The Study of Psychoanalytical and Post-Colonial

Feminism in Margaret Atwoods Surfacing

By

Ms.Arpita Chatterjee

Research Scholar, Canadian Literature

RTNMU (Nagpur University)

Abstract

The drive of my article is to study meticulously the notion of societal sarcasm, illuminating
and thus modifying the peoples disfigurement interconnected to the work of fiction,
Surfacing by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood.

Feminism is diligently linked to the passage into the centre. There are dualistic possibilities
for all -- chiefly to breathe alike an ostrich corresponding to the realm of fiction and to walk
into the area of realism. Human beings are similar to the blessing on the globe with their
impregnable command of intellectualism to shield their personal life as well as the earth
where they are breathing. Every human being should appreciate the worth of their life.
Anarchism or despotism comes with radical and financial control. Females have been
browbeaten in numerous means by the self-styled divine Male.

In Surfacing, Margaret Atwood dealt with Feminism or Self-discovery by executing the

two types of concepts such as, Psychoanalysis and Post-Colonialism. The novel portrays on
probing of their individuality and a woman who comes back to her birthplace, Northern
Quebec Bush in Canada to discover her lost father. Escorted by her lover and an added
wedded duo, the nameless central character chances upon her bygone days in her juvenile
house, recollecting occasions and moods, whereas trying to gather evidences for her father's
enigmatic loss. Meticulously, the bygone days surpasses her and pushes her into the realm of
wildness and psychosis. Although these types of effects are chanced upon in the novel which
marks Surfacing as a psychoanalytic and post-colonial work of fiction.

It is a Canadian allegory in which the present-day fixations of Canada turn out to be the codes
in a stage show of individual survival: patriotism, female psychoanalysis, eco-feminism,
post-colonialism and culture. Atwood in Surfacing is verily apprehensive with the
nation's dilemma as a politically aware object. The novel opinions on Atwoods border
affiliation with the United States of Canadian cognizance - the hazard of Americanism to
Canadas nation-wide identity by bestowing a sliver of Canadian realism.

Keywords: Margaret Atwood; Post-Colonial Feminism; Psychoanalysis; Identity crisis;

Self-discovery; Psychosis; Neurosis
Surfacing is more than any other of Margaret Atwoods novels also is border country,
halfway between poem and novel theological treaties and political manifesto, myth and
realism. Surfacing is quite possibly the best of all her work.
- Barbara Hill Rigney

Margaret Atwood is an individual who accomplished to comprehend the tragic predicament

of womenfolk. She is branded as the female women's libber writer in Canada. She portrayed
the primary situation of womenfolk existing in unawareness of their abuse and later their
rejection of it in order to breathe the freedom of life. She has a universal existence in the
contemporary Canadian Literature. Atwood made her repute as a poet throughout the 1960s
and has subsequently established an ardent following as an author of works of fiction. She
gained status as a thoughtful author with remarkable potential. She unveiled a significant
awareness into the works of females cognizance and received an eminent standing among
women authors for her idealistic explanations of feminist beliefs. She reconnoitres the rapport
amid humankind, environment and the mortal conduct and control. She netted a respectable
title while conveying facts of writings to scholars of a number of supposed academies.

Surfacing (1972) is an utmost expressive and emblematic second novel of Margaret Atwood
with themes of psychoanalytical and post-colonial feminism. It is an acquaintance novel to
Atwoods assemblage of poems, Power Politics (1971) that handled nation-wide and
universal identity forestalling growing apprehensions about upkeep, protection and
occurrence of Canadian Nationalism. It is an initial work of Atwoods fiction that explored
into the mysteries of creative loss of women and abortion. Through the publication of
Surfacing, Margaret Atwood came to be observed as a woman author with a discourse
principally aimed at and towards womenfolk.

Surfacing is an effort of an impression of complex uncertainty with multifaceted

connotations. The theme is psychoanalytical and post-colonial feminism, partly a detective
page-turner inscribed in a vivid harsh writing style about modern-day life, environment,
relations and conjugal life. The novel also validates the composite problem of identity for an
English-speaking Canadian Women. Atwoods worry about the environment that got
reproduced in numerous thematic distresses is dominant to Canadian philosophy. It is a
witness or fixed conviction in the moralities of the individual and themes of environments
conquest over society. It was inscribed in the early 70s in the mid of the hallucinogenic effort
where there was a clash of morals with the part of women, that the nation bids and demands
from them.

