This is early Atwood (1972), written before Cat’s Eye or The Handmaid’s Tale. I found a review of Surfacing in Sarah’s Books which clearly states my own ambivalence about the book.
Surfacing seems to be a feminist novel, but it is really a novel with a theme of feminine madness. Not all of us who are angry go mad. The narrator in Surfacing has just cause for anger and madness, but so does Christie in Alcott’s Work, written 100 years ago. Christie hikes up her skirts, so to speak, and goes to work, while Atwood’s narrator can’t let go of the past. The story is one long seeking for her father, her mother, her brother, the life they led together in the wilderness, a life she does not appear to have liked all that much. She wants that life to send her a message.
It would be right for my mother to have left something for me also, a legacy. His was complicated tanged, but hers would be simple as a hand, it would be final. I was not completed yet; there had to be a gift for each of them.
More than feminism, I think, the most arresting theme is identity. Is the narrator Canadian? Why does she dislike the Americans so much and feel threatened by them. Uneasy as a daughter, she feels no relief now that her parents are gone. Uneasy as a mother, she now seeks to replace the child she gave away or aborted. That is another problem with the text. Because the narrator is so emotionally disturbed we cannot know which of her accounts of the past is the true one. While she is still relatively sane she tells us she gave the child away. That might be more believable because she is more rational at that time, but also more able rationally to deceive. Later, when totally distraught, she remembers an abortion, but perhaps she fantasizes that. Perhaps both things happened. Also perhaps it doesn’t matter.
I treasure The Handmaid’s Tale as one of the most perceptive novels I have read embodying the contemporary feminine quandary. Surfacing is on the way to The Handmaid’s Tale, but it is only a way station; it hasn’t arrived yet.
Thanks for the mention!
I thoroughly enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale, so much so that I whizzed through it in a single sitting. Your final comment makes me feel that I really should read it again.
With regard to Surfacing, I like your point that perhaps the precise nature of the past doesn’t matter. This suggests to me some tricky questions about the relative merits of memory and reality.
I love your idea to have a blog of reviews of your reading. I may add the same to mine.
I have been trying for some 40 years to appreciate Atwood, the much lauded “feminist writer.” My last effort was with Oryx. I came away convinced I will never read another book that so disrespects its characters.
I think you have I think nailed Margaret Atwood in implying her anger (which she associates with being female) has driven her mad. An affliction I fear of much of latter 20th century feminism.
I find my resonance in Cady Stanton and Julia Ward Howe.
“I find my resonance in Cady Stanton and Julia Ward Howe.”
In the 19th century I find my resonance in Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott. Not feminists in modern terms, but very female in their own time and able to say it from the inside.
I like Louisa May Alcott also. In fact also her father and the Transcendentalists. I mentioned Julia Howe for her Appeal to Womahood in the context of this time of war and out of the, now desperate, conviction that it will take the women to stop it.
It seems somehow the later day feminists lost the feminine in conflating equality with equivalence..
Have you reviewed The Bolter?
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Sorry for off topic, but 2012 is close, is this really matter?