Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women's Spiritual Quest ...

Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women's Spiritual Quest and VisionAuthor(s): Carol P. ChristSource: Signs, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter, 1976), pp. 316-330Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173450 .

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Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women's Spiritual Quest

and Vision

Carol P. Christ

Margaret Atwood's Surfacing is about a woman's spiritual quest; the unnamed protagonist of her novel seeks redemption.1 The powerful religious vision of Surfacing merits the attention of feminist critics both in religion and in literature. To do justice to this novel and others like it, feminist critics must move into an area at the junction of religion and literature and develop an understanding of the spiritual quest novel. Because certain features of Atwood's protagonist's quest and vision de- rive from her experience as a twentieth-century woman, and because women's religious experience is little understood, I have chosen to focus my interpretation on those aspects of the novel which reflect a particularly female spiritual quest and vision.

To guard against misunderstanding, let me state that when I refer to women's, or female, experience, quest, or vision, I do not mean to refer to an "eternal feminine" principle, nor to exclude men. I simply refer to a viewpoint rooted in and reflective of women's experiences in a particular time and place.

The interpretation of Surfacing as a spiritual quest leads to distin-

Talks with Carolyn Forrey on Lake Champlain and Judith Plaskow stimulated my thinking about this essay. First presented at a symposium entitled "Theology and Women's Experience" at the 1974 meeting of the American Academy of Religion and later during Women's Week 1975, at Florida State University at Tallahassee, the essay received honor- able mention in the 1975 Florence Howe Feminist Criticism competition of the Women's Caucus of the Modern Language Association. I also discuss related issues in my essay, "Feminist Studies in Religion and Literature,"Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44, no. 2 (1976): 317-26, and forthcoming in Women and Religion II, ed. Rita Gross (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars' Press and the American Academy of Religion, 1976).

1. In the first chapter she describes the lake as "blue and cool as redemption" (see Surfacing [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972], p. 16). All quotes from Surfacing, cited with page numbers in parentheses in the text, will be from the hardback edition.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1976, vol. 2, no. 2] ? 1976 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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guishing between the spiritual and social quest, a distinction which should not, however, be taken to imply that the two may not be united in a single novel or life for that matter. The social quest is a search for self in which the protagonist begins in alienation and seeks integration into a human community where he or she can develop more fully. This may involve ajourney away from a stifling society and the attempt to discover or create a different sort of society. The journeys of Atwood's protagonist or Lessing's Kate Brown and Martha Quest, where increased self-knowledge is not translated into new social roles for women, seem to be about spiritual quest.2 Here the self's journey is in relation to cosmic power or powers. Often interior, it may also have communal dimensions.

The distinction between the spiritual and the social quest calls attention to an important dilemma of feminist criticism. If feminism is defined primarily in social terms, then Surfacing, like Lessing's Summer before the Dark or The Four-gated City and other novels which focus on the spititual quest, would have to be called protofeminist or transitionally feminist novels.3 Atwood's protagonist's journey leads her to the decision to conceive a child beneath the full moon, a decision that feminists might not immediately applaud, especially since Atwood does not show how her protagonist will integrate motherhood with work, relations with other adults, or politics. Marge Piercy, a political feminist, has questioned whether the protagonist of Surfacing has indeed transcended victimization and achieved power. "I don't believe one woman can single- handedly leave off being a victim; power exists and some have it,"4 she contends.

Piercy's criticism of Surfacing may arise from the wish to have the novels of female quest answer the questions of the female social quest. If, however, the spiritual quest is recognized as an independent genre, then one might be prepared to see it as crucially important to feminism. Though feminism seems to begin with a dissatisfaction with social and political roles for women, a spiritual dimension seems inevitably to

2. Sydney Janet Kaplan has understood the spiritual dimensions of Kate Brown's quest (see "Postscript: The Summer before the Dark," in The Writings of Doris Lessing: Papers Collected for the MLA Seminar 171, ed. Ellen Morgan [Newark, Del.: Interdisciplinary Women's Studies Program Office, 1974]).

