Surfacing (Criticism)

Criticism

Wendy Perkins

Perkins is an associate professor of English at Prince George's Community College in Maryland and has published several articles on British and American authors. In the following essay, she traces the narrator's search for identity in Atwood's novel.

In her most popular and critically acclaimed novel, The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood traces her heroine's efforts to cope, endure, and survive the oppressive totalitarian regime that governs her life. In a similar vein, Atwood places the unnamed narrator in Surfacing into a more realistic, contemporary setting that does not threaten her physical safety. Yet, she too must reconstruct herself to preserve a strong sense of self.

The narrator in Surfacing has been victimized and disabled by a society that promoted male superiority and domination. She entered into a relationship with a married man who forced her to abort their unborn child. This experience so devastated the narrator that she has suppressed her memory of it and has cut herself off from any real contact with her world. At one point in the novel, she admits

I realized I didn't feel much of anything, I hadn't for a long time. Perhaps I'd been like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch; but if that was true I wouldn't have noticed the absence. At some point my neck must have closed over, pond freezing on a wound, shutting me into my head.

When she looks at the pictures she had made as a child, searching for some answers to her growing sense of unease, she finds

no hints or facts, I didn't know when it had happened; I must have been all right then; but after that I'd allowed myself to be cut in two. There had been an accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal numb.

She acknowledges that she "rehearses" emotions, "naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate, react, relate, what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and memorized it," and that "in a way it was a relief, to be exempt from feeling."

She has tried to form a relationship with her lover Joe, but only halfheartedly. When he asks her if she loves him, she responds, "I want to. I do in a way," but ultimately, she cannot give him what he needs, a confirmation of himself. She concludes, "David is like me. We are the ones that don't know how to love, there is something essential missing in us atrophy of the heart."

For the first half of the novel, she allows herself to be victimized to a lesser degree by Joe. While she does refuse to marry him, she quietly accepts his bullying. Henry C. Phelps in his article on Surfacing for the Explicator concludes that Joe exhibits "a seeming solicitude toward women that masks a more fundamental antipathy.' Phelps notes that Joe's behavior reveals a "blend of overt concern and strained hostility toward women." For ex-ample, "relief gleams through his beard" when Joe does not accept the narrator's offer to search for her father. He reveals his own lack of emotion when he asks the narrator to marry him, couching his proposal in what Phelps considers "tepid, even antagonistic terms": "We should get married," Joe remarks. "I think we should we might as well." When she refuses, he becomes hostile: "Sometimes," he complains, "I get the feeling you don't give a s — about me." Later, when she continues to rebuff his attempts to reconcile, he seems as if he is about to hit her.

In an effort to suppress the painful memory of the abortion, she creates a fictional past that provides a more comfortable explanation for her inability to commit to a relationship with Joe. She tells him that "I've been married before and it didn't work out. I had a baby too. I don't want to go through that again." She has convinced herself that she had a baby with her "husband" and that for some unnamed reason she gave the baby up. Yet she notes that previously she had never told Anna or Joe about her baby, explaining

I have to behave as though it doesn't exist, because for me it can't; it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.

Jerome H. Rosenberg, in his article on the novel for Twayne's World Authors Series Online comments on the narrator's fictionalization of her past:

We do not perceive these "facts" as deliberate lies; rather, they are related to us as elements of the narrator's most profound belief regarding her past. If we recognize them as falsehoods at all, we realize that they are the protagonist's psychological defense, her means of avoiding yet one more death, one more sign of mortality — but this one a result of her own actions, her own decision to act, her own assertion of power. It is this secret, what she later calls this "death inside me," that she has layered "over, a cyst, a tumor, black pearl." And it is this repressed guilt that she must bring to the surface, must exorcise, before she can become whole.

Patricia F. Goldblatt notes that "After enduring, accepting, regurgitating, denying, and attempting to please and cope, Atwood's protagonists begin to take action and change their lives." In Surfacing, the narrator's search for herself is ironically triggered by her search for her father. As she tries to recall the details of her past while she looks for clues on the island about her father's disappearance, the truth of her own life begins to emerge. When she dives below the surface of the lake, she symbolically submerges into her own past and allows her emotional response to the abortion to surface. Goldblatt concludes, however, that before the narrator can establish a strong sense of identity, she hits "rock bottom. Fed up with the superficiality of her companions, [she] banishes them and submits to paranoia." Alone on the island, she tries to strip away the trappings of civilization to discover a sense of self:

Everything I can't break I throw on the floor. I take off my clothes I dip my head beneath the water I leave my dung, droppings on the ground I hollow a lair near the woodpile I scramble on hands and knees I could be anything, a tree, a deer skeleton, a rock.

What finally brings her back to reality and to a refusal to allow herself to be victimized any longer is her belief that she is pregnant with Joe's child. She considers the possible new pregnancy as a way to absolve herself from the guilt she feels over the abortion. After she and Joe have intercourse, she insists, "He trembles and then I can feel my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me." She must return to civilization and contact with others because her child "must be born, allowed." This "act of healing" as Rosenberg terms it helps her reconstruct herself by establishing a strong sense of who she is and what she wants. Rosenberg concludes

To renounce power, to remain a passive victim of others, she sees, is an exercise in futility: if she wishes to survive in the historical, struggle-ridden world into which we are all born, she must "join in the war, or be destroyed." She wishes there were "other choices" but sees there are not. What is morally essential, however, is for her to acknowledge her power, accept her imperfection, take responsibility for her actions, and "give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone."

By the end of the novel, when she determines to reenter society and perhaps establish a strong relationship with Joe, she accomplishes these goals.

Commenting on Atwood's focus on the "plight of women in society" in her novels, Goldblatt concludes that Atwood:

has reconstructed this victim, proving to her and to us that we all possess the talent and the strength to revitalize our lives and reject society's well-trodden paths that suppress the human spirit. She has shown us that we can be vicariously empowered by our surrogate, who not only now smiles but winks back at us, daring us to reclaim our own female identities.

In Surfacing, Atwood illustrates for her readers, through the transformation of the main character, the indefatigable nature of the human spirit.

Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on Surfacing, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

What Do I Read Next?

• Margaret Atwood sets The Handmaid's Tale (1986) in the futuristic, totalitarian society of the Republic of Gilead, where women are valued only for their ability to breed. This novel also focuses on a woman's struggle to define herself not as a victim but as an individual.
• In Edible Woman (1965), Atwood presents another powerful portrait of a woman who suffers under social limitations.
• In the play A Doll House (1879), Henrik Ibsen examines a woman's restricted role in the nineteenth century, and the disastrous effects those limitations have on her marriage.
• The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin chronicles the tragic life of Edna Pontiellier as she tries to discover a true sense of self in America at the beginning of the twentieth century.