Introducing Margaret Atwood's Surfacing: A Reader's Guide

Marjorie Retzleff teaches English at Champlain Regional College in
Lennoxville, Quebec.

Of all Atwood’s novels, Surfacing poses the most problems for
inexperienced readers, who take at face value the false memories of the
narrator and consequently miss the main point Atwood is making.
Fortunately for such readers, ECW Press now has a reader’s guide to
this challenging novel. Like other works in ECW’s Canadian Fiction
Studies series, this volume gives a chronology of the author’s life
and a selected bibliography, discusses the importance and critical
reception of the novel, and, most importantly, presents a reading of the
text.

Here Woodcock’s long critical association with Atwood’s literary
career is obvious as he discusses the relation of Surfacing to The
Edible Woman, to the nonfictional work Survival, and to the author’s
poetry, noting the particular stylistic and thematic features that mark
Atwood’s work. He goes on to give a clear summary of the narrative
line of the novel and to discuss the metaphorical structure, the
characters, and the themes. His handling of the complex
submersion-surfacing metaphor cluster is particularly informative, as is
his definition of the expression “American” as used in Surfacing.
Woodcock also comments on Jungian affinities and draws interesting
parallels between the narrator’s search for her identity and certain
Native-Canadian shamanistic initiations and spiritual quests. However,
he fails to discuss the feminist element beyond the woman-as-victim
stage. Although he sees the importance of life as a central theme, he
does not link it with the mother’s message, with the fact that what
the narrator learns goes beyond guilt about the abortion and becomes a
statement of true, creative, nonvictimized femaleness. Nevertheless,
this book’s usefulness as an introduction to Surfacing is
indisputable, and as is usual with Woodcock’s work, the style is
clear, economical, and eminently readable.