3. Correspondence and conversation with Ellen Morgan about Doris Lessing's recent novels have helped me to clarify this point. Morgan used the terms "prefeminist" and "transitionally feminist" of Lessing's novels. See also my studies of spiritual quest in The Four-gated City, "Explorations with Doris Lessing in Quest of the Four-gated City," in Women and Religion, rev. ed., ed. Judith Plaskow and Joan Arnold Romero (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars' Press and the American Academy of Religion, 1974), pp. 31-61; and "Spiritual Quest and Women's Experience," Anima 1, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 4-14.

4. "Margaret Atwood: Beyond Victimhood," American Poetry Review 2, no. 6 (November-December 1973): 44. A similar narrow political definition of feminism seems to underlie Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's statement that Surfacing is not concerned with "liberationism," in "It Is Time That Separates Us: Margaret Atwood's Surfacing," Centennial Review 18, no. 4 (Fall 1974): 319.

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Matriarchal Religion

emerge. Feminism is a challenge, not only to traditional social and political structures, but also to the perception of reality which underlies and legitimates them. The great nineteenth-century activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton came to recognize the churches as one of the strongest oppo- nents of the kinds of fundamental change required to bring about women's full equality. Thus, at the end of her life she edited The Woman's Bible5 in order to attack directly the traditional ideas of divinity and divine order which undergirded much nineteenth-century opposition to women's rights. Recently feminism has sparked a good deal of religious ferment inside and outside traditional institutions and provoked questions about traditional symbols of ultimate reality. Mary Daly has called the feminist challenge to the perception of reality in the West the "on- tological impulse" of feminism as "intuition of being."6 Others would call it a search for pre- or postpatriarchal woman-centered images, myths, and symbols of reality.

Though the spiritual quest has a long history in the West, dating at least from Augustine's Confessions, the traditional categories of Western religion are not always adequate for the discussion of the religious dimension of the female quest. As might be expected, the heroines of this genre rarely discover the God of Jewish and Christian traditions at the end of their journeys. The contemporary "story" theories of religion developed by Stephen Crites, Michael Novak, and others7 have proved useful for defining women's religious experience. According to Crites, religion is a fundamental story, which creates a sense of self and world for those who live it. Crites speaks of the religious dimension of stories as orientation to the "great powers" which establish the reality of a world.8 The novels of female quest may be seen in this light as fundamental stories which may have the power to create new ways of being for women in new worlds.

Spiritual Quest and Vision in Surfacing

The spiritual quest of the protagonist of Surfacing begins with a return to the Canadian wilderness where she had lived as a child, in search of her missing father who is presumed dead. The search is really for her missing parents, her mother having died a few years earlier, and

5. Recently reprinted as The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible (New York: Arno Press, 1974), intro. by Barbara Welter.

6. See Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). 7. Stephen Crites, "The Narrative Quality of Experience," Journal of the American

Academy of Religion 39, no. 3 (September 1971): 291-311; Michael Novak, Ascent of the Mountain: Flight of the Dove (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); and James B. Wiggins, ed., Religion as Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

8. Crites, p. 295.

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for the power she feels it was their duty to have communicated to her. The external detective story of the protagonist's search for her father is paralleled by an internal search, half-obscured by her obsession with her father, to discover how she lost the ability to feel. The scene of the mystery is strewn with false clues from her fictitious memories, which she uses to shield herself from the pain of confronting her true past. While the protagonist's interest remains focused on her father's disap- pearance, the reader struggles as well to make sense of the inconsisten- cies in her story about her marriage, husband, and child. Why couldn't she return home after the wedding? Why did she hide the child from her parents? Why is she obsessed with the bizarre image of her brother floating just below the surface of the water, a near-drowning which occurred before she was born? The unraveling of her father's mystery brings her to the powers which enlighten her as they had possibly enlight- ened him, but the unraveling of her own mystery is the key to the redemption she seeks. The two mysteries intersect when she recognizes "it was no longer his death but my own that concerned me" (p. 123).

Even at the beginning of the journey the protagonist recognizes that she has experienced a death. First, like her three friends, she is com- pletely cut off from her past. "Any one of us could have had amnesia for years and the others wouldn't notice" (p. 33). Second, she has lost the ability to experience normal feelings. She recalls that her current man- friend Joe was impressed by her coolness the first time they made love, but she found her behavior unremarkable because she did not feel anything. She is tortured by Joe's demand that she say she loves him, because she does not believe the word has any meaning.

