As a novel about human’s relation with nature, Surfacing shows Atwood’s unique insight into the suppressed condition of both women and nature.  Even though it is published in the early 70’s, it demonstrates her particular concern about the crisis of human intrusion in the wilderness and evokes the attention to the disequilibrium in the novel.  According to Nathalie Cooke’s observation in Margaret Atwood: A Biography, Atwood shows her concern of the topic about nature in her early works⁵:

                   Atwood’s earliest work reflects a number of concerns that have remained central to her oeuvre: a profound respect for the natural world, a commitment to Canadian culture, and a firm belief in the rights of the individual.  In her work, such concerns can be traced in the themes of nature’s triumph over civilization, Canadian nationalism, and feminism. (79)

In Surfacing, Atwood embraces many of the dichotomies that have long been standards in Western thought.  She connects women with nature and men with culture, which each in opposition to the other.  Although these binary categories bring the nameless narrator numerous pains, she relieves herself from the burdens of dichotomy and returns to the city with hope at the end of the novel.

     The anonymous narrator in Surfacing grows up in a remote island in northern Quebec.  She goes back to her birthplace in search of her missing father.  When she puts herself in the isolated nature, the narrator finds that she is captivated and summoned by the mysterious power of nature like many of the female characters in the fairy tales.⁶  She has a special sense as she dwells in the natural environment.  She gets the experience in her lifetime to come into contact with and learn about nature.  Unlike her unfeeling companions, she believes and senses nature with ease.  As she stays in the rural environment, she feels a kind of safety.  “How have I been able to live so long in the city, it isn’t safe,” the narrator says, “I always [feel] safe here, even at night” (70).  In comparison with the stifling city, the narrator lives and breathes at ease on the island. 

     For the narrator, living in the city is as if bearing numerous kinds of burdens.  Everything in the city for her is a difficult task.  Getting alone with so many people makes her uneasy.  She cannot fit herself into the surrounding at all.  Every time she recalls the nights she spent in the city, she suffers the tension of emotion.       

                    In the night I had wanted rescue, if my body could be made to sense, respond, move strongly enough, some of the red light-bulb neurons, incandescent mole-cules might seep into my head through the closed throat, neck membrane.  Pleasure and pain are side by side they said but most of the brain is neutral; nerveless, like fat.  I rehearsed emotions, naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate, react, relate; what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and memorized it. (112)

She is unaccustomed to the pressure of modern life.  She cannot get used to the life in the civilization.  Therefore, she confronts so many difficulties during the period she spends in the city.  It’s such a hard time in her life.       

                    The inside of my arms were stippled with tiny wounds, like an addict’s.  They slipped the needle into the vein and I was falling down, it was like diving, sinking from one layer of darkness to a deeper, deepest; when I rose up through the anaesthetic, pale green and then daylight, I would remember nothing. (112)

The narrator’s unaccommodated situation in civilization is displayed in her narration as well.  Shoes for her “are a barrier between touch and the earth” (164).  David and Anna’s car is nothing but “a lumbering monster.”  The “Americans” are intruders.  As Hilde Steals notices in “Surfacing: Retracing the Paths of (Self-) Mutilation,” the narrator disdains everything symbolizing civilization and never wants to change herself. 

                   These foreign signs signal the deterioration of the “original” landscape, caused by the intervention of other human beings, an interference that she associates with violation.  The environment that underwent a process as a result of changed context “betrays” her [the narrator’s] expectations. (46)

Therefore, when the narrator comes back to her birthplace, goes fishing with her friends, and eats artificial food on the natural land, she even has a sense of complicity.  A sense of crime rises gradually in her mind because she is aware of her taking part in doing something bad to nature.

                   We knelt down and began to pull at the weeds; they resisted, holding on or taking clumps of soil out with them or breaking their stems, leaving their roots in the earth to regenerate; I dug for the feet in the warm dirt, my hands green with weed blood.  Gradually the vegetables emerged, pallid and stunted most of them, all but strangled.  We raked the weeds into piles between the rows, where they wilted, dying slowly; later they would be burned, like witches, to keep them from reappearing.  There were a few mosquitoes and the deer flies with their iridescent rainbow eyes and stings like heated needles. (77)

After perceiving her own complicity, she then turns to despise what the “Americans” do to the natural island and even compares them with dogs.  They should preserve the beauty of the environment rather than destroy it.

