the text, and the narrator occupies over-lapping spaces and borders; hence, she cannot be identified with any one of them. However, it could be safely said that over all it is her internalization of the Western world-view that has disempowered her. It is especially in terms of her gender perception that she is clearly marginalized. The protagonist has bought into the Eurocentric binaries of gender: male as active and dominant over the female, and female as subordinate to the male and passive. It is for this reason that she found herself as the ‘other woman’ in a relationship to a married man, and had to undergo the traumatic experience of an abortion. We learn of these facts when they are gradually unraveled to us through the voice of a false narrator, who dresses up her secretive relationship to a married man as a “marriage” and the loss of her foetus as separation from her ‘child.’ The narrator’s fictitious story and artful construction of various false memories in the novel, which are uncovered layer after layer by the reader, is yet another marker of her de-centered self.

It is especially the loss of her ‘unborn baby’, literally a part of herself, in flesh and blood, that de-centers her and makes her lead a numb and emotionless existence. She feels deadened and numb because she has lost a part of herself, and also because this experience signifies her subordination in the world of extra-marital relations where the ‘other woman’ ends up victimized.

David’s relationship with Anna is unequal in the extreme with him in a dominating and aggressive role, while Anna meekly complies with his wishes and instructions. Their relationship is based on superficial considerations, so much so that Anna is shown replenishing her make-up periodically so as to look good for David. David is shooting a film Random Samples, as part of which he films a dead heron supposedly killed by the “bloody Americans.” He also films Anna in the nude after coercing her to remove her clothes for the shot. It is ironic that in the past when it came to the narrator's relationship with the married man it she who was subordinated to him, while in her present relationship with Joe. In what appears to be a gender role reversal, it is Joe with his ‘feminine’ side who pleads his love for the female narrator-protagonist, wishes to marry her, and is hurt when she rejects his marriage proposal:

His vulnerability embarrassed me, he could still feel. I should have been more careful with him. (135)

Do you love me, that’s all,” he said. “That’s the only thing that matters.”

It was the language again. I couldn’t use it because it wasn’t mine…the Eskimoes had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love. (135)

Both the narrator’s relationships suggest an unhealthy imbalance between the sexes. It appears that in the world structured according to Western notions of femininity and masculinity, men and women can either be dominant or subordinate, but not equals. It also appears to be the case that the narrator possesses a latent consciousness of the fact that everything about the Western world view, including its inadequacy of its language to express the variety of human sentiment, has played a role in the erosion of both her femininity and her humanity. That is why she cannot feel love for Joe, only he can feel love for her.

3. Towards Empowerment

The narrator’s journey unravels in stages and reveals itself to us layer by layer, like the unpeeling of an onion. The narrator goes out on a search for her missing father, which eventually leads to her search for her ‘missing’ self. But her journey does not end with the recovery of her lost self. She ventures out further into the mysteries of nature, and delving deep into them, eventually accomplishes a transformation of self.

What is it that becomes her doorway into her transformative journey? It is the lunatic drawings of her rationalist father supposedly gone mad that she comes across, later realizing they are ancient rock paintings made by aboriginal Canadians, marked by crosses by her father on a pathway along the lake. When the narrator dives underwater to locate the paintings, she sees a grotesque sprawling creature underwater which is possibly a hallucination:

...it was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. (182)

Whatever it is, part of myself or a separate creature, I killed it. It wasn’t a child but it could have been one. I didn’t allow it. (183)

This is the narrator’s acknowledgement that it was the surfacing of her memory of her aborted foetus in her mind. And this awareness is accompanied by a sense of gratitude towards what can be identified as an aboriginal Canadian tradition:

I had to go onto the shore and leave something: that was what you were supposed to do, leave a piece of your clothing as an offering…These gods, here on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten, were the only ones who had ever given me anything I needed, and freely. (186-87)

Further, the narrator says:

The Indians did not own salvation but they had known where it lived and their signs marked the sacred places, the places where you could learn the truth. There was no painting at White Birch Lake and none on the rocks. He had discovered new places, new oracles, they were things he was seeing the way I had seen, true vision; at the end, after the failure of logic. (186)

Elucidating the nature of religious experience, Carol Christ argues that the “true vision” alluded to by the narrator-protagonist is a form of female religious experience in both form and content, in which the narrator experiences mystical union with the powers of nature. This is very different from men’s religious experience in Western culture which usually revolves around a personal god. Christ further adds:

The transformative energy of life to death and death to life which is the great power in Surfacing is, of course, not new to the historian of religions. Atwood seems to believe it was the great power worshipped by the Canadian Indians of the area where she set the novel. (325)

While I agree with Christ that the religious or mystical vision experienced by the narrator in Surfacing is peculiarly female in nature, involving a mystical identification with the powers of nature, of which I say more towards the end of this paper, I assert that it is not Atwood’s mere supposition that the great powers the narrator encounters are the powers that Canadian Indians of the region worshipped. In my view, Atwood is indeed alluding to the “Canadian Indians” of the area where she set the novel, and their world view, which reveres the powers of nature and emphasizes the interconnectedness of all living beings. By doing so, Atwood is characteristically acting ahead of her times for a novel published in 1972.

The narrator’s marginalization has been affected not simply because of the encroaching American way of life. It is her internalization of the Western worldview in which nature is subordinated to humans, female to male, emotion to reason, and white settler Canadians to indigenous Canadians, that has brought about her disempowerment. It is the rootedness of Western thought in logic and the primacy of the reason, with an inadequate and divisive language as its vehicle of expression, that accomplishes the narrator’s severance from her deeper self. With this worldview is contrasted the sane and sacred world of Indians and Eskimoes who revere nature and possess an understanding of its deeper secrets.