The protagonist's alienation from her feelings is reflected in her dispassionate voice: everything is seen; nothing is felt. The town, the cabin, friends, even her memories are accurately recorded-or so it seems. Occasionally she slips, as when she says, "I keep my outside hand on the door so I can get out quickly if I have to" (p. 8), causing the reader to ask whether she is similarly defensive about her life, perhaps censor- ing her story. The reader is also alerted by her report of how she copes with pain: "I bite down hard into the cone and I can't feel anything for a minute but the knife-hard pain up the side of my face. Anesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts invent a different pain" (p. 13). How much unacknowledged anesthesia, the reader wonders, does the protagonist use? Might her whole story be a shield from a pain she wishes to deny?

The protagonist's inability to feel is paralleled by an inability to act. Her selective vision holds fast to the illusion that she is helpless and "they" do things to her. Hurt and angry that her parents died before endowing her with their power, she accuses them of having hurt her. "They have no right to get old," she complains, but she remains blind to the pain her abrupt departure doubtless caused them. Always conscious of how she might be hurt, she remains oblivious to her power to hurt

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others. Moreover, as the reader later discovers, she studiously avoids confronting the center of her pain, the place where she lost the ability to feel and to act-her betrayal by the first man she loved.

Unable to come to terms with his violation of her self and her body, she focuses her attention on the violation of the Canadian wilderness by the men she calls "Americans."9 The conflict between technology and nature, Americans in powerboats and Canadians in canoes, refracts the protagonist's own pain: she experiences herself as the wilderness inno- cent and virgin, violated by nameless and destructive men. Her illusion that the wilderness has no power to recover from American violation prevents her from realizing her own power to overcome her sense of violation. Though the wilderness initially deflects her vision, in the end it will provide the key, the revelation, which releases her power.

Though the protagonist continually imagines herself as powerless, she is extraordinarily concerned with power. Anything out of the ordinary-Madame with one hand, the purple bean at the top of a high pole, the cool blue lake, a white mushroom, the toes of saints-all are seen as harboring magical power. Here is a religious orientation modern Westerners have associated with children or so-called primitives, in which religion and magic have not yet been separated. Eventually the protagonist's sense of the magic-religious powers resident in things will become a key to revelations which enable her to contact the source of her power.

At first, however, the protagonist seeks her lost power in the wrong places. Realizing that she lost the inability to feel somewhere in the past, she imagines that a simple return to childhood will provide the answer. Searching through old scrapbooks kept by her mother, she discovers that she looked normal in all the pictures-no clues there. There is a clue in the drawings from her childhood-hers of eggs and bunnies, everything peaceful, her brother's of airplanes and bombs, but she cannot quite fathom it. Another clue surfaces from the garden. She remembers that once she thought a certain purple bean on a high pole was a source of power. She says she is glad the bean did not give it to her because "if I'd turned out like the others with power I would have been evil" (p. 41). Her association of power with evil and her dissociation of herself from both reflect a typical female delusion of innocence, which hides her complicity in evil and feeds her false belief that she can do nothing but witness her victimization. In order to regain her power the protagonist must realize that she does not live in a world where only others have power or do evil. An unexpected thing, a killed heron strung up on a tree, monument to some "American" victory, mediates this revelation to the protagonist.

9. The protagonist calls the people who destroy the Canadian wilderness "Ameri- cans"; some of them turn out to be Canadians.

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On the return trip the heron mediates the knowledge the protagonist requires to escape her passive sense of victimization, the delusion of her childhood innocence. For her the heron is a sacred object, mediator, like Christ to the Christian. Seeing it again, she realizes that her passivity is not innocence. She does not live in a world of eggs and bunnies; she did not escape the evil others are immersed in. "I felt a sickening complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands, as though I had been there and watched without saying No or doing anything to stop it" (p. 150). Memories of her active participation in acts of cruelty equally senseless surface in her as she remembers how she and her brother used to throw the "bad kind" of leeches into the fire. "To become a little child again, a barbarian, a vandal: it was in us too, it was innate. A thing closed in my head, hand, synapse, cutting off my escape" (p. 152). Though she feels trapped, recognition of her guilt and responsibility is a step toward claiming her power to refuse to be a victim.