            After we landed we found that someone had built a fireplace already, on the shore ledge of bare granite; trash was strewn around it, orange peelings and tin cans and a rancid bulge of greasy paper, the tracks of humans.  It was like dogs pissing on a fence, as if the endlessness, anonymous water and unclaimed land, compelled them to leave their signature, stake their territory, and garbage was the only thing they had to do it with. (111)

The “Americans” unscrupulously do things bad to nature in order to demonstrate their power.  They repeatedly ravage and rob the landscape with their own will and disregard the reciprocal relationship between humans and the land.  Human beings exist in the natural world.  They should give thanks and preserve it with all efforts.  Without the support of natural system, it’s impossible for humans to sustain themselves well.

                    Whether it died willingly, consented, whether Christ died willingly, anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn’t kill birds and fish they would have killed us.  The animals die that way we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the tall killing the deer, that is Christ also.  And we eat them out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life.  Canned spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ.  But we refuse to worship. (141)

It’s ironic that human beings worship Jesus Christ for his sacrificing life for them but contempt animals’ for giving life to provide them food.  Birds and fish in the novel are victims that convey the embarrassing condition.  The way of human’s exploitation of nature is connected to the oppression of women through the narrator since she is a woman who suffers painfully from the domination of men and civilization and has a special bond to nature.  Both nature and women contribute to human society but are repressed under men’s commanding power.

     Women have no names in the rural town.  Everyone is called “Madame.”  They are only objects that belong to men in the male-dominated society.  They exist to satisfy the physical, domestic and sexual needs of their spouse or male companion.  Names for them are not important at all because individuals are not significant.   The narrator’s abortion of her child is then portrayed as brutal as a butcher’s slaughter of livestock in the novel although the narrator deliberately describes it as if she goes through a delivery:

                   After the first I didn’t never want to have another child, it was too much to tie your hands down and they don’t let you see, they don’t want you to understand, they want you to believe it’s their power, not yours.  They stick needles into you so you won’t hear anything, you might as well be a dead pig, your leg are up in a metal frame, they bend over you, technicians, mechanics, butchers, students clumsy or snickering practicing on your body, they take the bady out with a fork like a pickle out of a pickle jar.  After that they fill your veins up with red plastic, I saw it running down through the tube.  I won’t let them do that to me again. (79)

The narrator is cut into two after the cruel and forced abortion.  “I [am] emptied, amputated;” the narrator says,” I [stink] of salt and antiseptic, they [have] planted death in me like a seed” (145).  This compelled event hurts her physically and mentally since how she feels is never the concern. 

Women are so humble that they can do nothing they really want to.  The narrator’s best female friend Anna provides the best example to present this inferior situation.  Anna lives up to the stereotypical image in the society that women are labeled subordinate to men.  Within her marriage with David for nine years, she is submissive all the time.  She does her best to please him from stem to stern.  She is never in control of her life; instead, it’s David in control of her life.  Like what Brooks J. Bouson describes in Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood, Anna “is a passive recipient and not active agent”(42).  She makes herself up to fit in with all of David’s demands.  The subjectless Anna hides poorly behind her makeup appearance.  Without makeup, she loses the only magic in her life.  She is poorly trapped in the powerless role of woman.

David symbolizes the authority of patriarchy that exploits women in all respects.  On the sixth day they spend on the island, David asks Anna to take off her clothes for his Random Samples.  He persuades her into doing it.

                    “What’s humiliating about your body, darling?” David said caressingly.  “We all love it, you ashamed of it? That’s pretty stingy of you, you should share the wealth; not that you don’t.” (136)

By pressing a button, David easily captures Anna’s naked images.  It’s a torture to Anna but a joy to David.  Shooting films is an act of taking possession.  David takes Anna as his personal property for consumption that he can film her as long as he can and he want.  For David, Anna becomes nothing but a pornographic object displaying in front of his eyes.  As Bouson observes in Brutal Choreographies, it’s the unequal power relationship that results in Anna’s tragedy.