Surfacing is a first person account using a modest story at the superficial level and the
dominant personality is a twenty year old speaker or the nameless protagonist who works as a
commercial artist. The nameless protagonist, the fresh divorcee of the novel, hail from
Toronto along with her acquaintance David, Anna and Joe to northern Quebec Bush after nine
years of absenteeism to gather evidences for her fathers enigmatic disappearance. The search
for her missing father is accomplished by the narrator, but she is not ready to believe it.
However when she is informed by the people who find his dead body, she has to believe
them. During their stay at the island, the friends try to find themselves through a bit of
interaction. David and Anna are husband and wife, going through a Patch of the Marriage
blues and Joe is the lover of the narrator to become his wife, when in the end her friends
leave, she is left all along on the island, she tries to shun all trappings of civilization by
removing all her clothes just covering herself in a dirty blanket. She goes through a number
of rituals and gets the vision of her mother and her father.

Surfacing explored into the problems of core enigmas of artistic demise of females and
abortion. Afore the novel being published, the ordeal of abortion and imaginative had never
been doled out so comprehensively in a different novel. It speaks about the aforementioned to
the disturbing effects, and the dominance of imaginative responsiveness on a females
psyche. Together with the central character of the novel, some of the leading characters of
Margaret Atwood are appreciated as neurotic or irrational and psychotic, in cooperation with
the critics and the characters inside the novels. However, pintsized has been prepared, to
reconnoitre and describe the cause and nature of neurosis and psychosis.

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud assumed that males conduct and character originate
commences from the continuous and unique communication of inconsistent psychosomatic
powers that function at three altered levels of consciousness --the preconscious, the
conscious, and the unconscious. According to him, the unconscious effects our conduct and
involvement, although we are ignorant of these fundamental effects.

The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that lie
outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable
or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. Freud described the phenomenon
of repression, in which the conscious mind turns away from a painful thought or memory,
pushing it down into the unconscious, because it is socially unacceptable. The thought does
not go away, however, and energy from the libido (life energy) is consumed by keeping it
repressed. This energy can be released, Freud thought, when a repressed memory is re-
admitted to consciousness. (Dewey 23)

Every person represses or supresses certain effects: depraved childhood memoirs or ordeals,
for instance. On the other hand, certain individuals control so far that the repression converts
into a chief constituent of psychological ailments, upsetting an individuals everyday actions:
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a
secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every
pore. (Freud 69)

The assessment validates Freuds opinion that in spite of repression, unconscious cravings
more readily work their way to the surface. A mutual case in point of this occurrence is
anything identified as the Freudian slip up or parapraxis. An individual will mark an oral
slip-up that discloses an unconscious thought or feeling. An individual may address his
partner by an altered name, revealing his magnetism for an alternative woman. Unconscious
cravings are too communicated by nonverbal communiqu.

The present paper seek out to create the fact that the female lead of Margaret
Atwoods Surfacing infringes the morals of behaviour, represses her corrupt memories and
agonises as a consequence, acquires her message and decides to live gracefully, unembitter
by her agony.
A personality minus a name is only just an oddity. The anonymous storyteller who appears at
the start of Surfacing is an expression somewhat than a person, and through her narrative
presents the involvement of two stages earlier juvenile juxtaposed with present-day
adulthoodthe everlasting quandary of man-woman rapport.

Despite the fact that the central character tries to disentangle the secret behind the loss of her
botanist father on a distant isle in northern Quebec, along with her lover Joe and one more
young couple, David and Anna, the bibliophile scuffles to make a logic of the frequently
differing threads of her story related her marriage, her husband and child.

On a number of points in the novel, she narrates the happenings commencing from her earlier
times. The woman in question hark back to her incapability of coming back home afterwards
of her wedding and hiding her child from her parents. Her brothers image of him nearly
drowned repeats- though the event occurred before her birth. She recalls her husband
considering her alike an unsound rather than a bride- afterward of their wedding; she senses
herself to have been deceived by him. The events do not take the shape of a coherent whole.
Her story seem like having features of a dream-vision, instead of a genuine expos built upon
a cause and effect order. Freud likened the unconscious to a storage area for repressed desires.
Despite their place outside of conscious thought, these desires are full of emotional charge
and constantly seek a means of expression. (Stevenson)

When the speaker, along with her associates, halts at the gas station with three stuffed
moose (Atwood 68), spotting that they were clad in human clothes, the speaker defined a
father moose, a mother moose and a little boy moose, but then yet again flops to notice a
little girl moose (Atwood 68) on the rooftop up until it is pointed out her. She does gets
aware of the father-mother-son assemblage, but not the daughter or the girl in question.

