Margaret Atwood\'s Theory of Natural

Margaret Atwood's Theory Of Natural Survival

Margaret Atwood is arguably one of the most influential female Canadian writers of the last four decades. Her best-selling books have one many awards and, in the case of novels such as Surfacing and Handmaid's Tale, have inspired/enraged/empowered women in several decades to seek out their own power and challenge the patriarchal domination of their lives. Surfacing, which first appeared in 1972, was particularly embraced by the feminist community, which found a sort of odd manifesto in the heroine's descent into primeval nudity and her return which rejected all forms of victimhood and colonization of the body in exchange for a new strength and innocence in her mothering and mating relationships.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim" (Atwood, Surfacing, 197) became a sort of credo for many feminists of the era. There is something vaguely ironic about the way in which that phrase was latched up, though, for Atwood herself considered a certain degree of victimhood to be that characteristic which most truly defined Canadian literature as such.

Atwood was not merely a novelist, for if she had been her impact on Canadian literature -- though nonetheless still likely to be profound-- would certainly have been less. To her credit, Atwood is also the author of one of the more formative treatises on Canadian literature. In her book Survival, she claimed that Canada did indeed have a distinct national literature which could be distinguished from that of American or British standards, and which served as a context for interpreting and understanding the work of emerging and established Canadian authors.

According to an informal interview, Atwood is said to have described the work as written "because some people said that Canadian literature didn't exist... [though] it was always out there" (Strong)

According to this work, nations tend towards having some sort of myth or metaphor which infuses their culture and is manifested in their art and literature. Canada's guiding myth is not the same as that of Britain or of America, and thus its literature may be marginalized by those who judge based on the standards of these more established bodies of work. The guiding myth of Canadian literature, Atwood proposes, is that of survival -- the protagonist who survives (or fails to survive) in the face of overwhelming odds stacked against them from nature, society, or self. Canadian literature is filled with tragic or senselessly destructive endings; its protagonists die suddenly at the hands of whimsical fate/nature, or survive alone past the destruction of all others.

A thinking critic might point out that something in this guiding myth idolizes victimhood, rather than refusing to indulge in it.

However, the key to that Canadian heroine's determination to refuse to be a victim is in its simultaneous commitment to accept responsibility for her actions and commitment to continue struggling in the human world which was so puzzling and destructive -- it is not a commitment to resist being harmed or to resist being destroyed, but rather a commitment to resist giving up in the face of adversity. It is this sort of gameness which is the core of the successful Canadian protagonist's soul, as Atwood portrays it in her defining book Survival.

Yet the key feature of survival, which Atwood claims is so typical of Canadian literature, is not enough to explain the character development and messages of Atwood's intensely alinear stories of female self-discovery and transcendence, such as those transcribed in Surfacing and (years later) Cat's Eye. These two stories (particularly the first) further depend on defining the delicate relationship between internal and external reality, and the relationship of Nature to self and to truth.

Through-out her body of work, from Surfacing to the Handmaid's Tale to Oryx & Crake, Atwood develops a subtle cosmology in which th e self must strive towards the same sort of truthfulness as the external world of Nature, and mankind's effacement of the wild is paralleled and complicit in its effacement of the self. Nature, in Atwood's works, is not merely made (as in so many other fictions) to reflect the inner state of the characters, storming when they are angry or sun-drenched when they are happy. Rather, the character is judged by the degree to which they are able to merge with Nature and coexist within its absolute truth.

Nature -- which is at once dangerous and pure -- is the truth at the core of our mammalian natures, and the degree to which the characters in a story are able to embrace that instead of turning against it with artificiality, instinct-denying logic, cold religion, commercialism, or any other such facade, is precisely the degree to which they are capable both of survival and of becoming truly themselves. In the following pages, the deep relationship between nature, self, and survival in Atwood's works will be both explicated within her written works and --as much as possible-- its experiential source within her personal life will be noted and explored.