With the path to redemption through childhood closed, the protagonist decides the clue to her redemption lies in deciphering her father's final obsession, a series of unintelligible drawings and marks on maps. At first she fears he had gone mad, but then she discovers he was copying Indian paintings and marking their locations on maps. She goes in search of the paintings to verify his sanity and her own. Deciding that one painting is submerged underwater, she dives deep into the lake to look for it. Instead of a painting she discovers an image from her past: "It was there but it wasn't a painting, it wasn't on the rock. It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead" (p. 162). Image of her dead father,10 it forces her to acknowledge both his sanity and his death. With the mystery of her father's death solved, the image becomes a clue to her own mystery, her own death. The open eyes recall the bizarre image of her brother's drowning, but with a shock she recognizes, "it wasn't ever my brother I'd been remembering" (p. 163). The thing approaching becomes the image of her aborted fetus "drowned in air" (p. 163). This revelation unlocks the mystery of the confusing stories of husband, child, marriage. The childbirth was an abortion; the wedding day, the day of the abortion; the husband, the lover who told her to have the abortion.

The protagonist sees the fetus as a living thing, not yet a child, but an animal deserving protection like the heron. "He said it wasn't a person, only an animal; I should have seen that it was no different, it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead of granting it sanctuary I let

10. In a letter to Dan Noel dated December 14, 1974, Atwood states that "what is actually seen during the diving scene is the father's corpse." I am not convinced that this is clear from the text.

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them catch it" (p. 165). Her abortion is no more or less a crime than the murder of the heron, but her guilt is more direct, because the creature was in her body. As the knowledge of her complicity in a killing comes to her, she realizes why she hid her past in false memories. "It was all real enough, it was reality enough forever, I couldn't accept it, that mutila- tion, ruin I'd made, I needed a different version" (p. 164). She understands, too, that the anesthesia of false memory is no escape, but rather the beginning of a fatal disease.

The protagonist sees this new self-knowledge for what it is-a revelation from great powers. "These gods, here on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten, were the only ones who had ever given me anything I needed.... The Indians did not own salvation but they had once known where it lived" (pp. 165-66). In the presence of great powers, she feels the need to worship, to give a thank offering, so she places her sweatshirt on a ledge for the gods whose names she does not know but whose power she has felt.

She correctly understands that her redemption comes from facing the truth and accepting the pain, guilt, and responsibility it entails. The feminist critic also notes that the protagonist is divorcing herself from the interpretations men use to justify their crimes. She no longer believes killing can be justified as "sport." She rejects her brother's distinction between "good" leeches which deserve to live and "bad" leeches which deserve to die. And she rejects her lover's distinction between "good" (legitimate) fetuses which grow up to have birthday parties, and "bad" (illegitimate) fetuses which must be killed. The feminist critic notes that the protagonist is allowing her own feeling, not male "moral- ity," to define reality for her.

The revelations which come to the protagonist through the heron and the underwater image of death provide her with the knowledge that unlocks her past, but she finds the revelation incomplete. "His were the gods of the head, antlers rooted in the brain" (p. 174). She believes a gift from her mother must complement her father's gift. "Not only how to see but how to act" (p. 174).11 Searching again for something out of the ordinary to provide guidance, she senses power in one of the scrapbooks. Heavy and warm, it opens to her mother's gift: a picture she had drawn as a child of "a woman with a round moon stomach: baby sitting up inside her gazing out" (pp. 180-81). That night she conceives a child by Joe on damp leaves with the moon on her left. In a heightened state of awareness she feels "my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me,

11. The feminist critic notes the traditional stereotyping of men as knowers, women as practical doers. She sees this as a realistic assessment of the gifts of the protagonist's parents (and many parents of their generation). She also notes that the protagonist incor-

porates the gifts and values of both parents, thereby transcending the limitations of the stereotypes.

