178 Atwood, Margaret
women within that system have no power at all: the
Marthas are the housekeepers who are in charge of
the Commanders’ households. They cook and clean,
and that is the limit of their action.
This new society is not only based on oppres-
sive laws of conduct and a politics of fear (of the
secret police), but also on the rejection of “other-
ness”: Its propaganda targets and vilifies specific
cultural and religious groups that once shaped the
American nation. African Americans are captured
and resettled in “National Homeland One,” a place
where nobody really knows what becomes of them.
Jews and other religious groups whose vision of
religion departs from Gilead’s are also targeted
alongside homosexuals and old, unfertile women
who are worthless to the Gilead system based on
the need to reproduce. Newspapers and the televi-
sion are heavily controlled and censored, and only
the Commanders and their wives have access to the
news. Those who are not at the top of the hierarchy
have very few or no privileges and are kept in a state
of ignorance about what is really happening in the
country. All words in the streets have been replaced
by signs, and reading and writing are forbidden to
those like the Handmaids who are only supposed to
obey the rules. This fundamentalist society has taken
away the rights of its members in order to create
an ordered society where idleness, drugs, “immoral”
behaviors, and more specifically violence have no
place. However, what really defines the system is
the escalation of hatred between the different castes
of Gilead, the erasure of entire cultural groups, and
an underground prostitution web brought into exis-
tence by the Commanders themselves.
Sophie Croisy
ATWOOD, MARGARET Surfacing
(1972)
The Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s second
novel Surfacing, one of her most famous works, is
considered a landmark text in terms of its explo-
ration of the connections between gender and
environmental oppression. Surfacing is the story
of an unnamed female narrator’s journey into the
wilderness of Quebec in search of her missing father.
Accompanying her are her lover Joe and the couple’s
friends David and Anna, all of whom think of the
trip as a vacation and a chance for David, with Joe’s
help, to make Random Samples, a film of various
oddities that they see along the way—a house made
of soda bottles, for example.
Initially, the narrator reveals to the reader that
she is divorced and has a child, but after the four
reach her family’s cabin located on an island, and
the search for her father begins, the narrator’s story
changes. We learn that prior to her involvement
with Joe, the narrator aborted a fetus that resulted
from an illicit affair with a married man. As these
truths “surface” over the course of the novel, the
narrator’s voice becomes increasingly fragmented;
she dissociates from her peers and heads into the
wilderness, where she spends five days in a state
of either madness or epiphany, depending on the
reader’s interpretation.
Surfacing examines such issues as the degra-
dation of the natural environment by corporate
interests, the treatment of women by men, and the
marginalization of Canadian culture as a result of
Canada’s proximity to the United States.
Laura WrightGender in Surfacing
Margaret Atwood wrote Surfacing at the height of
the second wave of the feminist movement, which
gained momentum—in Canada as well as in the
United States—during the late 1960s and early
1970s. Atwood’s nameless narrator is a woman who
ultimately refuses to be victimized by the socially
enforced gender roles that define her as a second-
class citizen because of her status as female. As she
states at the end of the novel, “this above all, to
refuse to be a victim.” Surfacing provides a sustained
analysis of the ways that gender roles are generated
by culture, and throughout the text, the narrator
seeks to break free from the civilized feminine role
that is expected of her by not only the men in her
life—Joe, David, and her former lover—but also by
women, particularly Anna and the narrator’s mother.
Furthermore, in Surfacing, Atwood presents male
gender roles as similarly problematic, a hindrance to
any real connection between men and women.
Atwood’s narrator is perhaps most conflicted
with regard to her relationship choices and repro-