Atwood's Career History

It seems certain that Atwood's childhood would be far more informative to the subject at hand than would a dry recital of her "long, remarkable career." (Strong) Like Stephen in Cat's Eye, one might say that Margaret Atwood needs no introduction - but she must be introduced with a long list of her qualifications nonetheless. It seems prudent to quickly survey her work, so as to give some perspective on her place in modern Canadian fiction. It is quite difficult to imagine the Canadian literary landscape today were it not for her prodigious and often formative involvement. Atwood was involved in writing from an early age, and pursued it through many years of university study. She was active in her local artist community as she pursued her doctorate which she never completed but which did give her a great deal of perspective. Within a few years of receiving her first teaching position she had completed numerous stories, a book of poems, and her first novel. At age 27 she was the youngest poet to be honored by the Governor General's poetry award. (Strong) Subsequently, she published dozens of books and received numerous awards. Her novels the Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye were both shortlisted for the Brooker Prize, and she was likewise a finalist for the Orange Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (more than once). She won the booker Prize with Blind Assassin, while the Robber Bride and Alias Grace both were awarded a Giller Prize. She has received numerous other honors, including being given the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., the Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and the first London Literary Prize to be awarded to a female writer. Despite failing to earn her Ph.D in school, she has received honorary degrees from numerous universities including Oxford. She has been published in over 25 countries, and lectured across the globe. (Sciliano)

Her long and well-received career, both as an academic and as an acclaimed writer, gives Atwood a certain perspective on the subject of Canadian literature, and also prepares her to analyze her own work - which for some may seem almost inseparable from the literature of her nation.

Survival: The Theory

In her ground-breaking book Survival, Atwood argued that the central organizing metaphor or "symbol" for Canadian literature is that of survival. This survival is not merely that act of living through difficult times, but rather an entire mind-set which pervades the people and literature of the nation.

For comparison, Atwood argues that America and England also have their own symbols. England is "The Island," by which Atwood refers to a sense of isolation, self-adoration and completion, and terraced in a patriarchal way: "island-as-body, self-contained, a Body politic evolving organically with a hierarchical structure in which the King is the head, the statesmen the hands, the peasants or farmers or workers the feet, and so on. The Englishman's home as his castle is the popular form of this symbol." One can see this sense, she suggests, through-out English literature, constantly concerned with structure and the way the classes support and interact with each other. America, meanwhile, is "The Frontier." It is typified by utopias (failing and succeeding), by the restless search for something new, the conquest of virgin space, and the movement of revolutions.

For Canada, this symbol of survival is far more personal than the island of English symbolism and far more desperate and angst-ridden than the American conception of the frontier, even when that frontier is seen as dangerous or impossible. Atwood distinguishes at several sorts of survival which infuse Canadian literature: bare survival, grim survival, cultural and emotional survival are among these. Bare survival is that defined by merely "hanging on, staying alive." Canadian literature recognizes the difficulty of making it through each day and year. The obstacles to survival may be physical, based in the land and climate or the clash of needs between men, societies, and competing animals. As Canada has become less wild, many of these obstacles have been recognized by writers to exist internally, as Atwood says: "no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what we may call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human being."

Grim survival is that sort of survival which overcomes a specific threat which destroys everything else about one, such as a hurricane or plane crash. One supposes that survival in a war setting, or even survival of a serious personal tragedy (such as rape) might also qualify. Of this sort of survival, Atwood writes: "The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival; he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, except gratitude for having escaped with his life."

Cultural survival is also a vital issue. French Canadians struggled to retain their language and religion under the rule of an anglophile government. Today all Canadians are struggling to maintain their independence under the cultural and economic global hegemony of America. Survival can in this sense be either quite positive, as in the maintenance of a valued cultural integrity, or refer to what Atwood calls: "a vestige of a vanished order which has managed to persist after its time is past, like a primitive reptile..." Either way it is a typical response against colonialism.

When dealing with Atwood's writings, and it seems with Canadian writing in general, the issue of colonialism is quite important. Atwood's very existence is a protest against colonialism, because the colonial mindset rebels against the very existence of its colonies developing their own literary traditions. Atwood speaks of the way in which colonial powers and the colonized alike remain "indifferent" to the presence of great Canadian writers. " Atwood found this indifference of Canada to Canadian talent puzzling and disappointing.... she noted a tendency among Canadians to become aggressive nationalists when living [in America]. She explained the behaviour as 'The Great Canadian Lie' because urban Canadians reinvented themselves as Great White Hunters and rugged naturalists." (NiR) the idea of survival and the value of naturalism is seen as a response to colonial pressure, even as the ignorance of a nation's own literature may reflect a blind struggle to survive.

