Analysis Of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing
The present paper focuses on the basic quest of a solitary individual as dramatized in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, which deals with the theme of confronting the submerged layers of the self. It is an archetypal search of a nameless narrator to find out the creative sources of life. Through this novel Atwood explores the feminist perspective both as a concept and a reality.
Surfacing was first published in 1972, at a time when second wave feminism was affecting the lives of women at the most basic level. It clearly answered the emotional, intellectual and social needs of a generation of women, who were wrestling with a series of issues about women’s role in society. With the publication of Surfacing Margaret Atwood was regarded as a woman novelist who speaks especially for and to women. In the novel Atwood shows a serious concern with women’s destiny in a male dominated world. It is an attempt to expose male prejudices against women’s creativity and talent. Not only the novel deals with search for identity and self discovery but also it intends to highlight the imbalances of power between sexes.
The novel presents the female quest for identity with reference to profession, marriage and motherhood. Surfacing depicts man’s imposition on woman in these matters which disables her intellectually, emotionally and morally. The novel questions and challenges woman’s place in traditional discourse and suggest a rejection of such discourse.
The novel seems to interrogate the notion
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