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rising from the lake where it has been prisoned for so long... it buds, it sends out fronds" (p. 187). As she conceives, the protagonist resembles the virgin Mother goddesses of old: at one with her sexual power, she is complete in herself; the male is incidental.12

The protagonist's extraordinary insight and sense of her power alienate her from her friends. She realizes that, if she wishes to pursue the revelations and experience the powers more deeply, she must choose the isolation of the visionary quest. After the others have left, the protagonist has time and space to plumb more deeply the knowledge and experience which has been given her. Lying alone at the bottom of her canoe she has a vision of the great powers of the universe, the gods who have guided her journey: "Through the trees the sun glances; the swamp around me smoulders, energy of decay turning to growth, green fire. I remember the heron; by now it will be insects, frogs, fish, other herons" (p. 194). The great powers of the universe transform the swamp; they transform the heron from death to life. The life power rises from death. This is the meaning of the incredible words she had spoken earlier, "nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive" (p. 182).

The protagonist recognizes her body as both revelation and incarnation of the great powers of life and death. "My body also changes, the creature in me, plant-animal, sends out filaments in me; I ferry it secure between death and life, I multiply" (p. 194). The female experience of the transformation of parts of her body into plant, animal, and infant is perhaps the most complete human incarnation of the great powers. The protagonist's vision of the transformative energy of life into death and death into life is reflected in her characteristic perception of the fluidity of the boundaries between objects, plants, animals, humans. Joe has "fur" like a bear, the canoer is "amphibian," the fetus is "plant-animal" sending out "filaments."

After her vision, the protagonist enters the final phase of her visionary journey: transformation itself. She realizes that she can approach her parents, and perhaps the gods themselves, if she follows the path she is beginning to sense. "The gods, their likenesses; to see them in their true shape is fatal. While you are human; but after the transformation they can be reached" (p. 181). Her transformation is frightening. Though she knows it is "beyond any rational points of view" (p. 196), it is neither mad nor illogical. Whereas before she had abandoned false memories, now she will give up all identity as a human. Whereas before she had experienced the fetus transforming in her body, now she will herself change into a different state.

She ritually breaks her connections to the human world, burning or 12. Penelope Washbourn, "Differentiation and Difference: The Virgin Mother God-

dess as Myth-Model for Women's Liberation," in Plaskow and Romero, eds. (n. 3 above), pp. 127-37.

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purifying clothing, books, one of everything in the cabin. She is purified and transformed by immersion in the lake. Like the fetus in her womb, she changes in water. "The earth rotates, holding my body down as it holds the moon; the sun pounds in the sky, red flames pulsing from it, searing away the wrong form that encases me" (p. 206). The powers guide her away from the garden, the house, into the woods. She becomes wild. She is animal: "I hollow a lair near the woodpile, dry leaves underneath dead branches leaned over" (p. 207). Having undergone transformation, she experiences mystical identification with all forms of life: "leopard frog with green spots and gold-rimmed eyes, ancestor. It includes me, it shines, nothing moves but its throat breathing" (p. 208). All boundaries between herself and other forms of life are abolished. She becomes the transformative energy: "I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning ... I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow" (p. 210).

Later she sees a vision of her mother feeding the birds; then her mother disappears, birds remain: she is translated. The next day she sees what her father has become, "it gazes at me with its yellow eyes, wolf's eyes, depthless but lambent as the eyes of animals seen at night in car headlights" (p. 216). Complete in itself, the vision neither approves nor disapproves of her. The protagonist is terrified as she realizes that in the state of transformation individual human identity has no meaning.

Having given her a vision of their great power, the gods retreat into "the earth, the air, the water, wherever they were when I summoned them" (p. 218). Translated back to human form the protagonist returns to the cabin and opens a can of beans, symbolizing her return to modern human life. Though she is no longer in direct contact with the powers, she has gained wisdom and power through her encounter with them. She marks her new state with a declaration. "This above all, to refuse to be a victim ... give up the old belief that I am powerless" (p. 222).

It is true, as Piercy has noted, that Atwood has not depicted what her protagonist will do with her newly acquired power. But I disagree with Piercy's skepticism that the protagonist has achieved it at all. To Piercy's objection that "power exists and some have it," Atwood's protagonist would probably reply, "Power exists in many more forms than are usually recognized. I have gained it by experiencing my grounding in the great transformative powers of the universe. I don't know yet how I will translate my power into social and political forms. But you cannot deny that I have gained power." Surely a novel depicting the relation between cosmic or spiritual power and social or political power is profoundly needed. But that should not cause us to overlook the unique contributions of the novel of spiritual quest which, in renam- ing the locations of power and access to them, provides women with op- tions for self-definition and strength unknown in a male-defined world.

