How Margaret Atwood Uses Language as a Theme in Surfacing

Language, its use and disuse, its secrets and means of deception,are central themes in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. Atwood creates an ironically (and intentionally) nameless heroine on a tormented and exhausting journey of self-discovery in a tale of lies and half-truths, essentially a Canadian Holden Caulfield.

Atwood, a Canadian by birth, uses her own personal experiences growing up in a linguistically split country as the groundwork for Surfacing. Atwood uses flashbacks to build the narrator's past, a past so traumatic to the narrator's mind that she can only think of it in fleeing moments, never truly grasping the meaning of everything until the end, until she finds her true self underneath a web of lies and painful truths. Her unusual and non-conformist childhood culminates into a period of extreme delusion, where the narrator retreats into herself as a means of coping with everything around her. She abandons all societal standards, lives briefly as a simple product of nature, neither human nor animal, just a tortured soul encased in human flesh. Through this delusion she reaches ultimate realization of self and her effect on the lives of others, which makes her journey more successful and beneficial than she ever expected. What began as a search for her supposedly dead father ends as a search for the meaning of her own life and the lives of the people around her, when she finally realizes that pain is as much a part of life as joy, that it exists everywhere, even in nature, the one thing she always thought of as perfection.

The narrator's parents are by far the most influential people in her life, which she shows throughout the novel through a sort of detached respect. She resents her father for making her family grow up different than others, living on a remote island hours away from civilization, not conforming to the town's social or religious standards. The hypocrisy enters when she unknowingly conforms to her father's ideals, fueled mainly by a futile church trip, to which her father was opposed. She goes with a local family that took a "pursed mouth missionary interest" in her, and enters a small "United church" that "smelled of face powder and damp wool trousers" (52). She recalls that the Sunday School teacher "told us a lot about her admirers and their cars", and then "gave out pictures of Jesus, who didn't have thorns and ribs but was alive and draped in a bedsheet, tired-looking, surely incapable of miracles" (52). Experiences like these become her proof of human deceit; proof that words cannot be trusted.

She seems to idolize her mother, view her as something better than simply human, a god perhaps, she even says that "I was disappointed in her when she died" (Surfacing 18). Her mother is portrayed as peaceful, quiet, and submissive yet strong. The narrator seems to think that her mother deserved more than what life gave her, that she was better than her surroundings. She recounts how her mother interacted with Paul's French speaking wife, Madame, desperately trying to converse through the language barrier (her mother spoke English only), remaining polite and smiling the whole time, "a domesticated version of English-French non-communication" (Fiamengo). Everything that is mentioned of her mother involves an absence of speech, even going as far as to insinuate that the birds around their home understood her mother the most, or perhaps the other way around.

She visits her mother in the hospital on her death bed and in awful pain, cancer eating up her brain, with webs of morphine impairing her vision, animal like with "skin tight over her beak nose, hands on the sheet curled like bird claws clinging to a perch" (18). While this image seems unappealing, it is later learned that the narrator has more respect for animals than humans anyway; the description of her mother is actually quite loving indeed. Her mother's lack of sensibility in her last days does not faze the narrator, she does not even seem to care that her mother may have or may not have recognized her, all that is important is that her mother understands, which requires nothing but silence between them either way. The understanding is a feeling, not a word, so words cannot express it. This concept agrees with the view that "Atwood displays a profound distrust of language as a means of communication between people, proposing, instead, a non-verbal or meta-language as infinitely superior" (Clark).

Growing up in a bilingual setting also seems to have affected the narrator's way of thought, making her resentful of her French speaking countrymen, saying that they all think "les maudits anglais", the cursed English (Surfacing 53). Just as her father did not accept the town's religion or ideals, he also rejected their language, choosing to instead stay isolated from them, as if their foreign tongues spoke poison instead of words. Ironically, the narrator herself seems to have picked up some of the town's beliefs, she curses the Americans throughout the novel, seeing them as bringers of ruin, a "disease from the South" (4). Her inability to communicate with the townsfolk while growing up isolates her more, makes her more of an outsider, even causes her to think that her father's death went uninvestigated at least partially due to their refusal to learn the language, yet another reason to distrust formal language, it abandons those who do not interest it (53).