                   Drawing attention to the power politics of gender relations, it shows how women, in an age of supposed sexual freedom, remain bound in a social formation that assigns man the role of sexual aggressor and woman that of passive victim and sexual object. (40)

The marriage between Anna and David is not an admirable relationship; on the contrary, it gives the narrator a lesson to scrutinize her own carefully.  Bouson further illustrates the power struggle between Anna and David.

                   Contesting the myths of romantic love as the attraction of opposites or the balance of complements, Surfacing draws attention to the oppression of women in a male-defined order of hierarchical and oppositional roles that empower men at the expense of women. (43)

The narrator gradually realizes the imbalance of Anna’s marriage and she decides to fight back.  She wants to do something for Anna, but at this point, she is still afraid and feels that "the only defense was flight, invisibility":

                    I wanted to run down to the dock and stop them, fighting was wrong, we aren’t allow to, if we did both sides got punished as in a real war.  So we battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won.  The only defense was flight, invisibility.  I sat down in the top step. (136)

The narrator reels off the film and symbolically rescues Anna from David’s coercion.  She unwinds the film and throws it into the lake.  These unjust treatments of Anna lead the narrator to re-examine her identity as a woman in marriage.  As the journey progresses, she rejects the patriarchy-defined gender role for women.  She refuses to be a victim like poor Anna.  She wants to have her own way as Atwood talks about in Margaret Atwood Conversation:

                If the only two kinds of people are killers and victims, then although it may be morally preferable to be a victim, it is obviously preferable from the point of view of survival to be a killer.  However, either alternative seems pretty hopeless; you can define yourself as innocent and get killed, or you can define yourself as a killer and kill others.  The ideal would be somebody who would neither be a killer nor a victim, who could achieve some kind of harmony with the world, which is a productive or creative harmony, rather than a destructive relationship towards the world. (16-7)

Without doubt, Anna embodies the role of victim, a victim of patriarchy.  However, the narrator doesn’t.  She resists being subordinate.  As Elenoara Rao points out in Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood, the narrator comprehends so many oppressions in her life that she decides not to be a victim anymore: 

Images of victimization permeate Surfacing.  The world of nature that surrounds the narrator and her companions is violated by technology, pollution and human lust.  The protagonist, confronted by such evidence of victimization, is convinced that she herself is a victim.  As a woman she feels handicapped in a man’s world as a commission; as a Canadian she feels exploited in a country that she regards as a sell-out.  As a human being, she is pervaded by guilt. (55)

Unlike Anna, the narrator asks for equilibrium in her “marriage.”  Her previous abnormal relationship with her ex-lover in the city leads her to try to break free from the established women’s role in the society.  Unlike Anna she strongly refuses to be a victim within the system of patriarchy.  Besides fighting back violently, there should be some placid ways to solve the problem.  Bouson observes in Brutal Choreographies:

                   Women and men may not only oppose but also represent aspects of one another.  Despite her inner resistance to the monolithic voice and finalizing speech of bourgeois culture, the Surfacer－not unlike Anna who speaks in a “radio” voice－finds herself responding to Joe in an inauthentic feminine voice. (45)

The narrator is conscious that she will never be a woman like Anna.  She has to resist.  She has to fight.  She has to walk her own path.  The journey into the wilderness is a chance for her.  After a few days’ stay on the island, the narrator’s long-denied past and affection surface.  She wants to experience nature.  She rejects to go back to the city to conform to the male-constructed woman without any change.  Then she decides to turn into a “natural” woman and lives in a “natural” way there.  The narrator is tired of civilization and does not want to pretend anymore.   She wants to get rid of all the burdens of civilization. 

                   It’s true, I am by myself; this is what I wanted, to stay here alone.  From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are on longer any rational points of view. (173) 

The narrator cares nothing about reason anymore.  Eating roots, destroying her clothes and sleeping in the wilderness, she reverts to the original state of life.  According to Emma Parker in “You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood,” it’s the narrator’s way to experience nature:

                    When she rejects culture and retreats into the wilderness to become a “natural” woman, she gives up eating processed food.  Such food is contaminated in the same way that society is contaminated by patriarchical ideology.  Both are unnatural, constructed, man-made, and both threaten to poison her. (115)

In this way, the narrator relieves completely from all of her burdens.  She accepts nature’s healing power. As Bouson points out in Brutal Choreographies, the narrator also reverses the perfect woman image set by Anna in her own way.

