Amanda Norton

English 446
Professor Knowles
06/10/2015
Femininity, Masculinity, and One Mind
The struggle of equality for women has been an on going issue not only in the
United States but also around the world for a long time. There have been many different
feminine movements that have granted more freedom to women over the years but there
is still not true equality for women. This inequality much like gender roles is that of
societies making. Men have often thought of themselves of having more power over a
womanthey should decide what happens to her mind and bodythus making women
feel powerless. This has often caused women to feel as if they have no self-identitythey
must be wife, mother, and housekeeper with no little decisions of their own. However, as
these movements of feminism came along more and more women felt compelled to
express their feelings, intelligence, and self-identity. Even though the rights of women
have come along way but equality is still a work in progress. Women are still depicted as
a lesser sexnovels still often contain damsels in distress, or a woman who needs a man
in some way. There are some authors that differ from this in a sense that the women
characters in their novels find themselves in accepting that they are not powerless such as
Margaret Atwoods novel Surfacing. But when it comes down to it both men and women
minds identify feminism and masculinity as part of itthe mind cant have one without
the other. The only thing that can be considered completely womanly is that of birth but
that doesnt mean that a man cant take raise a child without a women.

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The three theorists that are going to be used in this paper to be analyzed with
Margaret Atwoods novel Surfacing are: Virginia Woolf, Annette Kolodny, and Jacques
Lacan. In Virginia Woolfs From A Room of Ones Own, she talks about how hard it
would be to be a woman in Shakespeares time and if Shakespeare were to have a sister
with the same ambitions her knowledge would have been lost because they were meant to
married and to take care of the home. She also has the theory that the brain operates with
both femininity and masculinityit is the natural way of the mind. Annette Kolonys
Dancing Through the Minefield theories deal with women in literature and their
brilliance as writes, which directly relates to Margaret Atwood and her novel Surfacing.
Lastly is Lacans theories are constructed by way of linguistic and ideological structures
that organize not only our conscious but also our unconscious lives (Felluga). He
believes that language is what makes humans understand their relationship to themselves
and others. The woman narrator in Surfacing faces many of the same challenges of
women throughout historyshe had to learn to over come power, to embrace linguistics,
and deal with gender roles.
Erinc zdemir scholarly article, POWER, MADNESS, AND GENDER
IDENTITY IN MARGARET ATWOOD'S SURFACING: A FEMINIST READING, he
discuss Atwoods Surfacing and how women are lost in the power that men have and
how women have become to feel powerless themselves. He also discuses how Atwoods
women characters arent truly powerless because they have the ability to find power with
in themselves. In the act of feeling powerless the narrator slowly loses herself in a sense
of madness. In this madness she believes that she can escape society by becoming natural
againto this she must be on her own and have no communication with others because

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language is what allows her to be connected to society. He also touches on gender roles
and there effect within the novel.
An ever-lasting issue for humans is that of power. It has often seemed that women
are more often considered powerless and made to think that way as well. In Surfacing
Atwood uses the theme of power as a way to display the narrators loss of power in
herself and in nature but also her ability to find it again. Throughout Surfacing the
narrator witnesses Davids power over Anna and he even tries to display his power of the
narrator. The narrator tries desperately to not give Joe any power over her but their
relationship still makes her feel a lack of power. One reason for this could be that she
feels trapped by an event in her past that left her without power and because she has no
control over finding her father a live. At first she describes the event of her past, as her
leaving her husband and child but this was just a memory she used to help her deal with
the pain. In chapter 17 when she is out looking for her father on the lake she remembers
that her lover made her get an abortionshe didnt want to but she also did nothing to
stopmaking her as much of a monster as him:
He said I should do it, he made me do it; he talked about it as though it was
legal, simple, like getting a wart removed. He said it wasnt a person, only an animal, I
should have seen that was different, it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead of
granting it sanctuary I let them catch it. I could have said NO but I didnt; that made me
one of them too, a killer (Atwood 146).
The narrator had her power taken from her and was made to feel worthless for doing what
her lover had insisted of her. Thus she felt as though a part of her was taken that she
could never get back. It is much harder to say no to someone when you feel as though

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they hold all of the power. She considers herself to be as bad as her loving for not telling
him no and caring for her child as she should have. She tries to make up a different
scenario for what happened in an attempt to help keep her sane from the truth of her
choices. Once she admits what really happened she couldnt help but beat herself up over
the situation. It seems as though men are continuously trying to take something from her
that she doesnt want to give. The narrator faces another loss of power again by Joe when
he tried to force himself upon her and then by David when he wanted to punish Anna for
going off with Joe. She is able to say no to them but it still leaves with a loss of power
thus causing her to would what society and people have come to.
The narrator sees how cruel people are to nature (she thinks of them as
Americans) and this may be why she finds security in nature. They find a bird that was
killed for sport and she later learns that the Americans that she thought killed the bird
were actually Canadians. She relates to nature in the sense that it has a little power over
what happens to it as she does over what happens to her. She eventually leaves her group
and finds sanctuary in the wilderness. It is the one place that seems to share the same
since of power instead of having others try to over power her. zdemir shares this view
of humans in his article, [t]he theme of power in the novel embodies a critique of
humans exploitative attitude towards nature, as well as towards others (zdemir 59).
Surfacing displays humans need for power over nature and other humans through the
perspective of the narrator. The need for power and the lack of power on the narrators
part drives her to madnessisolation and not embracing the use of language is the only
way she feels she can escape confines of power.