The narrator’s journey towards wholeness is further goaded on by the retrieval of her lost self when she makes love with Joe:

He trembles and then I can feel my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has been imprisoned for so long…this time I will do it by myself, squatting on old newspapers in a corner alone…The baby will slip out easily as an egg, a kitten, and I’ll lick it off and bite the cord…the moon will be full, pulling. In the morning I will be able to see it: it will be covered with shining fur, a god, I will never teach it any words. (209)

The surfacing of the lost child within her is also the surfacing of the female principle and the aboriginal Canadian world view, to which she now accords primacy, overturning the male principle, which is the engine of the Western world view and thought, which lords logic over emotion, the masculine over the feminine, and so on. The protagonist will never teach her child “any words” as words belong to the realm of logic and reason.

As part of her journey towards wholeness the narrator’s self appears to disintegrate and enter non-rational states of being. She hides in the cottage on the island when her friends come looking for her to take her back with them to the city. She isolates herself, and pieces together a collage in her consciousness created out childhood memories of her mother and father. She regresses like a child, lives in the nude like an animal, and even becomes one with the powers of nature. In the process, she invents an inspired language of her own:

The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word

I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning

….

I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which

the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place. (236)

This is the protagonist’s protest against civilization as constructed by the Western mind, both white American and white Canadian, Anglophone and Francophone. It is her entry into this sacred space which the native Canadians or aboriginals know and revere, which eventually leads her to the realization of her wholeness and empowerment, and ends her state of being marginalized and victimized:

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing. 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 (249).

The narrator’s journey of transformation from a world of divisive language and oppressive binaries - masculine-feminine, American-Canadian, English-French, emotion-reason, and so forth - into a languageless space where she becomes one with the powers of nature and the world of spirit, can be likened to a shamanic journey. Shamanism is a spiritual practice in many aboriginal cultures of the world, including aboriginal Canadian traditions, centered “on the shaman, a person believed to achieve various powers through trance or ecstatic religious experience,” who “are typically thought to have the ability to heal the sick, to communicate with the otherworld, and often to escort the souls of the dead to that otherworld” (www.britannica.com).

What we witness in Atwood’s Surfacing is indeed such a journey of radical transformation that can be likened to a shamanic journey, in which the narrator becomes her own shaman. As part of this shamanic journey the narrator rejects her association with the signs and symbols of Western civilization, both outwardly by hiding in a cabin in the forest, and internally by going beyond the world of reason marked by binaries, to eventually enter a sacred space where self, nature, and spirit comingle to effect a healing of her divided self. This healing becomes available to her as she begins to recall the native Canadian children she had seen in her childhood, decodes the ‘lunatic drawings’ of her father as ancient paintings made by aboriginal Canadians, eventually undergoing a sort of shamanic journey of her own using the insights derived from their worldview which reveres the inter-connectedness of human, plant and animal world, and values spiritual experience and shamanic ritual as a means to gain insight into deep truths about the self. It is by undergoing such a shamanic journey that the narrator is able to accomplish her own healing and return to a state of wholeness.

Conclusion

To conclude, it is the Western world view or metaphysics rooted in logic, gender roles that subordinate the feminine to the masculine, and an anti-nature world-view that lauds the exploitation of nature by humans, that leads to the narrator’s marginalization and victimization. The aboriginal Canadian worldview, on the other hand, with its belief in harmonious co-existence between humans and their environment, the interconnectedness of all beings, and a reverence for the sacred powers of nature, is able to eventually center the narrator upon her true self, enable her to undergo her own shamanic journey of transformation, and restore to her both her empowered femininity and lost humanity.

Works Cited:

Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. Virago, 2009.

Christ, Carol P. “Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest and Vision.” Signs, vol. 2, no. 2, 1976, pp. 316–30. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173450. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/shamanism. Accessed 5 Jan. 2025.

Note:

The term ‘aboriginal Canadian’ has been used here as synonymous with ‘indigenous Canadian. The term ‘native Canadian’ or ‘Indian’ is eschewed for its lack of political correctness, although Atwood uses the latter term (Indian) in the novel to refer to indigenous Canadians. The researcher is not concerned with investigating the specific aboriginal cultures associated with the regions Atwood describes in Surfacing. She is mainly concerned with the role the aboriginal Canadian worldview plays in the protagonist’s transformative journey, as well as the ways it differs from the Western world view.

About the Author:

Raised and educated in the cities of Delhi, Chandigarh, Kuala Lumpur, and Toronto, Archna Sahni is an Indo-Canadian poet who calls both Chandigarh and Toronto home. She is the author of poetry collections, First Fire (Calicut, 2005) and Another Nirvana (Toronto, 2018). She has published widely in literary journals and anthologies, and has performed her work in India, Canada, and the United States. Archna is the recipient of Agha Shahid Ali Prize for Poetry, Poetry Prize by A3 Foundation, and received Honourable Mention for EJ Pratt Medal and Poetry Prize. Her other avatars are life-coach and educator. She works as Assistant Professor at GGDSD College, Chandigarh. She holds an M.Ed. from University of Toronto, and a PhD in English Literature from Panjab University, and has presented and published papers on areas such as education, postcolonial writing, and women in the Mahabharata. She can be contacted at archnadocuments@gmail.com.