Nature and Meaning in Surfacing.

Surfacing is one of Atwood's early books, in which she begins to formulate her approach to subjects such as nature and survival. In this story, a young woman returns to the wilderness where she grew up with her family in an ultimately vain attempt to find her vanished father. While there she explores her relationship with her more "civilized" urban friends and with society at large, while reliving expanses of her childhood and past. In the isolation of these woods, the four friends who have ventured forth together find their individual relationships all decaying and falling apart.

Meanwhile, the protagonist traces her father's steps, at first thinking him mad and eventually coming to realize that he had quite sanely -if mystically-- somehow discovered a power in the woods and waters which predates the civilization of humankind and offers to give them back the truth of natural life. Under the influence of these spirits, she realizes that she has been lying to herself about her abortion, and slowly reverts to a primal state in which she lives in the woods briefly as a savage thing. In the end, she returns (one assumes) to her own humanity, carrying with her the animal determination to survive without becoming a victim or selling out to the Americanization of her soul.

This story, though it presents a sort of deification of nature, certainly does not treat the wild as Disney might, making it simple and non-aggressive. Nature, in this work, though it is worthy of reverence and represents the best of what is available to humankind on the one hand, is also shown as being capricious and capable of great harm. The narrator casually, if heartbreakingly, admits that "it's not unusual for a man to disappear in the bush... all it takes is a small mistake, going too far from the house in winter, blizzards are sudden, or twisting your leg so you can't walk out, in spring the blackflies would finish you, they crawl inside your clothes, you'd be covered with blood and delirious in a day." (Atwood, Surfacing, 43) Nature, though the ultimate shape of purity in this novel, is also a great threat to those who under-estimate it.

The idea of nature as a threat is evident in Atwood's writing on Survival, where there is an entire chapter called "Nature the Monster." In this chapter, she speaks of the death by nature (as distinguished from a natural death) which Atwood reports seems to kill more humans in Canadian fiction than in modern Canadian reality. This evil manifestation of nature occurs when "something in the natural environment murders the individual, though the author, who is of course the real guilty party, since it is he who has arranged the murder." (Atwood, Survival 54-55) in Surfacing this sort of death by nature is a constant threat. The protagonist suspects that her father may have died thus, and it is frequently recalled how her brother nearly drowned to death.

Yet it is not nature which is the greatest threat to the protagonist, in the end - it is not actually nature that she must fight against to survive, but rather it is humanity itself. She refers to being human as like being German after the war, complicitly guilty of all the crimes of her race against animals, each other, and the earth. The greatest threat to human survival is not the failure to find food, to mate and eat and survive, but the risk that as a species we will make ourselves and our environment extinct. This fear is vocalized through out the novel by different speakers, embodied in the fear that Americans will start a war to steal Canada's money, or in the threat that greedy power companies will raise the lake level and erase the protagonist's home. Even the threat of nuclear annihilation is mentioned, though it does not seem to be such a central focus compared to the threat of cultural and environmental annihilation posed by the Americans.

In the end, even more important that the developing heroine than her mere search for food. She focuses in the end, "above all" on the issue of resisting victimization by other humans. "I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone... The word games, the winning and losing games are finished; at the moment there are no others but they will have to be invented, withdrawing is no longer possible and the alternative is death." (Atwood, Surfacing, 197)

Humanity is far more of a threat than nature could ever be - not just humanity exterior to the individual, but also the trappings of civilization which have been internalized -- and this threat will continue until the individual returns to the truth of their mammalian state. It is clear through-out Surfacing that the great problem with humanity is that it has divorced itself from nature - that its technology has made it cruel and exploitative, fencing its psyche away from the test of the world.

This forbidding is evidenced in the way in which the protagonist was slowly taught by her ancient gods, in the end, that she must not pass into the garden because it has been separated and alienated from nature by its fence. "The cabins, the fences, the fires and paths were violations: now his own fence excludes him, as logic excludes love." (Atwood, Surfacing, 192) This is the same law that is at play when the gods forbid her to eat out of tins and glass jars, which confine and separate food from the earth.