An analogous parting happens at the conclusion of this section once, in the mid of a sentence
in the present tense, she shifts to the past: At intervals the old road crosses us, it was dirt,
full of bumps and potholes (Atwood 10). Recalling a kinfolk that had journeyed on this
road, she calls them they, only to break off: That wont work, I cant call them they as if
they were somebody elses family: I have to keep myself from telling that story. (Atwood
12)

These phase shifts in the cognizance of a speaker whose insight shades out noteworthy
substances, and who has to jog her memory regarding her individuality, acquaint a narrative
technique to exaggerate the rigidity of inner conflict: her brawls to retain herself from telling
that story (Atwood 23)are what tell it.

Furthermore, the speaker by repetitively checking and amending minutes of her own
narrative, fetches her propensity for misrepresentation to full consciousness: I have to be
more careful about my memories, I have to be sure that theyre my own and not the memories
of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the
feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, Ill start inventing them and there will be
no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone. I run quickly over my version of it,
my life, checking it like an alibi (Atwood 67)

In consequence, the person who reads Surfacing must an effort in disentangling the actual
from the imaginary.
 The enigmatic vanishing of her botanist father, from his log cabin on a lake isle, provides the
speaker with an explanation for going back to the environ that bounded her initial years. This
passage of unearthing and search recuperates her memory of the doomed past from which she
senses the alienation. Her divorce has estranged her from the idea, so that she never again
have faith in it: He [the art teacher] said he loved me, the magic word, it was supposed to
make everything light up, Ill never trust that word again. (Atwood 44)

Her bond with Joe is without of any sentiments or emotions: Perhaps that was what he liked
about me What impressed him, cool he called it, was the way I took off my clothes and put
them on again later very smoothly as if I were feeling no emotion. But I really wasnt
(Atwood 24). Joe is her erotic confidante only rather than an emotive confidante. She put up
with him only as a physical need: Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the
rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous (Atwood 54). In the narrative, at one point,
he is stated to as: merely an object in the bed, like a sack or a large turnip (Atwood 92).

In quest of her lost father, the speaker of Surfacing discovers amongst his papers and
drawings, what she be certain of are prints of Indian petroglyphs, now submerged in a
bottomless lake. Plunging in pursuit of the real McCoy or the originals, she discovers her
fathers drowned dead body in its place, and therefore her hunt for him finishes with an
ultimate receipt of his death. Nonetheless, this episode obliges to discharge her private
choked senses. The picture of her deceased father resembles to the reminiscences of her
practically drowned brother, the latter of which she abruptly identifies as an additional for her
reminiscence of her terminated foetus. The central character can, at that time, remember the
accurate evidences neighbouring the further events. The man she recalls, was her lover, not
her spouse, there was no marriage ceremony nor labour painssimply the abortion, which
she partook on his commands.

Repression, argued Freud, maintains equilibrium in the individual by repressing

inappropriate, unfeasible, or guilt-causing urges, memories and wishes to the level of the
unconscious, where they will be out of sight, if not out of mind. The ability to repress
dangerous or unsettling thoughts turns out to be vital to the individuals ability to negotiate
his way through life. Only the timely repression of harmful impulses and urges gives the
individual the capacity to move on and meet the demands of an ever-changing world.
(Stevenson)

The entire of the novel is therefore a justification of the unidentified and extremely
untrustworthy speakers passage into her past, an imaginative location that had become so
painful to her that she had insulated herself from it through numbing her feelings and
rearranging her memories into forms which she could bear. It is simply in the direction of the
conclusion of the novel we discover that she was a kept woman and not a wife -- as a
replacement for a baby, she went under an abortion. Atwood lets us, slowly but surely, to
comprehendas the speaker herself challenges it that she had creatively distorted a matter
with a wedded man and the abortion of a child, in the direction towards marriage, giving
birth, and separation.

