In Surfacing, love, sex, and marriage are all potential weapons in fights between couples—though love, sex, and marriage may also have independent, positive realities. In the novel, the narrator goes to visit her family’s remote Canadian cabin with her boyfriend Joe and their married friends David and Anna. Both couples are engaged in power struggles. Joe wants the narrator to love him—so he proposes marriage and throws a series of tantrums when she says that she’s already been divorced and doesn’t want to go through it again. He wants her to marry him against her inclinations rather than remain happily unmarried but cohabiting with her—because if she married him against her wishes, that would (in his mind) prove she really loved him. Marriage is thus not a desirable state but a weapon in an emotional war. Meanwhile, Anna both loves and hates David; he finds her genuine love of him so hard to accept that he regularly cheats on her and then tells her about it, rendering sex a weapon in a difficult marriage. Despite these negative depictions of love, sex, and marriage as potential weapons, however, the novel suggests they might be positive phenomena under other circumstances; toward the end of the narrative, the narrator has the epiphany that she does love Joe and that, because his personality isn’t rigidly unchanging, his love could potentially offer her “freedom” rather than the “captivity” she observes in Anna’s relationship to David. Surfacing thus deromanticizes love, sex, and marriage while suggesting that they are still desirable under certain circumstances.
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Love, Sex, and Marriage Quotes in Surfacing
From the side he’s like the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction.
What he means is that a man should be handling this; Joe will do as a stand-in. My status is a problem, they obviously think I’m married. But I’m safe, I’m wearing my wedding ring, I never threw it out, it’s useful for landladies.
What impressed him that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took my clothes off and put them on again later very smoothly as if I were feeling no emotion. But I really wasn’t.
For a while I was going to be a real artist; he thought that was cute but misguided, he said I should study something I would be able to use because there has [sic] never been any important women artists. That was before we were married and I still listened to what he said, so I went into Design and did fabric patterns.
Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.
Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to the other things.
Prove your love, they say. You really want to marry me, let me fuck you instead. You really want to fuck, let me marry you instead. As long as there’s a victory, some flag I can wave, parade I can have in my head.
“You’ll go in beside the dead bird[.]”
