Surfacing Study Guide

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, Canada, to Margaret Dorothy Atwood and Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist. Her father’s entomological research took the family to wild, remote areas of Canada, including northern Quebec; Atwood did not attend school regularly until age 12, though she began writing poetry in childhood. After graduating high school in 1957, she attended Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where she studied English, French, and philosophy. From 1961–1962, she earned an MA in English at Radcliffe College (Radcliffe was Harvard University’s sister school, founded before Harvard began admitting women, and was absorbed into Harvard in 1999). Also in 1961, she published her first book of poetry, Double Persephone. In addition to publishing five books of poetry in the 1960s, Atwood also published her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969. Thereafter she became a prolific writer of both poetry and fiction: as of 2024, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, and nine short story collections—not including children’s books. Several of her novels have won major awards: her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) won the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year, while The Blind Assassin (2000) won the Booker Prize.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939, the same year that World War II (1939–1945) commenced. In Surfacing, the Canadian narrator makes frequent reference to her own early childhood during World War II, uses examples of violence and evil from World War II to explain her own moral intuitions, and reflects on the changed relationship between Canada and the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II. In 1939, at the outbreak of the war, Canada’s population was only about 11 million people—and more than one million Canadians served in Canada’s military over the course of the war, a mobilization rate of around 10% of the total population. When the war began, Canada was a poor country still suffering from the Great Depression (1929–1939), a massive and long-lasting global financial crisis. Selling manufacturing and agricultural products to allies during World War II helped Canada move past the Great Depression—yet not to the degree that the United States did. Due to the Canadian characters’ negative perceptions of Americans’ economic materialism and the U.S.’s overwhelming military and cultural influence in the aftermath of World War II, the Canadian characters tend to suspect Americans of shallowness, greed, and violent tendencies—qualities the narrator fears are contagious. 

Margaret Atwood’s second novel Surfacing uses an unreliable narrator to explore themes of conflict between men and women, as well as human violence against animals and the environment. Similar elements appear in Atwood’s later, more famous novels: for example, her Booker Prize-winning novel The Blind Assassin (2000) also uses an unreliable narrator, while her influential dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a theocratic state suffering from population-wide infertility problems in which powerful men use women called “handmaids” like breeding animals. Her speculative-fiction opus Oryx and Crake (2003) represents near-future environmental collapse and hubristic genetic manipulation of animals. The unreliable narrator in Surfacing may have been inspired by earlier famous unreliable narrators in postmodern English literature, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s V. in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) or Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955). The mental breakdown of Surfacing’s narrator in response to a misogynistic society may have been influenced by earlier feminist works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), in which a woman forced on bed rest to treat minor “hysteria” descends into flamboyant madness; and Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963), in which a female college student smothered by a misogynistic society ends up in an insane asylum.