Related to certain direction by her father, it is to one more woman, her deceased mother that
the central character must look for the conclusion of her vision. Intuiting that this direction
will be found in a timeworn scrap book she had prepared as a child, she unfastens it to
treasure trove some representations she had drawn of a woman with a round moon stomach:
the baby sitting up inside her gazing out (Atwood 159). She reach a decision of conceiving a
child. Having antagonised by her involvement in death, she at present identifies her
possibility for creativeness. She perceives that nothing has died, everything is alive and
everything is waiting to become alive. (Atwood 160) She obliges the probability of the real
birth of a child as a symbolic nullification of her abortion. In addition to this possibility, in
turn, call for Joe to become an suitable lover.

Repression works as a vital surviving tool, says Freud and it too can reason out for excessive
anguish. A repressed need, although it might be in the unconscious, have emotional impact on
the actions and opinions of the individual. Without a doubt, inconsistent urges or throbbing
memories therefore repressed are likely to reason out for great anxiety, nevertheless the
individual will not comprehend what bases it. As the repressed matters swarm and surge
underneath the conscious surface, they sap vital psychic vigour and continually force the
individual to uphold lines of defence mechanisms in contradiction of his own unconscious.
But as the impulses swell up, the individual, sooner or later, will discover release, through
some external disarticulation, displaced emotion, or added mechanism. This release,
impending as it does from irrepressible and often immeasurable complexities, can root out the
unpredictable, occasionally unbelievable reactions.

The speakers wish to see her parents ghosts and to ascertain her father by means of the
Indian God, describes two additional portions of what it means to be a mortal: the occurrence
of death and the lack of the gods. She cannot revive either one of her parents or the gods of
the dead past, but formerly accommodating these two rigid facts, she travels through the
similar repression, misrepresentation, allegation, and forecast that she did about the abortion.
By declining to show up at her mothers funeral, she declined to assent her death. This
infantile behaviour drives her willpower to force her parents out of hiding. By repudiating
herself foodstuff and slumber, she prompts for the visualisations she desires.

The speaker could visualise her mother, nurturing the jays, an appearance allied with her all
through the novel, but she has no opinion for her daughter: She looks at me, past me; as
though she knows something is there but she cant quite see it (Atwood 188). In conclusion,
her mother can be unconfined to death, not in a casket, but into Mother Nature itself, as one
of the jays, the speaker contemplates. Her happenstance with her father is alike to that with
her mother. He has no memorandum apart from liberating the central character unto herself:
It does not approve of me or disapprove of me, it tells me it has nothing to tell me, only the
fact of itself (Atwood 193). Like her mother, he comes into nature: A fish no, antlered
flesh flesh turned to icon, he has changed again, returned to water (Atwood 193). As she
discharges her parents to their death, she admits that they are not gods; they dwindle, grow,
become what they were, human (Atwood 196). To assent their humanness is to accept her
own, using all her feebleness and following onus.

Freud believed that regardless of the consequences, the release of the repressed urges and
memories does more good than harm, resulting in a new balance and distribution of psychic
energy. (Martin)

Debauchery, set aside secrets, shoves the offender out of public. Unaided, estranged,
frightened, he can treasure trove his answer in permitting others to know him as he actually is
and creating amends for the damage he has triggered. The anonymous speaker
of Surfacing has thus reached a phase in her life when she chooses to live in the typical way,
defining them (her parents) by their absence and love by its failure, power by its loss, its
renunciation (Atwood 195). What stimulates and enlivens us about Surfacing is its mortal
uniqueness, with its occasional view of a womans vast aptitude to challenge bravely the
apparitions of her psyche and to overcome them.

Surfacing is a postcolonial novel, but not in the old-fashioned logic. The thoroughgoing
postcolonial work of fiction are inscribed by authors from nations that have incurred their
blood-spattered independence from domains such as Britain, France, Spain, or America.
These work of fiction generally mark the pressures of turmoil and blood-spattered revolt,
detailing a quest for a self-governing nation-wide identity united with a response to the
political mutilating ported by imperialism (R 34). Ever since Canadian liberation from Britain
befell so slowly but surely, Surfacing does not descent into the outdated postcolonial
categorization. Surfacing, nonetheless, reconnoitre a developing Canadian nation-wide
identity. Atwood comprises a passage about the Canadian national flag, which had merely
stayed accepted in 1965. Added impact of Surfacing, it lives as a postcolonial novel in its
discussion of Americans and the method that America work out with its national influence
over Canada. Atwood states that Americas understated cultural access of Canada is
essentially a form of colonialism (E 22). And above all, to reject 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 . . . withdrawing is no longer possible and
the alternative is death (Atwood 118). The speaker marks this comment in Chapter 27, after
surviving her psychosis. The expression interrupts her effort to totally extract herself from the
civilisation and breathe like a regular animal, and it comprises of her cathartic decision to
come back with the society. Once she states her actuality as a victim, she states to the
psychologically uncertain masses that had formerly prepared her to trust that she was being
burdened by powers beyond her control, together with religious conviction, menfolk, and
marital pacts.

