Analysis Of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

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der difference that leaves a woman with emotions and isolation from culture, language and sense of self, which leads to regain identity. Surfacing is read with multiple dimensions and on many levels. It is a study of gender difference, female male relationship, detective story, and journey towards nature, study of self-identity, sexual politics, and searching for the meaning of life. Atwood’s Surfacing is about a “woman’s spiritual quest” (Christ Margaret 316). “A feminist/ecological treatise that reflects the political and issues of the postmodern society (Hutcheon, Casnadian 54). Surfacing is written with the elements of suspense, with multiple layer of meanings and in brilliant style. The readers praise the style, theme and characterization …show more content…
The development of the ecological movements and feminist movements mingle with time of publication of the novel, Surfacing. The novel gives the way to relate environmentalism to feminism and sets an example as ‘prototypical’ ecofeminist text. Patrick Murphy credits Surfacing as “One of the first of the current generation of ecofeminist novels” (Hartman 98). Jaidev opines that, “so rich in its texture and so disturbing in its implications in Margaret Atwood’s short novel Surfacing that no single study can do justice to it. A feminist text which transcends all ‘isms’ including feminism; romantic novel which is hard and anti- romantic in its treatment of such romantic themes as nature… a book whose pagan and ecological concerns will move many Indians, especially those who endow water, earth, fire, birds, trees, and animals with a sacred status, Surfacing is easily one of the most impressive and relevant texts of our times (276). The novel can be interpreted in many angles and it focuses mainly on self- discovery of women as the relationship between nature and …show more content…
Her boyfriend Joe and newly young married couple David and Anna are her companions. After, the physical journey changes as journey into her mind. Her journey is paralleled with the journey of the mind. She is filled with the memories of her past. She moves away from the city towards north on the border between Ontorio and Quebec. “The future is in the North that was a political slogan once; when my father heard it he said there was nothing in the North but the past and not much of that either. “Whenever he is now, dead or alive and nobody knows which, he’s no longer making epigrams” (5). Atwood also has marked the ideas of patriarchal society through her father, “he’ alone evokes the space into which the object of the daughter who left home for the city from her father who stayed on the island and close to nature. The lack of explicit reference implies the word ‘father’ has become somehow difficult for her” (Barzilai

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