Surfacing –Part III

Woman and Nature

Quest or Alienation?

Discovery or Madness?

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, habi

ts, artifice) and nature;

– What she finds;

• The ending • Atwood on the novel and our conclusion

Review

• Surfacing 1 (Intro & Part I):

Main Issues—Nature, 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 II—the climax) -- Quest or Alienation; Diving and Power Struggle;

“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) “They’re avoiding me, they find me inappropriate . . . “

“They”

1) Imperialism, capitalism, exploitation of nature, sexism work together to form a matrix of domination. (e.g. heron—to kill the untamable, Anna’s 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.

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.

1. e.g. 16th-century pastorals: organicist view: nature as mother and bride;

2. e.g. Scientific revolution: exploitative view: “a female to be controlled and dissected through experiment.”

Woman and Nature

11 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)

11 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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 retreat—but, 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.

What the narrator rejects/wants

1. Rejects (Death): The film’s objectification/fragmentation of women and nature –168-69;

2. Wants (Life): a baby – p. 165 (rejects words and death machine –”I will never teach it any words”); p. 172

3. Does she want to be a ‘natural woman’? No, she wants to be able to be close to her parents. Chap 22 p. 177

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

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

What does she gets through her ‘natural’ existence in nature?

1. Pain -- 2. 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)

3. Her ‘parents’ (pp. 188; 192)? Or jay birds, a wolf, appreciation of human connections with nature and rejection of human fences?

4. Multiple View of Nature

What does she gets through her ‘natural’ existence in nature?

1. She knows that ‘they’ are gone and she has to go back to the city; pp. 194- 95

2. Defines them by their absence; understands them;

3. Ceases to be a victim.

4. The baby as both a ‘primeval one’ and with words.

Ending: Tentative Return to Society?

1. Refuses being caught by the ‘hunters’ (who are like machines);

2. To allow the baby to be born; 3. Ambiguity in her views of Joe and nature

– • Joe – love for him useless; mistrust; ‘he isn’t

an American’ • “I” – tense forward, with feet not moving; • Nature – asking, giving nothing.

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.

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.

Our Conclusion on the Novel?

Less Romantic than Wordsworth and Keats, more sophisticated than 安卓珍妮 and Nell, the novel shows the narrator’s rejection of human exploitation and acceptance of interconnections of life and death, the human and the non-human.

Reference

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