Analysis Of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing And Survival

culture where people knew nothing about one’s home place. Here might be located the roots of Atwood’s Canadian nationalism, which developed in the late 1960s and frequently defined itself against the United States, a position which she scrutinizes in her early 1970s work Surfacing and Survival. During the 1970s Atwood was extremely productive, publishing three novels, a book of short stories, five books of poetry, a pioneering critical survey of Canadian literature, and a children’s book. Her works often portray female characters dominated by patriarchy. This was the period when her national and international reputation was made, and the stages of her rise to fame make an interesting chronicle, coinciding as they did with the rise of feminism and a resurgence of cultural nationalism centered on Canada’s Centennial Year, 1967. Atwood’s contributions to the theorizing of Canadian identity have garnered attention both in Canada and internationally.

Surfacing takes place in Quebec, where the narrator goes back to the place of

This kind of abnormality and insanity in women is undoubtedly the result of oppression in a male dominated society. Some other reasons behind the mental breakdown of the protagonist are: unwillingness to adhere to social expectations imposed on women, troubled relations with parents, a strange sense of insecurity at all times as a result of her troubled past and the memory of the dead, her forced abortion, her sense of alienation from the civilized world, and as a result of all these the Narrator found it very difficult to converse with others as language seemed to fail her. She battles the social and psychological forces that suppress her, and at the end of the novel she gains confidence and a sense of