Surfacing 179ductive freedom; initially, she refers to her former
lover as her “husband” and tells the audience that
their child is at home. But other comments under-
score a different reality, one characterized by the
narrator’s guilt over the fact that she was involved
with a married man and aborted their unborn child
at his request. Early in the novel, she claims that she
feels as if her former lover “imposed it on me.” The
narrator’s reference to her baby as “it” is an indication
that she did not carry the child to term, but the lies
that she tells herself and the audience indicate the
ways that she feels trapped by gender expectations
that demand her to be a “good girl.” Another way
that the narrative illustrates the conflict that women
feel with regard to the roles they are expected to play
is evidenced when Anna, putting on her makeup,
tells the narrator that David “ ‘doesn’t like to see
me without it,’ and then, contradicting herself, ‘He
doesn’t know I wear it.’ ” Throughout the text, David
is presented as the enforcer of gender roles, a man
who monitors his wife’s body, telling her at one
point that she is “eating too much” and getting fat,
while he flaunts his extramarital affairs before her;
his comments about her body make her too insecure
to leave him.
At one point in the novel, David tells Anna to
avoid participating in the women’s liberation move-
ment: “None of that Women’s Lib... or you’ll be
out on the street. I won’t have one in my house,
they’re preaching random castration, they get off on
that.” However, when the narrator begins to discard,
bit by bit, the submissive and victimized female
role that she had maintained at the beginning of
the novel and that Anna maintains throughout, the
consequences are telling. First, by refusing to marry
Joe, the narrator reverses typical gender role expecta-
tions; she, not the man, is unwilling to give up her
independence. In response, Joe behaves in a more
typically feminine manner, claiming that “sometimes
... I get the feeling you don’t give a shit about me.”
Furthermore, when the narrator refuses David’s
advances, he calls her a “tight-ass bitch” and accuses
her of being a lesbian. These criticisms are attempts
to show the narrator her gendered place, to force
her to conform to male expectations of submissive
female behavior. But men are not the only ones who
police gender roles; Anna criticizes the narrator as
well, calling her “inhuman.” The narrator realizes
that refusing to have sex with David causes Anna
to resent her: “[B]ecause I hadn’t given in, it com-
mented on her.”
The narrator ultimately refuses to uphold the
facade of wife and mother, admitting that she was
never married and that she had had an abortion. At
this point, she acknowledges that everyone wants
to save the world in one way or another—“men
think they can do it with guns, women with their
bodies”—and then she turns her back on this way
of thinking, destroying David and Joe’s film, smash-
ing all of the mirrors in the cabin, taking off all her
clothes, and heading out into the wilderness. She
gives up her name and states, “I tried for all those
years to be civilized but I’m not and I’m through
pretending.” The novel ends with the narrator
waiting for a new way to define herself, a way that
is not dependent on female submission and male
dominance.
Laura WrightnatiOnalism in Surfacing
When Margaret Atwood wrote Surfacing in 1972,
Canada was characterized by a void in terms of
its national conception of itself. Canada’s national
identity has evolved over three main stages since its
colonization in the 18th century. It was viewed, first,
as a colonial or provincial outpost of empire; second,
as a colonial nation; and finally, as a kind of country
without a specific identity. Furthermore, Canada’s
relationship with its imposing neighbor the United
States has shaped its national identity. For example,
prior to 1965, Canadian policy was one of coopera-
tion with and emulation of the United States; how-
ever, with the Lyndon Johnson presidency, Canada’s
desire to imitate was replaced by a sense of moral
righteousness as it sought to distance itself from its
neighbor’s escalating involvement in the Vietnam
War.
To some extent, it is this anti-U.S. sensibility that
Atwood portrays in Surfacing. Atwood examines the
complexities of the national conception of the “nice
Canadian” in the late 1960s while she simultane-
ously critiques the artifice of niceness by tracing
her unnamed narrator’s descent into madness in
the wilderness of Quebec. Over the course of the