Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood

• Surfacing (1)

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Outline

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Margaret Atwood
The Circle Game (1966, poetry) Survival
(1972, non-fiction) The Edible Woman (1969,
novel) Surfacing (1973, novel) Lady Oracle
(1977, novel) Dancing Girls (1977, short)
Life Before Man (1979, novel) Dancing Girls
and Other Stories (1982, short stories) Bodily
Harm (1982, novel) The Handmaid's Tale
(1985, novel) Bluebeard's Egg (1987, short
stories) Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1987,
poetry)

• Concerned with Canadas cultural identity
  Womens lives and identities
• Survival (1972) Victim mentality
• Themes of Duality Self Other, Men Women,
  Victim Victimizer, City and Nature

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Margaret Atwood (2)
Selected Poems II 1976-1986 (1987, poetry...
US) Cat's Eye (1989, novel) Wilderness
Tips (1991, short stories) The Robber Bride
(1993, novel) Good Bones and Simple
Murders (1994, short stories) Alias Grace
(1996, novel) A Quiet Game(1997, The Blind
Assassins (2000)

• 42 books more than 10 novels
• Postmodern, self-reflexive mode
• mixing poetry and fiction, mixing a lot of genres
  (Gothic, detective story, fairy tales, family
  romance, comedy, allegory, etc.)

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Margaret Atwood (3)

• Margaret Atwood general intro. and her family
  life on an island
• Her views
• of her
• characters

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Margaret Atwood (4)

• Her Language
• Around us is the illusion of infinite space or
  of no space, ourselves and the obscure shore
  which it seems we could touch, the water between
  an absence. The canoes reflection floats with
  us, the paddles twin in the lake. Its like
  moving on air, nothing beneath us holding us up
  suspended, we drift home (end of chap 7).

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Surfacing Plot summary major issues

• Plot The narrator, together with Anna, David and
  Joe, goes back to the village in the mountains
  in Northern Quebec and then to the island where
  she lived as a childin order to look for her
  missing father. She also has to confront her
  past and the relations shes involved in.
• The setting a border country between the English
  and the French, between wild nature and human
  civilization.
• Time early 1970s, when young people are
  rebellious and aware of radical feminism, which,
  however, does not change all at once the
  structure of patriarchal society.

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Surfacing Title and Plot

• The title The protagonist dives into her past
  and then surfaces.
• Part I arrivalfish and canoeing ? swimming
  //remembers her past and her brothers drowning
  experience (which she remembers as an unborn
  baby end of chap 3)
• ending --". . . finally being in the air is more
  painful than being in the water and I bend and
  push myself reluctantly into the lake."
• Part II (remembered after the six days of
  events, conflicts and diving) ends with the
  finding of her fathers corpse
• Part III leaves the other friends and stays
  behind.

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Surfacing main characters

• David and Joe, teachers of a community college
  David teaches communication and Joe, arts
• Work on Random Samples together
• Anna and David, a couple
• The narrator, an illustrator
• Minor characters Paul and his wife (French),
  Evans and Claudeconnections to civilization
• The Americans

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Surfacing Main Issues (1) Nature

1. Existence in nature founded on dead bodies
   empty and expansive everything echoes here.
2. No electricity at night, the use of outhouse,
   etc.
3. p. 41 refrigerator
4. the narrators views -- chap 6 (p. 48) chap 9
   (p. 76)

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Surfacing Main Issues (1) Nature

• 2. Human invasion fishing, hunting, the use of
  moose as commodities, jokes on beaver,
• Chap 1 -- "I can't believe I'm on this road
  again, twisting along past the lake where the
  white birches are dying, the disease is spreading
  up from the south, and I notice they now have
  sea-planes for hire"(p. 3).

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Surfacing Main Issues (2) Home

• sense of alienation
• arriving at her hometown, which she calls "my
  home ground, foreign territory" (7)
• resisting telling the story the narrator refers
  to her parents, herself, and her brother "as if
  they were somebody else's family" also she has
  to "keep herself from telling that story" (10).
• Alienated from her parents since her marriage,
  not hearing a word from her father after her
  mothers death.

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Surfacing Main Issues (3) the past

• How does she look at her past?
• Her remembering the past happens simultaneously
  with her return home
• 1.chap 3 p. 25 the parents
• 2. Chap 4 p. 30 the husband
• 3. Chap 5 pp. 43-44
• 4. Chap 8 -- p. 70

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Surfacing Main Issues (4) gender relations

• How is Anna related to David? (chap 5 pp.41 44
  chap 8 p. 67)
• How is the narrator related to Joe? Chap 5 pp.
  38-39 chap 6 pp. 54

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Surfacing Main Issues (5) patriarchal society

• childhood constraints and freedom
• Freedom from the fears of the war
• Chap 6 Sunday School
• Chap 8 What do you think about the game on p.
  69?
• B. The narrators job
• Chap 6 --