Even before this, however, one may see the protagonist slowly becoming aware of the way in which human separation from nature is improper. One of the first hints come in her slow rejection of fishing with hooks, "if we dived for them and used our teeth to catch them, fighting on their own grounds, that would be fair, but hooks were substitutes and air wasn't their place." (Atwood, Surfacing, 127) Yet it is not merely that technology, be that technology fences or jars or hooks, is evil. In fact, at one point in the book the gods seem to rejoice in her ritual use of clothing, whereas at another point they ask her to reject clothing - and yet still allow her to keep a blanket. So it is not the existence of technological remnants such as cloth that are a problem, but rather it is that the technology serves to distance the individual from the truth of their physicality, just as the protagonist suggests that the neck separates the intellect from the body. Thus it would be "different in those countries where an animal is the soul of an ancestor," (Atwood, Surfacing, 129) and the self was not artificially held apart.

It is significant that in plunging her entire naked body into an element of raw nature (the lake), this woman is given the power to see the truth about her own actions and history. As she becomes more mammalian, more physical and more natural, she increasingly understands those things she has repressed about herself in order to be part of civilization. Her abortion -the fact that he body had conceived and lost its progeny through violence-- was one of those repressed factors. There are other truths to be discovered as well, including the fact that she does love Joe, in that simple and deep animal way which is not verbal or intellectual, but physical.

This same sense of sinking (or surfacing) into nature is present when Atwood approaches older stories of survival. In her book of poetry based on the life of Susanna Moodie, Atwood explores this same theme. "The natural, organic self... Susanna discovers has always been a part of her. Man is originally a natural animal. But because of his exaltation of reason, he has repressed his animal qualities... [when this is freed] Plants, animals, Susanna are all becoming one. She is successfully merging with the landscape...and the merging is hastened by death...of her children." (Groening)

In an article reviewing Atwood's poetic journals, Groening describes how different Atwood's interpretation of nature and the self truly is from that of the historical Moodie. This difference is typified in the way that Atwood describes the idealized Susanna coming into one-ness with the earth. This difference ought not be considered a flaw, but rather an innovation, a salvation of the old, stripped of its fences and slashed to let enlightenment in. In these journals, Atwood describes the way in which (in death) the body becomes one with the earth:

The body dies little by little the body buries itself joins itself to the loosened mind, to the black- berries and thistles

Atwood, in Groening)

This becoming is what the protagonist of Surfacing also faces, and yet she emerges from it alive (resurrected, as it were), precisely because she is underwilling to go through this transition without the jolting spur of death. She accepts her nature, her physicality and mammalian-ness, without dying to prove it. Nonetheless, there are many connections between the way in which transcendent nature is portrayed in Susanna's poetic journals and the way it appears in Surfacing. The idea of body becoming mood and roots is closely paralleled with quotes such as "I am tree," or "I am a place." (Atwood, Surfacing, 187) One is even pushed to question whether those spots marked off with Indian runes which have the ability to grant insight and the touch of a higher consciousness, are themselves place-people, spaces of water and earth where a person has transcended reality and become one with nature. Of course, this tends a little towards the mystical, and yet such places seem to appear in other works by Atwood as well, such as Cat's Eye (under the bridge).

In Surfacing, nature is deified, but it is also used in a very realistic way. Certainly on the one hand it is the threatened god, the one that teaches the protagonist how to see again and how to emerge from her Americanized stupor. It is also the victim of mankind's violence - the heron strung up to rot, the lakes fished out and artificially redrawn, the pathways clearcut into the forest. Apart from these personifications, nature is also used to intimately and carefully give the details of the inhabitants environment and life. Nature not only is acted upon by them, it not only lies within them - it is also the backdrop and subplot to all that humans do.

Atwood certainly uses the sort of nature which surrounds a people seems to say something about that people, whether they are interacting with it poorly (and can never escape it or grasp it, and must strike out at it) or whether they somehow manage to coexist or even integrate with it.

One can see the way that nature is both threatened and controlled by humanity in the narrative of the Handmaid's Tale. One critic, writing about Gilead, describes the way in which nature is perverted within it: "the perpetually whirring lawn mowers testify that nothing natural can escape state cultivation. In fact, the 'heart of Gilead' is a sleepy suburban landscape out of Better Homes and Gardens, tidily gridded with roadblocks... But in this Gilead...our nightmares about the perils of toxic waste, radioactive fallout, chemical and biological warfare, nuclear sabotage and the building of atomic power plants along earthquake fault lines have all come true. " (Lawson) it is particularly significant that this post-apocalyptic world exists in the framework of the Handmaid's story, in which human nature is being likewise gridded and divided into tidy but unnatural categories. Here again one finds Atwood subtly linking the degradation of human life with the degradation of the environment and the denial of nature. The future portrayed in the Handmaid's Tale is precisely the future which the protagonist of Surfacing fears and to some degree foresees - a world where love has been done away with, and nature has been subsumed into American Puritanism.

