The Quest for Wholeness and Individuation in Atwood's novel Surfacing: A Psycho-Feminist Approach (original) (raw)

Deconstructing the Quest for Identity and Meaning in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 2024

https://ijels.com/detail/deconstructing-the-quest-for-identity-and-meaning-in-margaret-atwood-s-surfacing/ Margaret Atwood's novel, Surfacing (1972) addresses the Woman's Question through the point of view of young woman who travels with her boyfriend and two married friends and sets on a journey into her troubled past. The paper analyzes the different ways in which the novel portrays the growing distance of the protagonist's self-identity from her sense of language, history, and culture. It delves into the role of language, reason, and logic in imbuing as well as taking away the protagonist's self-belief. It also probes Atwood's portrayal of nature, especially wilderness, as an essential aspect of one's psychological development and realization of desires. The paper argues that the novel is a quest for female identity and meaning in which language and nature play extremely significant roles.

The Study of Psychoanalytical and Post-Colonial Feminism in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

The drive of my article is to study meticulously the notion of societal sarcasm, illuminating and thus modifying the people's disfigurement interconnected to the work of fiction, Surfacing by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Feminism is diligently linked to the passage into the centre. There are dualistic possibilities for all-chiefly to breathe alike an ostrich corresponding to the realm of fiction and to walk into the area of realism. Human beings are similar to the blessing on the globe with their impregnable command of intellectualism to shield their personal life as well as the earth where they are breathing. Every human being should appreciate the worth of their life. Anarchism or despotism comes with radical and financial control. Females have been browbeaten in numerous means by the self-styled divine Male. In Surfacing, Margaret Atwood dealt with 'Feminism' or 'Self-discovery' by executing the two types of concepts such as, Psychoanalysis and Post-Colonialism. The novel portrays on probing of their individuality and a woman who comes back to her birthplace, Northern Quebec Bush in Canada to discover her lost father. Escorted by her lover and an added wedded duo, the nameless central character chances upon her bygone days in her juvenile house, recollecting occasions and moods, whereas trying to gather evidences for her father's enigmatic loss. Meticulously, the bygone days surpasses her and pushes her into the realm of wildness and psychosis. Although these types of effects are chanced upon in the novel which marks Surfacing as a psychoanalytic and post-colonial work of fiction.

Gender and Victimization in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

Grove: Working Papers on English Studies, 2019

Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972), a contemporary classic nowadays, has raised the interest of all kinds of critics. Some of the most remarkable elements in the novel concern feminism, a movement with which the Canadian author has been highly committed. This paper deals with two specific aspects in Atwood's work in relation to the aforementioned critical approach: gender and victimization. A thorough reading of the novel is thus done in order to detect and subsequently dissect the main instances of both aspects. Special attention is paid to female characters (Anna and the unnamed protagonist), hypersexualized and victimized in the patriarchal microcosms rendered in the story.

Psychic Assimilation in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believed that man's behavior and personality derive from the constant and unique interaction of conflicting psychological forces that operate at three different levels of awareness: the preconscious, the conscious, and the unconscious. According to Freud the unconscious influences our behavior and experience, even though we are unaware of these underlying influences. The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that lie outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. Freud described the phenomenon of repression, in which the conscious mind turns away from a painful thought or memory, pushing it down into the unconscious, because it is socially unacceptable. The thought does not go away, however, and energy from the libido (life energy) is consumed by keeping it repressed. This energy can be released, Freud thought, when a repressed memory is re-admitted to consciousness. 1 Everyone represses some things: bad childhood memories or traumas, for example. But some people repress so much that repression becomes a major component of mental disorders, affecting a person's day-today activities: " He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips ; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. " 2 The quote demonstrates Freud's conviction that despite repression, unconscious desires eventually work their way to the surface. A common example of this phenomenon is what is now known as the Freudian slip or parapraxis. A person will make a verbal mistake that reveals an unconscious thought or emotion. A person may call his spouse by a different name, exposing his attraction for another woman. Unconscious desires are also expressed by nonverbal communication. The present paper seeks to establish that the heroine of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing violates standards of behavior, represses her bad memories and suffers as a consequence, learns her lesson and resolves to live in light of it, unembittered by her pain. A character without a name is hardly a character at all. The nameless narrator who appears at the beginning of Surfacing is a voice rather than a person, and presents through her narrative involving two time spans–past childhood juxtaposed with present adulthood–the eternal dilemma of man-woman relationship. While the protagonist attempts to unravel the mystery behind the disappearance of her botanist father on a remote island in northern Quebec, along with her lover Joe and another young couple, David and Anna, the reader struggles to make sense of the often conflicting stands of her story about her marriage, her husband and her child.

