- Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’  

“From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view” 

- Margaret Atwood, Surfacing 

Deep beneath the placid narrative of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, glides a denial that is as savage as it is magnificent. It is a most dreadful monster, it threatens our entire world, and yet the light in its eyes is one that we must recognise as our own. This is an untamed howl of a novel, a gasping escape from all the stifles us as human beings. It is a brilliant and fierce negation of the oppression of the individual by the forces of social conformity.  

The story begins quietly. The narrator, an unnamed young woman, has returned to the remote island in northern Quebec where she lived as a child, drawn by the news that her father has mysteriously disappeared. She brings her lover, Joe, with her, as well as another couple, David and Anna – the four of them have decided to turn the quest for her missing father into a kind of holiday. The narrator’s initial search shows up nothing, but her friends are charmed by the quaint little cottage, completely isolated from the rest of the world, and decide to stay on for a week and enjoy themselves.  

It is this isolation that is at once the narrator’s undoing and her redemption. Framed against the pristine landscapes of her childhood, the hypocrisy of her friends (and, by extension, of human society more generally) becomes more apparent to her. She begins to see her friends for what they are – unnatural animals trapped in roles defined by gender and social status, indulging in desperate exercises of the ego that make them petty and cruel.  

Seen at close quarters, David and Anna turn out to be anything but the perfect married couple the narrator thought them to be. David is a philanderer and a sadist, who likes nothing more than humiliating his wife, even as he talks big about fighting capitalist oppression. Anna is an empty-headed and ultimately submissive woman, who gives in to his cruelty, is afraid to be seen in his presence without make-up, and not only will not stand up to him, but takes his side when the narrator tries to do so. They seem extreme as a couple, almost caricatures, but it is only because of our nearness to them and the lack of a more urban social setting which would camouflage their faults, that these flaws become visible. Even Joe is not spared. A caring, affectionate mate on the surface, Joe is ultimately driven by his own needs and vulnerabilities, by his desire to be loved and admired, his desire to control and dominate. When the narrator refuses to cooperate in his self-fulfilment, when she refuses to sacrifice her independence to him in the name of love, he too turns against her.  

Surfacing is a deeply ‘feminist’ novel, which is to say that it is a book about gender roles and how they oppress and corrupt women. It explores, in microcosm, the ways in which social stereotypes subvert a woman’s identity, making her a willing accomplice to her own subjugation. She exists either as a sex-object or as a prop to some man’s ego, slave to a system that begins to force-fit her into her inferior role as early as childhood (“it was what you said at school when they asked you what you were going to be when you grew up, you said, “A lady” or “A mother” either one was safe”). Describing the woman who lives in this world, Atwood writes: 

“a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere, hairless lobed angel in the same heaven where God is a circle, captive princess in someone’s head. She is locked in, she isn’t allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. She takes her clothes off and puts them on, paper doll wardrobe….she is not bored, she has no other interests.” 

The narrator herself has experienced this first-hand. She too feels these pressures to conform – to be wife, to be mother, to give up her pursuit of art and become an illustrator of children’s books, to do always what is convenient for her man, to make her whole life a compromise. These are the things that shape and define her, and it is this that she finds herself increasingly rejecting, even at the risk of being considered inhuman for doing so.  

And so the quest for the missing father becomes a quest for something more primal, more fundamental – a quest for her own soul, for the clarity of self that has been muddied and polluted by social conformity, lost beneath layers of language and relationship, beneath the parts she is forced to play to be accepted by the world. As she retreats further and further into this other wilderness, her companions come to seem more and more unreal to her, and a return to their world entirely impossible. And the wilds of Northern Quebec, with all their attendant spirits, come to symbolise the endless territories of the human heart, the places inside us that other people destroy.  

And not just other people. The narrator’s big realisation, and Atwood’s eventual message, is that we are all, tacitly or explicitly, participants in our own victimisation. The oppression exists because we comply with it. It is this realisation that makes Surfacing as much a manifesto as it is a novel. The answer to oppression then, in Atwood’s words, is: 

“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. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been”.  

This is the choice the narrator finally has to make: between accepting her place in the world, or denying it by denying the world that demands it entirely. It is this choice that the novel constantly builds up to, starting calmly and growing ever more violent, ever more dissonant, as the story progresses. There is a sense, throughout the novel, of something terrible yet beautiful being born, of the knots of the narrative coming loose, freeing the narrator, of something gradual yet tremendous rising out of the placid but suffocating waters of the book, waiting to burst into eventual clarity.  

When that moment finally arrives, it does so with an explosion of raw energy, a whirlwind of savage literary power. These last chapters of Surfacing are a true tour de force, a mesmerising exploration of physical, emotional and spiritual wildness, a bravura leap into a jungle of fertile and menacing freedom. Never before or since has Atwood dared to go this far, never again has her writing been this poetic and this brutal at the same time. There is all the mythmaking brilliance of Atwood’s better poetry here, but there is also something more untamed, more daring, a sort of literary one-upmanship, a willingness to go further than you had expected or even imagined. Atwood, as much as her narrator, is saying – Look! This is who I am. This is what I can do. Do you think you are strong enough to handle this? Are you sure?  

Overall then, Surfacing is a unique and visionary novel, a glorious study of the path to self-assertion, and a triumphant exploration of female identity that makes the case for unbridled, even violent excess in the quest for personal freedom. It is also a remarkably unsentimental book, unflinching in its criticisms but generous with its sympathy, and incredibly clear-eyed about the costs that reclaiming our own identities will extract from us, about the impossibility of breaking entirely free of the world. This is not a celebration of independence, Atwood is too much of a realist for that, it is a celebration of protest, of rebellion, of the struggle to be free, of the desperate and endless fight to be ourselves in a world that would shape us to its own uses. It is Atwood’s best book.  
 

P.S. The other thing that makes Surfacing interesting, for Atwood fans, is the way it foreshadows so many of the later themes of her novels. Remember Handmaid’s Tale? Talking of the child from her failed marriage, the narrator in Surfacing says, “It was my husband’s, he imposed it on me, all the time it was growing in me I felt like an incubator”. Remember, the tediously long chapters in Cat’s Eye about discovering God and being an outsider at school? Surfacing packs them into a few quick pages. And there are echoes here of the relationships between men and women from The Robber Bride, glimpses of the naturalist from Wilderness Tips, even hints of Alias Grace in the descriptions of routine household chores. And the setting of Surfacing looks suspiciously like the landscape of some of Atwood’s finer poetry – the mythological country of the Journals of Susanna Moodie, the intimate interiors of Power Politics.

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