In summary, Surfacing is a book which attempts to deal in truth - a truth which transcends mere logic and reason. The reason of the protagonist's father, like the faith of her friends, is not sufficient for survival. The truth which this book deals with is dangerous. This may be why it is associated with nature, as after all nature itself is dangerous and even deadly. Truth which is open about the structure of power and misery in relationships would be equally dangerous. One feels sure that (for example) in Anna and David ever became truthful, their relationship would crumble, like Anna's made-up face. Likewise it is truth that endangers the woman's relationship with Joe - the truth that she rejects marriage and love. Yet it is also truth that may enable them to begin again.

The truth which this book deals with is subversive - it is the overturning of the intellectual, patriarchal, and the capitalistic in favor of the emotional/physical, gender-equal, and communal. It is a truth which is inherent in the body, in the emotions that overcome thought, in the equal ability of male and female to give and receive pleasure and to interpret instinct, and in the need of each individual to survive. The body which moves towards its animal nature, towards a rhythm which is in sync with the earth, is a body which cannot lie. The natural body, for example, would never confuse abortion with giving birth. It would not confuse abstinence with rape, nor love and fear. These are all aberrations of the mind.

So if Surfacing makes a single use of nature, it is this: nature is the truth-teller. Nature, as it is within us and without us, is that which upholds an inconceivably high standard of real-ness. This is, in the end, what may be valued about science, that it is capable of decoding and making manifest the truthfulness of nature. What is to be devalued about science (and art) is its ability to deceive and corrupt. Nature and instinct, this book suggests, pose certain dangers to the self and to society, but they are dangers which must be embraced if one is to be fully human.

Survival and Nature in Cat's Eye

That Cat's Eye tends to deify nature less than Surfacing is quite apparent on the surface. Despite that, they both share a number of striking similarities both in plot and meaning. Cat's Eye tells the story of the daughter of entomologist whose family spends most of their time in the bush, traveling from place to place chasing "infestations" until they settle in Toronto. There the girl Elaine makes friends with three girls who torment her ceaselessly. Eventually, after she comes very near death, she breaks off their abusive relationship and forgets it entirely. This amnesia later allows her to re-establish a relationship with the ringleader Cordelia some few years later. Now the tables have turned, and she is cruel one. Eventually, Elaine goes to art school and into a two failed relationships while establishing her feminist art career. She eventually ends up frumpy and married -and a famous artist-- while Cordelia ends up in an insane asylum. The book actually begins with her retrospective show in Toronto, where she walks the streets reminiscing. On the surface, this plot has little in common with Surfacing. However, just below the surface the similarities are so strong one might consider the protagonists to be almost dopplegangers in separate time lines. (One suspects both draw strongly form Atwood's own childhood in the wilderness)

The plot similarities are all in the details. Many tiny elements of the girl's lives are nearly identical. Both have one older brother, with whom they relate better than with other girls. Both grow up a-religious in a highly religious world, with rational, educated fathers and quiet, slightly eccentric mothers. Both attend church with a neighborhood friend whose father escapes from his workaday existence by Sunday-afternoon train peeping, and both Christian families have Sabbath meals consisting of beans and tawdry nursery rhymes about musical fruit. Both grow up to be artists, and both have an affair with their art teacher. Perhaps the most significant parallel, however, is that they both have some very significant memory loss associated with past suffering, and part of the character development and the moral significance of the story is the way in which this gap - this psychic untruth - is restored.

