Surfacing: Identity

Margaret Atwood’s second novel Surfacing (1972) follows in the footsteps of her debut novel The Edible Woman: it also portrays a woman who undergoes a transformation, albeit a strikingly different one. The Narrator of Surfacing has no name, which I think is deliberate: she has no identity, but she could also represent something bigger – all women, all Canadians. In the novel, the Narrator, together with her boyfriend Joe and her friends, married couple Anna and David, travel to the Narrator’s family cabin next to a lake in a remote area of Quebec. There, the Narrator wants to find her father who has gone missing. This novel is a tough nut to crack; when I first read it, I was majorly confused. It takes a lot of thinking, analyzing and interpreting to actually understand what’s going on. [Massive spoilers follow].

The Narrator tells us in the beginning of the novel that she was married before and that she had a child which now lives with its father in the city. She hasn’t told any of her friends or her boyfriend about this, she justifies this by saying that they wouldn’t understand. However, throughout the novel it becomes obvious that the Narrator is completely crazy and highly unreliable as a source of information. She herself continuously repeats that she lies to her friends, and to some extend she herself doesn’t know what is true anymore. The truth is that she has constructed happy(ish) memories for herself in order to repress what has happened to her. The turning point of the novel occurs in Chapter 17, when the Narrator repeatedly dives into the lake, where she hopes to see cave paintings. What she finds is much more gruesome: “It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead.” At first she thinks it was her brother, who nearly (not actually) drowned before she was born, but she then realizes it can’t be him. In my interpretation, what she actually sees down there is her dead father, who is later revealed to have been found drifting in the lake. He had drowned a while ago and was held underwater by the weight of a heavy camera around his neck. What makes the novel more confusing is that she doesn’t tell any of her friends what she saw: instead, this event triggers the resurfacing of her actual, much more traumatizing memories.

Shortly after seeing the dead thing at the bottom of the lake, she narrates “I knew when it was, it was in a bottle curled up, staring out at me like a cat pickled; it had huge jelly eyes and fins instead of hands, fish gills, I couldn’t let it out, it was dead already, it had drowned in air. […] Whatever it is, part of myself or a separate creature, I killed it. It wasn’t a child but it could have been one, I didn’t allow it.” Here it becomes somewhat obvious that the Narrator actually had an abortion – her child does not actually live with her husband in the city. In fact, she has never been married. She had an affair with a married man who already had “real” children, and he forced her to have an abortion. Her constructed reality is replaced by the resurfacing of much more horrible memories. Simultaneously, she mixes up her memories with those of her brother, who has disappeared from her life but with whom she had a disturbed relationship: he used to put animals into jars, and sometimes he forgot to feed them and they died. She felt sorry for the animals and released them, but sometimes she was too scared to do that because her brother would be angry. She let them die and blamed herself for their death. This is why she sees her own aborted fetus as something in a jar: combined guilt of letting things die.

Death appears to be omnipresent in this novel – a notable symbol is that of the hanged heron. While exploring the island, the group comes across a dead heron hung by its feet on a tree. It reeks, and it disgusts the Narrator immensely, she can’t stop thinking about it. The heron was probably hanged there by the “Americans”, a term with which the Narrator generalizes everyone who pollutes and disturbs nature in an obnoxious way (regardless of actual nationality). Killing for sport also falls into that category. The heron symbolizes the slaughtering of innocents – animals are innocent, but so are children of course, and this is another reference to the abortion. In a way, the Narrator also sees herself in the heron. This comes strikingly obvious in the last chapter of the book, where the Narrator undergoes a drastic transformation in order to “cure” herself. She basically turns into an animal and attempts to become one with nature. This occurs after the memory of her abortion resurfaces, after her father is found dead and after her friends left the cabin for the city. She hides from them while they are leaving and later breaks into the cabin. There, she destroys everything that is unnatural – including her clothes. Gradually she loses control and is not allowed (by her own animal self) to go into the cabin anymore, not even to eat from the garden anymore. She becomes an animal that is hunted, however, she believes that she is being hunted because she is a naked woman, not because she is an animal. Eventually she realizes that the winter is approaching and she would not survive in the wilderness by herself – she resurfaces from the wild with a new identity, conscious of her now processed trauma. She is cleansed, like a Phoenix risen from the ashes (guess what she paints earlier in the novel). She was a victim and now refuses to be a victim anymore.

The Narrator’s relationship with Joe shifts throughout the novel. Their relationship is a very pragmatic one – she compares moving in together as a decision similar to getting a goldfish. In the novel, Joe asks her to marry him and she refuses. Joe’s intentions are probably that he wants to have control over her, he sees women as a passive part of society waiting to be married. She feels uneasy because she sees herself as a child – only after accepting the death of both her parents, after realizing that her “previous” marriage was a construct of her mind, and after accepting her abortion, does she reevaluate her position and feels ready to commit to a relationship, even a pregnancy. After her transformation she becomes hopeful and optimistic.

Initially, the Narrator’s role models of a perfect relationship are her friends Anna & David. On the surface, they have a great marriage. However, throughout the novel we realize that David treats Anna like a possession. Anna is a (somewhat passive) receiver of David’s psychological abuse and he constantly exploits her. In a memorable scene, he forces her to be filmed naked while jumping into the lake. Both of them regularly commit adultery and it becomes obvious that they don’t actually love each other. Their marriage is about appearances, also literally – Anna uses make-up to make herself look prettier, but David doesn’t even know about this. On one occasion, the group is away from the cabin for a night and Anna is scared that David will notice that she’s usually wearing make-up. Their relationship is very much reflective of the gender circumstances during the early seventies.

Another subtheme of the novel is Canadian nationalism. As mentioned earlier, the Narrator has an aversion to Americans, because stereotypically they pollute and disturb nature. In the novel, the Narrator and the group encounter two “Americans” who fit this scheme – they are noisy, scaring away the fish, they throw their garbage on the shore and perhaps they even hunt for sport. Later in the novel it is revealed that they are actually also Canadian, though fans of American baseball (hence an American flag on a baseball logo on their boat). But for the Narrator this doesn’t make a difference anymore, they are “American” because they behave American. Simultaneously, the novel is set in Quebec and portrays the Narrator as a “foreigner” because she is an English-speaking Canadian in a French-speaking region of Canada – despite the cabin basically being the place where she grew up.

Finally, the lake is an important symbol of the novel. Since the novel is called “Surfacing”, the lake stands for many things: most importantly the Narrator’s emotional depth. She has constructed a reality for herself on the surface, but deep down she has buried what really happened to her – and she only realizes this by literally diving into the lake four times. The symbolism of the lake is aptly summarized in one of the earliest chapter when the Narrator sees it for the first time again: “…as though the first view of the lake, which we can see now, blue & cool as redemption, should be through tears and a haze of vomit.” The lake is her redemption – her deliverance from her sin, her salvation, her compensation for her defect. To get there, she has to go through tears and a haze of vomit – she can’t see clearly yet, and it will be a sickening experience to get there.

Once again, Margaret Atwood has written a brilliant novel focusing on the role of women, identity and nationalism. She is a genius with words – this novel is full of single sentences about which you could write entire essays. And lastly, the novel is full of sneaky little details which foreshadow future events. It is very hard to read because of its crazy, unreliable narrator, but once you have cracked it, there’s a lot to discover.