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Aspects of Female Quest and Vision in Surfacing

Surfacing exemplifies two structural elements of female quest which can be isolated for comparison with the quests of other heroines, in literature and in life. Awakening13 from a male-defined world, to the greater terror and risk, and also the great potential healing and joy, of a world defined by the heroine's own feeling and judgment, is one of the stages or moments of the female quest which may have important spiritual implications. Often this requires a heroine to return to the past to redefine her relation to it-exchanging his story for her story, as feminists sometimes put it. This awakening is especially poignant for women who, like Atwood's protagonist, have suppressed their own feelings in order to acquiesce to male value systems. Rejection of a male-defined world may also open a woman to a full experience of the great powers, as happens to the heroine of Surfacing. This awakening could be called a "conversion" to a new religious world view, in conven- tional religious terminology. However, "awakening" or "surfacing" seem to be better metaphors for describing this spiritual experience, which is more the emergence of what is known but suppressed than the radical turning around or adopting of an alien world view implied by the con- ventional term. A second stage of the female quest which often has profound spiritual implications is moving from victimhood to power. This movement is especially important for woman who have previously been identified as powerless. Correlative to awakening or surfacing, this movement may also open the protagonist to the experience of great cosmic powers which ground her newly felt sense of her own power.

The female nature of the religious experience represented in Sur- facing is also reflected in both the form and the content of the spiritual vision. The transformative energy of life to death and death to life which is the great power in Surfacing is, of course, not new to the historian of religions. Atwood seems to believe it was the great power worshiped by the Canadian Indians of the area where she set the novel. Many tribal and ancient peoples,14 both men and women, have worshiped similar powers. However, when such powers emerge convincingly in the experience of a modern woman, it may still be asked whether in the modern urbanized West, the experience of them may reflect a particularly female standpoint.

There are intriguing reasons for entertaining the hypothesis that a vision like that of Atwood's protagonist, both in form and content, is

13. See Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964). 14. See Ruth M. Underhill, Red Man's Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1972), or Rita Gross, "Exclusion and Participation in Aboriginal Australian Religion" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1974); and Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), chap. 3, esp. pp. 138-47.

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more likely to emerge in women's experience than in men's in the modern urbanized West. In tribal and other nonurban cultures, such as those of the Indians, the close relation of the community to nature and natural processes is commonly celebrated in myths and symbols in which women and men participate. However, as societies become urbanized, the culture-creating males celebrate their relative freedom from the body and nature in myth, symbol, philosophy, and theology.15 The traditional values derived from the body and nature are identified primarily with women, both because women's close relation to the body and nature is evident in their traditional roles of childbearing and nurture of the young,16 and because the culture-creating males identify the traditional values their culture has transcended with the other, woman.17 This development produces the paradox that the surfacing of female values in alienated urban cultures may also be a return to some of the values of traditional tribal or less urbanized ones.

The experience of nature as great power, the content of Atwood's protagonist's religious vision, seems to reflect a female standpoint in the modern West, because the biological experiences of women in menstrua- tion, pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing often enable women to retain a sense of closeness to nature, which men tend to lose in urbanized cultures. Moreover, the experience of nature as transformative power of life to death and death to life may reflect a particularly female ap- prehension of nature in the modern West. Whereas Western male heroes commonly see nature as a dragon of finitude and death which must be conquered, or as mere matter to be used for their projects, Atwood's protagonist, in contrast, identifies with nature's life and death powers. Women's experience of life and death processes in their bodies may suggest this dynamic view of nature to them and encourage them to identify with nature in realistic acceptance of its processes.

The form in which Atwood's protagonist experiences the transformative powers of nature may be called a transpersonal experience of mystical identification'8 because she experiences unity with a nonpersonal energy, not with a personal god or power. That women's characteristic religious experience might take the form of nonpersonal identification could be predicted from certain psychological theories. According to Erich Neumann, for example, the primary (though cer-

15. This explanatory hypothesis has been proposed by Rosemary Radford Ruether in many of her articles on Western history (see, most recently, New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation [New York: Seabury Press, 1976], esp. chap. 1).

