Women’s Alienation in Margaret Awtood Book “Surfacing”

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue VIII, August 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186

Women’s Alienation in Margaret Awtood Book “Surfacing”

 Tahiri Halima
Master Gender Studies, Soultan Moulay Slimane University, Morocco

Abstract: The present study attempts to analyse the theme of woman’s alienation in Margaret Atwood’s novel “surfacing “. In her novel, Margaret sheds light on the alienation that woman and particularly the narrator lives in patriarchal society. The unnamed narrator who is a talented and an artist woman turns back to Canada to search for her father, so she begins to feel like an isolated and alienated person. Because of her father disappearance and her mother detachment the narrator feels like an abandoned child who doesn’t have parents also when we read the book we find that there are a number of factors that contribute to the narrator’s alienation including her memories and bad experiences, losing her child due to abortion and lacking trust in her closet friends. In fact, being alienated has a negative impact on the narrator’s personality because it will lead her to move away from society, to become introvert and more than that it will lead her to madness acting like an animal living in the forest. In surfacing, the unnamed narrator understands the patriarchal factors behind her alienation and, therefore, she decides to resist them.

I.INTRODUCTION

Margaret Atwood is an internationally famous Canadian, postmodern and feminist writer specialized in women’s literature, she has actively engaged in the Canadian feminist movement, she writes many novels including “the Robber Bride’’, “the Cat’s eye”, “Alias Grace’’, “Life before man”, the Handmaid’s Tale”,” the edible woman“. In most of her works, Margaret Atwood tries to shed light on feminist and gender issues. She also tends to discover the conflict between women and their struggle to realize and to confirm their real identity in a society which is mainly patriarchal. Surfacing is the second novel of Margaret Atwood it was published in 1972 three years after her first novel “the edible woman”. Surfacing narrates the story of unnamed narrator who turns to Canada to find her missing father, accompanied by a couple that she recently knows and her boyfriend Joe. In her family house the unnamed protagonist remembers her past and she recalls feelings and events, she tries to find clues that can help her to find her father but without vain, being alienated and being disconnected affect the narrator’s mind so immensely leading her to wildness and madness. This paper tries to demonstrate the factors that lie behind the narrator’s feeling of alienation at different levels; Personal level, psychological level and the social level. And also it tries to determine the ways that the unnamed narrator adopts to resist alienation.

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