Dwelling in the Dissolve: Trans-Corporeality and Aquatic Materiality in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing

There has always been a dichotomy between the decadent urban lifestyle and the pristine countryside. Drawing on literary examples ranging from Aristotle’s Poetics to modern works, Northrop Frye identifies a mode in which the protagonist’s withdrawal or escape from society becomes a crucial step toward their redemption and eventual salvation. In her much-appraised book of criticism, Survival, Margaret Atwood, too, underlines not only the nurturing essence of nature but also the evilness of cities in Canadian literature. In a similar vein, the protagonist in Atwood’s Surfacing resorts to nature to purge herself from the diseases and wounds inflicted on her in the city. It is not just Old Mother Nature as a redeeming space to which she resorts, but the adherence to the values of the modern society, with its emphasis on makeup, grooming, and childbearing precautions, from which the narrator in the novel seeks refuge that help her tinker herself piece by piece. By way of Stacy Alaimo and Sidney Dobrin, among other new materialist and blue humanities thinkers, this paper explores the natural environment as a lively agentic force and addresses the idea of lake as body, thereby unmooring ecocriticism from its terra-centered anchors. Positioning and embedding the human body in proximity to other bodies which populate the natural environment, this study discusses how the entanglement of human and nonhuman bodies restores wholeness to an otherwise psychologically fragmented self.

کلیدواژه ها:

Margaret Atwood ، blue humanities ، new materialism ، Pantheism ، Porosity ، Surfacing ، trans-corporeality