MARGARET ATWOOD, SURFACING: SEARCHING FOR ROOTS

The paper focuses on the main character’s quest for identity as she returns both physically and mentally to the Bottle Villa, the place where she lived as a child, which is situated in between the English and French part of Canada. Here, she is appalled by the destruction brought about by the so-called American tourists who kill a heron in order to have fun and decides to undergo a thorough change of her own behaviour for having condoned their act. In complete isolation, away from the noise of the city and the disturbing influence of friends, surrounded only by nature and wilderness, she manages to find her balance and to discover the truth about her father’s death. The protagonist cannot identify with her kind mother and seems to be following the rationalist thinking pattern drawn a long time ago by her father although this stunts her evolution. She feels the need for ritual in order to connect with the earth gods and find answers. The ritual the character undergoes involves the use of mushrooms that help her enter a trance during which she establishes connections with both her father and her ancestors. The female character surfaces a stronger person able to understand the decisions she has taken so far and to rediscover her balance and the unity of her body and mind. The analysis will take into account various types of identity: foreign (American), cultural, spiritual and narrative and also the focus on the opposition American – Canadian and French – English culture/ identity. The critics/ theorists consulted will include: John Cottingham, Richard Culpeper, René Descartes, Mircea Eliade, Janice Fiamengo, John Rothfork, Madan Sarup, Benedict Spinoza, Hilde Staels, etc.

Women"s Alienation in Margaret Awtood Book "Surfacing""

International journal of research and innovation in social science, 2021

The present study attempts to analyse the theme of woman"s alienation in Margaret Atwood"s novel "surfacing ". In her novel, Margaret sheds light on the alienation that woman and particularly the narrator lives in patriarchal society. The unnamed narrator who is a talented and an artist woman turns back to Canada to search for her father, so she begins to feel like an isolated and alienated person. Because of her father disappearance and her mother detachment the narrator feels like an abandoned child who doesn"t have parents also when we read the book we find that there are a number of factors that contribute to the narrator"s alienation including her memories and bad experiences, losing her child due to abortion and lacking trust in her closet friends. In fact, being alienated has a negative impact on the narrator"s personality because it will lead her to move away from society, to become introvert and more than that it will lead her to madness acting like an animal living in the forest. In surfacing, the unnamed narrator understands the patriarchal factors behind her alienation and, therefore, she decides to resist them.

Misogyny in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing

JURNAL BASIS

The aimed of this study is to show misogyny exposed by male character in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. Margaret Atwood unveils patriarchal practice in a seemingly perfect marriage. Surfacing tells the story of the wife who lives under the pressure of her husband. Using feminist literary approach, this novel is scrutinized by applying close reading method. The source of data for this study is Surfacing the novel, book reviews, and articles written by and about author of the book. This is a textual study, in collecting the data, the researchers applied the data gathered in the form of words, phrase and sentence Some steps are taken in collecting the data, the first step is reading and understanding the theme, character, and the backdrop of the story. The next step is Identifying the words, quotations, and dialogs relating to the theme. The data are analyzed descriptively. Based on the analysis, misogyny exposed in this novel is embedded in a culture and internalized the customs. T...

Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

1993

Questions of genre, identity and female subjectivity comprise the focus of this comprehensive study of the contemporary Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. It explores the literary sense of the plurality of genres and narrative styles present throughout Atwood's published fiction, with the purpose of analyzing the revisitation of historical and canonical forms. The narrative possibilities inherent to specific genres constitute the basis of an examination of representations of selfhood in the light of psychoanalytic theories of language and subjectivity that define the subject as heterogeneous and in constant process. Atwood's work proposes a gendered vision of subjectivity, wherein woman is characterized by a multiplicity of roles and subjective positions. Atwood's delineations of the marginality and polyvalency of her female characters are discussed in relation to sexual politics and gender difference. Of primary importance to the study is the texts' emphasi...