The Narrator’s Abortion Started the Process of her Mental Transformation (Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing)
The Narrator’s Abortion Started the Process of her Mental Transformation
Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing is a novel about a woman who seeks redemption because of having her baby aborted. Her name is never revealed what denotes a serious problem in her identity. She has lost all the human characteristics such as the ability to feel (Atwood 22), love (Atwood 36), dream (Atwood 37) or weep (Atwood 166). She has to go through both physical but mainly mental transformation to realize and find her real self; she has to move from denial to self-knowledge. In this essay I am going to focus on the most important details connected to the abortion which changes her life, and prove that the abortion started the process of her mental transformation.
First and most importantly, there is the word abortion which accompanies the reader throughout the whole book. The narrator’s lover describes the abortion as something ‘legal, simple’: "He said I should do it, he made me do it; he talked about it as though it was legal, simple, like getting a wart removed" (Atwood 79) to persuade her that there is nothing wrong with it. The narrator, hurt by the abortion, seeks comfort in persuading herself that she did not experience the abortion but the divorce, she simply substitutes the word abortion by the word divorce. It might be because ‘to divorce somebody’ means "to separate a person, an idea, a subject, etc. from sth; to keep two things separate" (Oxford Dictionary 444). The same meaning has the verb ‘to abort something’; because when a foetus is aborted it is also separate – from its mother. She needed a rational connection between these two words to be able to replace them. Later on the narrator even confesses that: "He [the lover] didn’t want our relationship to influence anything; it was to be kept separate from life" (Atwood 174). The second part of the sentence might not speak about their relationship anymore, but about the abortion while using the word ‘separate’. It was the child
Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing is a novel about a woman who seeks redemption because of having her baby aborted. Her name is never revealed what denotes a serious problem in her identity. She has lost all the human characteristics such as the ability to feel (Atwood 22), love (Atwood 36), dream (Atwood 37) or weep (Atwood 166). She has to go through both physical but mainly mental transformation to realize and find her real self; she has to move from denial to self-knowledge. In this essay I am going to focus on the most important details connected to the abortion which changes her life, and prove that the abortion started the process of her mental transformation.
First and most importantly, there is the word abortion which accompanies the reader throughout the whole book. The narrator’s lover describes the abortion as something ‘legal, simple’: "He said I should do it, he made me do it; he talked about it as though it was legal, simple, like getting a wart removed" (Atwood 79) to persuade her that there is nothing wrong with it. The narrator, hurt by the abortion, seeks comfort in persuading herself that she did not experience the abortion but the divorce, she simply substitutes the word abortion by the word divorce. It might be because ‘to divorce somebody’ means "to separate a person, an idea, a subject, etc. from sth; to keep two things separate" (Oxford Dictionary 444). The same meaning has the verb ‘to abort something’; because when a foetus is aborted it is also separate – from its mother. She needed a rational connection between these two words to be able to replace them. Later on the narrator even confesses that: "He [the lover] didn’t want our relationship to influence anything; it was to be kept separate from life" (Atwood 174). The second part of the sentence might not speak about their relationship anymore, but about the abortion while using the word ‘separate’. It was the child