                   Through this troubling image of the natural woman, the novel deliberately subverts the cultural construction of an eroticized, commodified femininity promoted by and circulated in the men’s magazines: the glossy magazine centerfold woman who is, like Anna, an imitation of an imitation. (58)

The narrator puts herself in the entire natural world.  She immerses herself in the lake and gets a redemptive power and then finally gets a totally new perspective toward life.     

                            A fish jumps, carved wooden fish with dots painted in the sides, no, antlered fish thing drawn in red on cliffstone, protecting spirit.  It hangs in the air suspended, flesh turned to icon, he has changed again, returned to the water.  How many shapes can he take.

                  I watch it for an hour or so; then it drops and softens, the circles widen, it becomes an ordinary fish again. (193)

Even death for her does not mean a separation now.  The death of the narrator’s father is a reunion to the earth, to nature. 

I am part of the landscape, I would be anything, a tree, a deer skeleton, a rock.  I see now that although it isn’t my father it is what my father has become.  I knew he wasn’t dead. (193)

Death becomes a kind of return to nature and a promise of new life.  After death, her parents blend into nature and become part of it.  She receives the inspiration and realizes that she must go back to the city with a completely new understanding.

The narrator determines to accept the restrictions in the city and the obstruction of civilization.  However, this time, she is different.  She is ready to try to fit herself into the world.  She does know that as a human being, coming back to the city is inevitable.  Eating food in the cabin, as Emma Parker illustrates in “You Are What You Eat,” is the narrator’s first step to compromise with the world.

                   However, when she “runs out of food, she realizes she cannot live without physical sustenance just as she cannot lives outside society.  She must engage with life.  Her return to the cabin to eat food there signals her first step toward tentative reintegration into society. (115)

However, after the first step is taken, the narrator decides to go back to the city then.  She decides to let go and to believe and is prepared to rejoin the world. 

     Nothing can disguise the fact that humans are part of nature, indivisible from it.  Even the narrator chooses to come back to civilization at the end of the story does not deny this idea.  Nature and civilization, women and men are not absolutely opposite.  However, with a complete transformation in mind, it can be changed.  As Rao illustrates in Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood, the importance of living in harmony with nature does not equal to give up everything civilized. 

Atwood implies that we should transcend the politics of victims and victors and thus try to “achieve some kind of harmony with the world, which is a productive or creative harmony rather than a destructive relationship towards the world.” (8)

After the journey, the narrator prepares to rejoin the world with a new realization.  Nature and Civilization are not the two levels in the hierarchy.  In Ruther’s phrase, they are “dependent parts”:

                    We need to think of human consciousness not as separating us as a higher species from the rest of nature, but rather as a gift to enable us to learn how to harmonize our needs with the natural system around us, of which we are a dependent part. (21)

There are no superiors or inferiors in the relationship.  There is only a mutual corporation for the only universe.  That is what Atwood wants to talk about in the book when she mentions it in her Conversation.

                    There is an objective world out there; I’m far from being a solipsist.  There are a lot of things out there, but toward any object in the world you can take a positive or negative attitude or, let us say, you can turn it into a positive or a negative symbol, and that goes for everything.  You can see a tree as the embodiment of natural beauty or you can see it as something menacing that’s going to get you, and that depends partly on your realistic position toward it; what you are doing with the tree, admiring it or cutting it down; but it’s also a matter of your symbolic orientation toward everything.  Now I’m not denying the reality, the existence of evil; some things are very hard to see in a positive light.  Evil obviously exists in the world, right? But you have a choice of how you can see yourself in relation to that.  And if you define yourself always as a harmless victim, there’s nothing you can ever do about it.  You can simply suffer. (212)

Looking from a different angle, everything will be different.  The borders between women and men and nature and civilization are not that hard to cross.