180 Atwood, Margaret
narrative, the protagonist is forced to examine her
self-proclaimed victimization by both the American
technological advances that encroach on the Cana-
dian wilderness and by the men with whom she has
been involved. The narrator ultimately learns that
her father has drowned, and at this point, she liter-
ally disrobes and heads into the wilderness, where
she lives for five days, hidden from her companions
who, in exasperation, return to the mainland.
The narrator’s sense of self, as a member of a
national community, is obtained at least in part
from her perception of her world through visual
images that depict the nation. As an illustrator, she
had been working on a book called Quebec Folk Tales
at the time of her father’s disappearance. She cre-
ates the visual images that accompany her nation’s
mythology, and despite the fact that she wants to
vary her presentation, to include a loup-garou, or
werewolf, story in the collection, the narrator real-
izes that her editor has taken it out because “it was
too rough for him.” The national image that she is
allowed to portray, therefore, is that of a nice, non-
violent Canadian. Furthermore, as a participant in
the market, she is limited in her creativity as well as
in her conception of a world beyond the fairy tales
that her editor—and her nation—consider accept-
able. She asks, “What’s the alternative to princesses?
What else will parents buy for their children?” The
narrator’s art is a commodity, an element in the con-
sumer culture of Canada’s nationalist consciousness.
Another visual narrative that shapes the narra-
tor’s sense of her place in the Canadian nation is
the photo album that she finds in the cabin. This
album, with its chronologically arranged familial
images, conflates time and space; photographs of the
narrator appear alongside those of distant and long-
dead relatives. While she can look at the images of
“grandmothers and grandfathers first, distant ances-
tors,” they are nonetheless “strangers, in face-front
firing-squad poses.” The narrator is able to trace the
“civilizing” process that occurs over the course of
her life by examining the succession of these pho-
tographs, which culminate in school pictures from
her teenage years. In these she sees herself as the
acceptable nice Canadian in “stiff dresses, crinolines
and tulle, layered like store birthday cakes,” and she
claims, “I was civilized at last, the finished product.”
Similarly, David and Joe control the visual national
narrative through their filming and then rearrang-
ing the “random samples” that they see on their
journey. The film stems in part from David’s desire
to capture images of the “real” Canadian nation, the
“uncivilized border country” of the Quebec wilder-
ness that Joe thinks of as “reality: a marginalized
economy and grizzled elderly men.”
At the end of Surfacing, the narrator destroys
David’s film and heads into the wilderness to
become a kind of werewolf, the loup-garou that she
is not allowed to portray in her art. During these five
days, the narrator is transformed from a woman into
a wild animal, and over the course of her madness,
she exists in opposition to the idea that the Cana-
dian national consciousness must always be “nice,”
must always exist in opposition to the “American.”
By the end of the narrative, the protagonist is able to
abandon labels that connote an appropriate national
identity.
Laura Wrightnature in Surfacing
Margaret Atwood’s second novel, Surfacing, has
been hailed as an ecofeminist classic because of the
connections she makes in the narrative between
the destruction of the environment as a result of
capitalist interests and the domination of women by
men. Atwood renders the natural world in Surfacing,
particularly the remote island in northern Quebec
where the novel is set, as a natural site compromised
by the intrusion of people the nameless narrator
assumes to be “American.”
In the novel’s first two sentences, the narrator
notes the way that the landscape has changed as
a result of development and increased population
since she last headed north:I can’t believe I’m on this road again, twisting
along the lake where the white birches are
dying, the disease is spreading up from the
south.... But this is still near the city limits;
we didn’t go through, it’s swelled enough to
have a bypass, that’s success.This opening sequence establishes a dichotomy that
Atwood’s narrator maintains throughout Surfac-