At this juncture, the speaker chooses not to be a prey. The speakers remark of helplessness
which reverberates her former quest for the power in her psychosis. She had hunted for
the power in her deceased parents, the Indian deities, and in Mother Nature. At this point,
her steadfastness not to sense helplessness, marks the minute when she lastly pursues shelter
from her social segregation by inner (rather than outer) resources.

The speaker move toward the inference that she has agency to get her activities their
penalties. Formerly, emotive coldness had prohibited her from considering that whatever she
did might have emotional impact on others. She assumed that her associates viewed at her as
an echo of themselves, and that consequently she had no role to play in their lives. This
attitude derives when she states that Joes wanting to get married to her was nothing but an
idea rather than an individual. Here, the speaker acknowledges that since she will convert to
an active associate of society, her activities will have their own magnitudes. She surrenders
her impassiveness by admitting that in owning feelings, she will have emotional impact on
others too.

Surfacing marks a social pass of rising secularization and of flared generational gaps.
Atwood considers religion as an additional social directorial force than a reality. For instance,
the civic priest abuses his religious power on the rural community by implementing a
stringent dress code for womenfolk. The speaker likewise tags Christianity as a societal
controlled mechanism that is well-read at an early age and remains strong through the later
life. Religion in Surfacing befits the false ideal, and Atwoods attack of Christianity results to
a greater social inclination en route for secularization. Similarly, Atwood discovers a rising
rift amid compeers. The speaker of Surfacing casts the older compeers as handicapped by a
inflexible sense of ethics. In this way, Atwood documents a riven concerning the
conventional older compeers and the open-minded newer compeers. A trivial tinge in
Surfacing is its actuality as a postWorld War II novel. The speaker remembers budding up
in the stir of World War II and documents the minor effects of the combat on her childhood.
She trusts that the combat aided as an opening for mens intrinsic viciousness, and she goes
into trace the effects of repressed ferocity in a society without war. The speaker perceives the
American penetration of Canada as a straight end result of American impatience throughout
the post-war era. Surfacing scrutinises the vague ethical backdrop left in the stir of World
War II. The speakers infantile reminiscence of Hitler as the personification of entirely the
malevolent, portrays the World War II era as ethically nave. The post-war realm is further
confusing, and the speaker defies herself to discern the pedigrees of malevolent, now that
human beings no longer have a lone accused. Surfacing precedes the environmentalist drive,
but the speakers respect for the Canadian boondocks is a pro-environmentalist one. The
speaker senses being protective of Mother Nature and retorts with resentment to the
American travellers who overfish, slaughter for amusement, and clutter the ground.
Surfacing is full of travellers, city extension, and technology that unswervingly intrude upon
the pristine land. These environmental apprehensions reverberates currently to the on-going
drifts to overconsumption and the popularity of technology that depend on the natural assets.

CONCLUSION

In Surfacing, Margaret Atwood recycled the notions of Psychoanalysis and Post-colonialism

feminism, since the novel describes on probing of their identity and a woman who comes
back to her birth place in Canada to discover her lost father (Benson E 45). Escorted by her
lover and one more married duo, the nameless protagonist encounters her bygone days in her
infantile house, remembering actions and emotional state, though trying to catch hold of
evidences for her fathers enigmatic departure. Minute by minute, the bygone days overhauls
her and pushes her into the land of desolation and psychosis.

Debauchery, kept undisclosed, lunges the offender out of the public. Unaided, estranged,
terrified, she can catch hold of her answer in allowing others identify her as she truly is and
making compensations for damage she has caused. The anonymous speaker of Surfacing has
therefore reached a stage in her life when she resolves to be alive in the customary manner,
defining them (her parents) by their absence and love by its failure, power by its loss, its
renunciation (Martin 195). Anything that stirs and enthuses us about Surfacing is its mortal
criticality, with its erratic assessment of a females great aptitude to antagonise bravely the
flashes of her inner self and to master them.