Gold Ring Symbol Analysis

In Surfacing, the gold ring that the female narrator wears represents her unreliability as a narrator due to the psychological difficulties that being a woman in a misogynistic, conservative society causes. The narrator first mentions the gold ring early in the novel, as she drives with her lover Joe and their married friends David and Anna into northern Quebec to search for her missing father: she mentions that Joe has a habit of fidgeting with her ring, but she doesn’t specify her exact relationship to Joe or whether the ring is a wedding ring. Readers are left to assume either that, most likely, Joe is either the narrator’s husband or that the ring isn’t a wedding ring. Yet once the group reaches the village near where the narrator’s father disappeared, she goes alone to speak with Paul, the old acquaintance who wrote to inform her of her father’s disappearance; when Paul asks whether the narrator’s husband is with her, she says yes—but privately thinks it’s lucky her parents never told Paul about her divorce and that she can pretend Joe is her husband for the duration of the trip. The contrast between what the narrator tells Paul and her private thoughts suggests that the narrator navigates the sexual conservatism of her society through deceit, avoiding telling older people that she got divorced and pretending that her new lover Joe is her husband when telling the truth would cause social problems.

The ring comes to represent not only the narrator’s self-protective lies to people around her but her unreliability as a narrator when, after getting a fright while swimming, she abruptly recalls that she never was married. She fabricated memories of an unhappy marriage and a child she abandoned with her husband to avoid confronting the truth: namely, that her lover, her art school professor who was married with children to someone else, coerced her into having an illegal abortion about which she feels deep guilt. This revelation fundamentally changes what the ring symbolizes: from symbolizing her deceptions of the people around her due to her society’s sexual conservatism, it comes to represent how she has deceived herself—and readers—with unreliable narration due to the intense psychological stress of being female in a society where a man like her professor can engage his student in a sexual relationship, coerce her into an unwanted abortion, and tell himself that he did her a favor.