Many of the themes are the same between these two. Both deal with abortion, with the imbalances between males and female, and with the difficulty of surviving in the world. Where Surfacing deals more with physical survival, Cat's Eye deals with social survival. Both have a similar important element: the protagonist is most real and most themselves when they are within nature. In Surfacing this has a certain mystic quality. In Cat's Eye it is more practical. Elaine cannot quite be herself around girls in the city, she only feels uninhibited and natural when she is away from the city, chasing infestations. At one point she paints a series about her mother in which one sees a carefully drawn form slowly dissolve into white paints and pipe-cleaners as it labors in a kitchen. The series reverses when her mother emerges from the whiteness back into focus as she cooks around a campfire. This is a vivid image of the way the self becomes lost within an urban setting, and how the house-wife is destroyed by her servitude while a woman cooking in a state of nature is not. Amusingly, Elaine herself does not quite seem to recognize the meanings of her paintings. This disconnect between the urban and the natural is clear also in Elaine's descriptions of the church she attends, where the ventilator seems like a sacred onion. She does not find a lasting connection to God there - but when she has been under water (like the girl from Surfacing) and come back to lay on the natural white snow, then she actually sees the face of the Virgin Mary. The mother of God comes to her as an elemental spirit: "I feel her around me, not like arms by like a small wind of warmer air." (Atwood, Cat's Eye, 209)

Once more the sanctity of the natural is made clear.

Where Surfacing deals directly with the struggle to integrate with nature and find truth through that integration, Cat's Eye deals with the struggle to integrate with society, with one's own gender, and with life in general. Nature plays an important role, certainly, but the wilderness which Elaine must learn to transgress is that of Toronto, of human sentiment and frailty. Like her predecessor in Surfacing, Elaine struggles to avoid being a victim. When she finally discovers how to simply walk away (after her experience by the river), the story is not yet finished. This gives some insight into the future of those who have revelations of transcendence - the story does not end there, and if one does not break the human tendency to repress and forget, then the cycle may just begin again. Elaine learns to survive, certainly, but she does so at the cost of becoming an abuser herself. As she accurately points out, she is becoming like Cordelia. "In some ways we changed places, and I've forgotten when." (Atwood, Cat's Eye, 249)

It is difficult for Elaine to become an adult and negotiate the path to a truthful life without selling out and becoming part of the system. Even as in Surfacing the Canadian natives risked becoming Americanized, so here Elaine risks becoming Cordelia, or Mrs. Smeaths - she risks selling out her art and becoming part of the establishment. At the same time, by not learning from these people the games that they play, she would risk being unhappy forever. If she did not give birth to her daughter, she would surely just have had an unhappy abortion. Becoming legitimate - becoming truthful - is the great challenge of Elaine's life, even as it is the challenge which nature presents in Surfacing.

The challenge of surviving society and seeking legitimacy is perhaps the greatest challenge in Cat's Eye, and yet the society of Toronto against which Elaine struggles is rather tame in comparison with the difficult situations of some of Atwood's other heroines, such as Offred. In Handmaid's tale, the great difficulties which patriarchy creates for women who wish to communicate with one another are made less subtle and more blatant. Offred spends months communicating with Ofglen before they begin to be able to communicate more than a few words at a time. She is likewise unable to truly communicate with Serena or with the Marthas. Here the Aunts inform and abuse their fellow women, and paranoia and backstabbing are the norm.

Everything which exists in Handmaid's Tale is merely an exaggeration of tendencies which are already among us. Just as the patriarchy of the system is a crude mockery of our own marriages, the names cold conglomerates of names today, the lawns and cities rough post-apocalyptic children of our own gardens, so the relationships between women may be precisely the sort one might expect in an environment where women are striped of much of their right to talk but must nonetheless communicate only with one another as they do now. The jealousy, acrimony, bossiness, and cruelty which exists between women in this dystopia is nothing more or less than that which exists in minor form in Cat's Eye, magnified and adjusted by the scope and environment of the respective cities.

Offred, too, must learn how to build community with her peers, for if she does not then she will never be truly able to overcome her situation. She, and the others, are not trapped merely by their physical habits or the guns of the Gilead Eyes, but also by their inability to communicate with one another. In the end, Offred finds something resembling peace, it seems, as she creates a form of intimacy with another human that eventually leads to her escape.

Elaine also finds a form of peace in her survival. Through-out the story she fears Cordelia or some other long-lost comrade showing up and making a spectacle at the show. At the end, she no longer fears those conflicts. In the end, as she herself has grown children, has been cruel in her past and has been frumpy and odd, Elaine forgives all those who have harmed her. She spends one last night with her ex-husband, seeking a way to redeem their time together and be able to look back at it without bitterness or blame. She comprehends the sufferings and tribulations even of Mrs. Smeaths. She can even consider facing Cordelia. She has becomes less of a victim, but also less of a victimizer. She recognizes the degree to which she has been unfair to others, and can not only face this but integrate and transform it.

