Gender Performativity and Myth in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing
Abstract
The representation of woman in literature has been considered as one of the most important forms of socialization. The utilization of mythmaking and human-animal relationships reflected in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. Atwood shows how societal restrictions can devalue the connections between the body, the mind, and the natural world. The formation of relational selves encourages both the communication with entities beyond the human realm and also the engagement in creative deconstruction that helps establish fluidity. Atwood represents the restrictions created by a dominant, patriarchal society that separates the body, the mind, and the natural world. These boundaries, and the negative connotations surrounding them, are deconstructed in a manner that places new emphasis on the environment and the changing perceptions of the female protagonists. Surfacing subverts isolated female identities to create relational selves that deconstruct the restrictions patriarchal society has over language, the mind, and the body; these fluid selves exist in the realm of creative difference rather than a sameness that forms oppressive (and potentially violent) binaries between the self and the other, the human and the animal, and the male and the female.
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