The narrator's marriage and subsequent divorce is probably the last straw, it breaks her spirit, and in a way it ruins her. Until this point she had clung to the hope of rescue, that someone would come and disprove her father, make her dreams of human decency a reality. The opposite occurred, her husband only proved her worst fears true. She recalls that at one time "everything he did was perfect...he said he loved me, the magic word, it was supposed to make everything light up, I'll never trust that word again" (44). She not only lost trust in that word, but also lost it in all words, and with that she lost trust in all those who speak words. Feelings become actions instead of words, things that are tangible, not just sounds that leave as quickly or quicker than they come. This seems hypocritical of a woman who has admittedly abandoned her only child, proclaiming that it was never hers anyway, that she was just an "incubator", that the child belonged to her husband only. Her logic is faulty, if her actions were the expressions of her feelings, then it would seem that she cared nothing for the child, but she regrets leaving it, she silently begs its forgiveness all the time. No matter how far she ran, how much she avoided it, she was still the child's mother, still responsible, there is no other way.

It is no surprise that as the narrator ages she too begins to deny her interest in societal expectations, becoming, as her so-called friend Anna noted, "inhuman" (155). It is not so much that she abandons humanity, it is more that she embraces what she sees as pure, and humanity is anything but pure. She is truly disgusted by the deceptive, manipulative nature of humans, so she clings to what cannot lie, what is unable to deceive. All she desires is escape, a recurrent theme in Atwood's works; it is the main desire of the narrator of The Handmaid's Tale as well. Other authors employ this theme too, it is central to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and it rides along with the theme of protection of the innocent. To Caufield it's protection of children, to the narrator of Surfacing, it is protection of nature and animals, but it is all protection of the innocent, of those who cannot protect themselves (Salinger 86). The narrator tries to stop thinking like a human altogether, to forget everything and live day-to-day as animals do. Silence and detachment become her refuge, and at the time Surfacing takes place, the narrator has respect and admiration only for the things that do no need or use words, speech, or any type of formal communication.

The narrator's lover, Joe, is also a place of refuge for her. He is quiet, hardly speaks, an artist like her, he expresses himself without words. Though she remains emotionally void regarding Joe for most of the novel, she introduces him as "beautiful Joe", not because of his appearance, but because he too shares her silent language, he thinks of himself as "deposed, unjustly", just as she does herself (Surfacing 4). Nearly all of their communication is non-verbal, actions instead of words. She forces herself not to admit love to Joe though, love is a word she does not trust, it has hurt her too badly. Instead she begins to see Joe as she sees the animals, pure, innocent, a god. She even refers to their unborn child as the "fur god" during her later period of delusion (187).

The narrator experiences a period of extreme delusion, or at least what society would call delusion. What she actually does is retreat inside herself, desperate to find out who she actually is. In her mind she is simply a place, a part of everything around her, a part of the island itself. During this time she constantly personifies the objects around her, the "multilingual water...the forest leaps upward...a powerboat, attacking" (184-89). She explores the island naked, untouched by human innovation, avoiding capture in her mind. Eventually she finds what she was looking for; she sees both of her parents while on the island alone. They give her the closure she needs, she then knows that they love her; they came back from the dead for her. Whether or not she really saw them is irrelevant, their simple presence comforts her traumatized soul. Neither of them speaks, reinforcing the superiority of natural, primitive language over formal, organized speech.

Seeing her parents brought her ultimate realization, "No total salvation, resurrection, our father, our mother, I pray, Reach down for me, but it won't work: they dwindle, grow, become what they were, human. Something I never gave them credit for" (196). She realizes her mistake, that she was too judgmental, that nothing can be perfect. She accepts this and returns to civilized life, she has finally found her true self. She dresses her naked body, looks at herself one last time in Anna's make-up mirror, but this time not as some inanimate object, but as a real person, a whole person, imperfect, and impure. She also realizes that the child growing inside her is perfection, not a victim. Her child is not a "fur god", but is a human, perhaps "the first true human" (198). It is never known if she goes with Joe when he comes back for her, it is not important. She received exactly what she went there for, to "give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been...withdrawing is no longer possible and the alternative is death" (197).

The narrator of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing goes on an extensive journey of self-discovery, a primitive search of her soul disguised as a search for her missing father. Life became more than she could handle, she had to get back to her origins, to find the signs her parents left for her. Communication in Surfacing is stifled, non-verbal, and complex. Her family, her country, her relationships, they all have affected her by turning her from modernity, from civilization. The end of her journey reveals that pain exists everywhere, even in nature, which she had viewed as perfection. She realizes that there is no perfection, if there were there would be no need to live, it would all be pointless.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. New York: Anchor Books, 1998.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986.
Clark, Meera T. "Margaret Atwood's Surfacing: Language, Logic and the Art of Fiction." Modern Language Studies. Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer 1983): pp. 3-15. 7 May 2008 .
Fiamengo, Janice. "Postcolonial Guilt in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing." American Review of Canadian Studies. Vol. 29 (1999): 7 May 2008 .
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Bay Back Books, 2001.