Exploring Mindscape and Landscape in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing

Margaret Atwood being the most significant Canadian novelist, poet and critic is chiefly popular for her writing about several social problems. Her novel Surfacing, published in 1972, portrays the domination of western civilization as a patriarchal ideology over nature and woman in parallel. The novel is about the degeneration of the core ideas of rationalism and progress into brute domination, colonization and the rift between nature and culture. Atwood scathingly criticizes the rampant consumerism and capitalism of the modern age embodied in the threat posed by American culture, or American mentality, to Canada and its landscape which runs parallel to the masculine rationality that wills to ‘submerge’ as the central metaphor of ‘surfacing’ as its feminine mindset. This paper discusses the conflict between the landscape and mindscape in several related dualisms represented in the novel and thus glorifies the theme of ecofeminism throughout its notion.