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Atwood also uses the importance of linguistics in her novel and how powerful
language is to the connection to society. Language is learned at a young age but is learned
from parents and others around the child. According to Jacques Lacans The Mirror
Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience
wrote, [t]his moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates, by the
identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial jealousy, the
dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations ( Lacan 1167).
The mirror stage is when the child identifies themselves and starts to understand the use
of I and how it works with society. This is also the point in a childs life when they start
to pull away from the mother. They are finding a sense of being without her. It seems the
narrator wants to go back to the stage before the mirror stage. She doesnt want to have
connection with society anymore. She wants to be free from the confines of language and
communication with other people.
This is a slow process that happens to the narratorthat she feels she can no
longer communicate with language. It slowly starts to happen when she comes to the
realization that she isnt like them. She starts to lose her use of language and begins to go
mad. She is losing her ability to communicate with them and their emotions. She hadnt
fully understood them and now she has no reason to understand them. It seems that when
she is under pressure is when she starts to lose her sense of language. Joes asks the
narrator if he loves her and her thought is, It was the language again, I couldnt use it
because it wasnt mine (Atwood 107). How was she to respond if she felt that language
couldnt answer his question or if she couldnt understand her own self? As the novel
goes on and she becomes more resentful of language and how it connects her to others

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It seems as though she feels that language will betray her and later in the novel after she
has alienated herself from the others it does. It she begins laughing when they are looking
for her and it leads them to finding her and knowing that she is still alive and on the
island.
The narrator in Surfacing had to deal with and over come gender roles throughout
the novel. Atwood had the narrator depict mens gender roles when she had them cutting
down a tree and the narrator wasnt sure if they could handle an axe or not. She then
depicts the gender role of women by having the women gardening while the men are
cutting down the tree. However, Atwood has the narrator breaks free of her gender role in
many ways throughout the novel. Atwood also broke gender roles by writing Surfacing in
the way that she did. Kolodny approach nonetheless suggests that what is important
about a fiction is not whether it ends in a death or a marriage, but what the symbolic
demands of that particular conventional ending implying about the values and beliefs the
world that engendered it (Kolodny 2051). Atwood displays the value in self power and
the beliefs that gender roles arent set in concrete and can be changed in Surfacing by the
narrator breaking free of her roles and becoming part of the wild symbolizing that she
doesnt need the roles of a woman to survive. Survival is about using all of your brain
and with that there is no such thing as gender roles or what is male and female. It can be
said that the brain if made up of both without acknowledging either.
Atwood displays that both the narrators parents had to take on gender roles of the
opposite sex in the wilderness, which they may have not have in the city. An example is
the father helping with the garden. And again when the father is away and the mother has
to take up the role of protector against a bear:

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The only thing it didnt bother with was the potatoes, and we were eating them
for breakfast around the campfire when it materialized on the path, snuffling along bulky
and flatfooted, an enormous fanged rug, returning for more. My mother stood up and
walked toward it; it hesitated and grunted. She yelled a word at it that sounded like
Scat! and waved her arms, and it turned around and thudded off into the forest
(Atwood 78).
As the narrator is back in the wilderness of were she grew up she begins to remember
these lessons that society has pushed away from her. Shes realizing that she doesnt have
to take on a certain gender role but that she can be a mixture of both. With this realization
she attempts to cope with the loss of her parents, and the tragedy she has experienced.
She wants to break free of all gender roles and live natural in wildwith out language
making it seem as if madness has over taken her but really she just wants to be at peace
with whom she is.
All minds have a sense of both feminine and masculinewomen and me often
use both without thinking about it especially in more recent times. There are men who
take on the role of mother and father and vise versa with women. They are also other
times that gender roles are used by both sexes because the mind doesnt differentiate.
Woolf explains this when she states:
The normal and comfortable state of the being is that when the two live in
harmony together, spiritually cooperating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the
brain must have effect [] It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully
fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create,
anymore than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought (Woolf 901).

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It seems to me that Woolf understands that the mind doesnt act on creativity by gender or
power. It is purely creative weather the creator is man or women. I think Atwood did a
great job of displaying this in her novel.
There are many different themes throughout Atwoods novel Surfacing that deal
with femininity and masculinitythe roles of men and women. There is the display of
the power that men often seem to have over women. How language is a direct line to
society and how it can lead to women gaining power within themselves. There is also the
issue of gender roles and how they are not specifically male or female but both are
naturally used in the mind. This is displayed in the narrators parents and within herself.
Creativity comes form within a person. It doesnt care weather the person in male,
female, powerful, or powerless. Surfacing is a great example of creativity and displays
the need for humans to find acceptance within themselves.

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Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. Print.
Felluga, Dino. "Introduction to Jacques Lacan, Module on Psychosexual Development."
Introduction to Jacques Lacan, Module on Psychosexual Development. N.p., n.d.
Web. 02 June 2015.
Annette Kolodny: "Dancing Through the Minefield" The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 2045-066. Print.
Jacques Lacan : "The Mirror Stage as Formative" The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 1156-189. Print.
Virginia Woolf: "A Room of One's Own" The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 892-904. Print.
zdemir, Erinc. "Power, Madness, And Gender Identity In Margaret Atwood?s
Surfacing: A Feminist Reading." English Studies 84.1 (2003): 57-79. Web.