In the end, rather than imagine Cordelia suffering as a sort of vengeance, Elaine imagines it as something she can help, appearing to her inner Cordelia as the Virgin once appeared to her: "I'm the stronger...I reach out my arms to her, bend down, hands open to show I have no weapon. it's all right, I say to her, you can go home now." (Atwood, Cat's Eye, 459) Despite the social focus, it is nonetheless nature in the end that enlightens, once again. The river which taught her how to go home (as a child) and escape her tormentors then, now teaches her again how to forgive her those she has hated and to let them go. As she becomes the lady of the river, Elaine finds that at last "Cordelia is no longer there." (Atwood, Cat's Eye, 460)

The cat's eye marble that she so cherished as a child is one of the symbols in the book for nature - it is associated with the cat grove and the smell of cat piss through-out the book (what could be more natural than cat piss?), and also with the flame of truth. The marble is also a sort of psychic link to the river, for so many jars of marbles are buried down in the mud of that ravine. It is the nature of the marble which activates her lost memories. Yet it is not memory alone which heals her, but the actual mammalian practice of aging. As she ages, her body becomes more pliant. She understands, slowly now, the fear which her mother felt for her child, the disillusionment and weariness of Smeaths, even the petty cruelty of Cordelia. Understanding brings sympathy, and forgiveness. To the degree that she can prevent herself from becoming those she hates, and yet be able to understand them, she succeeds in finding truth.

The Influence of Atwood's Life

If there seemed to be a great deal of plot overlap between Surfacing and Cat's Eye, this may be because both draw a great deal from the writer's personal autobiography. It would not be amiss to say that both protagonists are pieces of Atwood which have broken off to go pursue lives of their own, and each carries with it pieces of her history. Identifying the facts first may help in identifying which theories from her personal experience may be infusing both her own work and her interpretation of Canadian literature.

Atwood's father, the rational Entomologist, seems to surface in both novels, as does the full circumstances of her early life:

Carl [her father] did not fight in the war but his expertise was vital: he ran a forest-insect research station in North Quebec, forestry being vital to the war economy. The family (Atwood has one brother, Harold Leslie, two years older; a younger sister, Ruth, was born much later, in 1951) would set off for the northern wilderness every spring, only returning in the autumn to one of a number of different cities. "At the age of six months," Atwood has written, "I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown." (the Guardian)

The family of Cat's Eye or Surfacing it easily recognizable, with the exception of the little sister (who wouldn't have been born in either case until the older two children were practically grown). It is clear that the early association with the wild of Canada spoke to young Margaret. Her early experience with nature obviously influenced her early development, for so many of her protagonists. Like Elaine, Atwood was eventually consigned to a school, and at age eight she found herself in Toronto trying to fit in with other children. It was surely at that age she learned the terrible divide that most humans place between what is nature-based and ture, and that which is societally dictated. T

Though she reports not suffering in quite the same degree as her heroine from Cat's Eye, Atwood still speaks of the difficulties of school: "I was now faced with real life, in the form of other little girls - their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms without wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten." (the Guardian)

Atwood, through-out her early life, lived tumultuously - constantly moving, frequently alienated with other children. She speaks of having only her brother and parents with whom to play, no television or money for cinema, and of course she was home-schooled until she was eight. So imagination had to take the foreground, and she and her brother immersed themselves in books (classics, contemporary, and comic books all alike), and active "make believe" games which no doubt fed her future writing career. Atwood speaks fondly of the way her parents encouraged the children to be creative:

They weren't very actively encouraging; I think their theory was to leave kids alone... I call that encouraging. The idea of parents hovering over you the whole time, making you take lessons and occupying every minute of your time, I think is probably quite bad, because it means the child has no room to invent. I did have this older brother who was very instructive, who liked passing on to me whatever information he'd acquired; it meant we didn't play dollies a lot; we'd line up our - few, I'd have to say, because it was the war, you know - our few stuffed animals and then we'd have the Battle of Waterloo." (the Guardian)