Surfacing Part III

1
Surfacing Part III

• Woman and Nature
• Quest or Alienation?
• Discovery or Madness?

2
Outline

• Review and the use of they
• Woman and Nature
• Plot Summary, Critical Controversies and Starting
  Questions
• The Quest
• What she rejects and wants
• Crossing the Boundaries of the human
  (rationality, habits, artifice) and nature
• What she finds
• The ending
• Atwood on the novel and our conclusion

3
Review

• Surfacing 1 (Intro Part I)
• Main IssuesNature, Home (the Past), Gender
  Relations in Patriarchal Society
• Surfacing 2 (Part II)
• Gendered Identities and Fragmented Bodies in
  Nature (fragmentation by repression and by
  humans)
• Surfacing 3 (Part IIthe climax) -- Quest or
  Alienation Diving and Power Struggle

4
They

• The Americans vs. the Canadians
• Joe vs. the others For him truth might still be
  possible, what will preserve him is the absence
  of words but the others are already turning to
  metal, skins galvanizing, heads congealing to
  brass knobs, components and intricate wires
  ripening inside. (chap 19 160) ? Theyre
  avoiding me, they find me inappropriate . . .

5
They

• 1) Imperialism, capitalism, exploitation of
  nature, sexism work together to form a matrix of
  domination. (e.g. heronto kill the untamable,
  Annas naked body put together with the dead
  heron the beaver as female sexual organ).
• 2) David, Joe, Anna all of those she rejects
• 3) the lost parents.

6
Woman and Nature

• Mother earth, earth mothers, natural women, wild
  women, fertile land, virgin lands, raped earth,
  etc.
• European cultures have long imagined nature as
  feminine.
• e.g. 16th-century pastorals organicist view
  nature as mother and bride
• e.g. Scientific revolution exploitative view
  a female to be controlled and dissected through
  experiment.

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Woman and Nature

• ? real women get to be associated with nature in
  philosophical thinking. woman is closer to
  nature and is thus inferior woman is inferior
  because nature made her so. (Alaimo 2-3)
• ? women get involved in the actual exploitation
  of nature (as laborers)
• Grounding for ecofeminism, e.g. landscape as a
  feminist site
• A possible problem uses the metaphoric
  connection of women and nature which justifies
  the oppression of both.

8
Plot Summary

• 19 switches back to the present tense (with the
  description of Joe)
• Part III
• 20 gets herself impregnated by Joe, while Joe
  just thought that she was jealous.
• 21 -- destroys the film and then takes the canoe
  away from the other three to hide among the
  bushes.
• 22-- goes back to the cabin to find her locked
  outside. Cries for the first time. "I am here!"
  She calls out to her parents.
• 23 -- fear rejecting human artifact, she eats
  raw foods and lives in a lair.

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Plot Summary (2)

• Part III
• 24 pains experience transformation sees 'her.
• 25 -- sees 'Father.
• 26 -- understands her parents and feels released
  from them observes nature from multiple angle.
• 27 gets dressed and re-enters her time.

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Critical Controversies and Starting Questions

• Is the narrator crazy?
• The narrator goes crazy deliberately in order
  to empower herself. (Annis Pratt)
• Before the narrator can establish a strong sense
  of identity, she hits "rock bottom. . . . Fed up
  with the superficiality of her companions, she
  banishes them and submits to paranoia (Patricia
  F. Goldblatt)

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Critical Controversies and Starting Questions

• Is the narrator crazy?
• ? appearance of madness hair standing tangled
  out from my head (180) a creature neither
  animal nor human, furless, only a dirty blanket,
  shoulders huddled over into a crouch, . . . The
  lips move by themselves. (end of chap 26 p. 196)
• ? rejects words, beyond rational point of view
  (173).
• But her mind is actively working in her
  experience of nature she is consciously crossing
  the boundaries.

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Critical Controversies and Starting Questions

• What does she want? Making up for her experience
  of abortion? Playing Nature?
• The heroine uses Nature as a
  consciousness-raising retreatbut, in the end,
  the novel abandons nature to silence. . . . The
  conclusion amplifies the division between
  humanity and nature. . . (142)
• ? The narrator has been close to nature, but her
  existence in nature has never been romanticized.
  Nor is nature silenced or forgotten at the end.

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What the narrator rejects/wants

• Rejects (Death) The films objectification/fragme
  ntation of women and nature 168-69
• Wants (Life) a baby p. 165 (rejects words and
  death machine I will never teach it any
  words) p. 172
• Does she want to be a natural woman? No, she
  wants to be able to be close to her parents.
  Chap 22 p. 177

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Her sense of nature

• Chap 20 close to the earth and familiar with
  the environment (p. 164 -- tentacled feet and
  free hand scent out the way.
• Sense of barrier the shoes
• She vs. Joe animal vs. city
• Feeling of watery existence sex on the earth
  166 lying in the canoe 171
• Fear pp. 177 -179 not really of ghosts, but of
  barriers the fear leaves her once she steps out
  of the house p. 181

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Rejecting Artifacts, Crossing the Boundaries

• Chap 23 rejects the brush, the mirror, the
  dock, the enclosure with the swing, the ring, . .
  . Everything from the past and made by humans.
• Chap 24 Locked outside the garden, she
  understands the rule. P. 186

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What does she gets through her natural
existence in nature?

• Pain --
• Transformation -- . . . everything is made of
  water . . . There are no nouns, only verbs . . .
  I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning. . .
  . I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in
  which the trees and animals grow, I am a place.
  (187)
• Her parents (pp. 188 192)? Or jay birds, a
  wolf, appreciation of human connections with
  nature and rejection of human fences?
• Multiple View of Nature

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What does she gets through her natural
existence in nature?

• She knows that they are gone and she has to go
  back to the city pp. 194- 95
• Defines them by their absence understands them
• Ceases to be a victim.
• The baby as both a primeval one and with words.
  

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Ending Tentative Return to Society?

• Refuses being caught by the hunters (who are
  like machines)
• To allow the baby to be born
• Ambiguity in her views of Joe and nature
• Joe love for him useless mistrust he isnt
  an American
• I tense forward, with feet not moving
• Nature asking, giving nothing.

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Atwood on the novel

• The novel takes an anti-coercion stand, not an
  anti-abortion stand. (Alaimo 213)
• P. 211-12 . . . You have a choice of thining
  the central character is crazy or thinking she is
  right. Or possibly thinking she is crazy and
  right. . . . Evil obviously exists in the world,
  right? But you have a choice of how you can see
  yourself in relation to that.
• P. 212 On the edge of the lake 1. stay standing
  on the edge of the lake, 2. jump in and get
  drowned, 3. learn to swim. (Impossible to walk
  away, since it is the entire universe.)
• An alternative to the two choices being in the
  machine and being run by the machine.

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Our Conclusion on the Novel?

• The narrator refuses to remain a victim by facing
  and changing the past (the aborted baby and her
  separation from her parents).
• Surfacing superficial unfeeling existence ?
  diving ? surviving and swimming
• While the character tries to approach a natural
  existence, natural beings are presented as they
  are, and as part of human imagination.

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Our Conclusion on the Novel?

• Less Romantic than Wordsworth and Keats, more
  sophisticated than ???? and Nell, the novel shows
  the narrators rejection of human exploitation
  and acceptance of interconnections of life and
  death, the human and the non-human.

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Reference

• Undomesticated Ground Recasting Nature As
  Feminist Space. Stacy Alaimo. Cornell UP, 2000.