16. Sherry Ortner has developed this hypothesis to explain the identification of woman and nature in almost all cultures, including tribal cultures, in "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 66-87.

17. Ruether. 18. I define mysticism as an experience of identification or union with the great

power or powers of the universe.

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tainly not for me the only) form of knowing for females (I would add, in modern Western culture) is by participation and identification, while for males it is by differentiation.19 Females do not radically differentiate self and other or develop as strong a sense of individual personal identity as males do in response to learning their gender difference from their mothers, Neumann states. Translating this model into religious terms, we would expect participation and union of a nonpersonal core of the self with the whole to be the most typical, though again not the only, form of religious insight in females. Confrontation or encounter with a personal other characteristic of biblical religion would be the expected primary form of religious knowledge for males. Atwood's protagonist's experience fits this model and suggests its possible usefulness for the study of women's religious experience.

Finally, to put form and content together, if the most characteristic form of women's religious experiences is mystical identification and if nature is the most characteristic content, then we might expect nature mysticism to be especially prevalent in women's religious experiences. Atwood's protagonist's experience and Annis Pratt's recent study of quest novels20 provide confirmation of this hypothesis. Pratt has found that "naturistic epiphanies" commonly give heroines a sense of authentic selfhood, but she has not found the same to be true for heroes.

Religious and Ethical Implications of Female Quest and Vision

Tribal and ancient peoples who worshiped natural powers such as those represented in Surfacing knew that the close connection of life and death in the hunting and agricultural cycles and in the birth processes were a reflection of the interpenetration of life and death in all natural processes.21 In Christianity the transformative mysteries of birth and the earth were spiritualized. While tribal and ancient peoples knew the hunted or domesticated animal and the wild plant or crop as sacred sacrifices to human life, Christianity limited the understanding of sacrificial death to Christ's death for the sins of humankind. Atwood's protagonist reverses this spiritualization when she intuits, "the animals die that we may live. ... we are the eaters of death, dead Christ flesh resurrecting in us" (p. 160). "Canned spam, canned Jesus, but we refuse to worship" (p. 110). The protagonist is not speaking blasphemy but rather expressing (not without irony) her sense that the ultimate mystery

19. Erich Neumann, "The Psychological Stages of Feminine Development," Spring (1959), pp. 63-97.

20. Annis Pratt, "Women and Nature in Modern Fiction," Contemporary Literature 13, no. 4 (1972): 476-90.

21. See Theodor Gaster, ed. The New Golden Bough (New York: New American Li- brary, 1959), esp. pp. 471 ff.

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of life and death is reflected in the process of eating. By showing how the ancient sense of the mysteries of life and death emerges in the consciousness of a thoroughly modern woman, Atwood has done more than nostalgically recall an ancient world view. She has suggested a direction for the transformation of modern religious consciousness, which might lead to a despiritualization of Western religious traditions, or to the development of new female-centered religious forms.

The reemergence of the great transformative powers of life and death in Western religious consciousness could have important ethical implications. A recognition of the inevitability of death in the life process would be an important reminder of the limitations of technological con- trol. Moreover, it would provide a firm basis for the ecological ethic so needed in a world being harmed by the technological machine. The qualitative distinction between humans and nature central to technological thinking must be questioned in an adequate ecological ethic. Surfac- ing does this without falling into a sentimental naturism. The protagonist recognizes that some things must die so that others may live. The heron, symbol of graceful integration with the environment, was seen in the process of killing a fish. Atwood's novel's ethical vision does not prohibit killing, but it restores a sense of worship, which recognizes that one sacrifices other beings to one's needs, but that one ought to make only those sacrifices that are truly necessary. A Papago Indian woman reflected this sense beautifully when she told the clay, "'I take only what I need. It is to cook for my children.' If possible, she left a small gift."22

The issue of abortion the novel raises provides a difficult test of its ethical vision. Women's right to abortion has been a major issue in the feminist movement. In the novel, abortion is viewed as killing, and the protagonist feels guilt about having one. Does this mean the novel's ethical vision condemns abortion?23 The novel compares the fetus in the womb to an animal in a burrow, suggesting that the killing of a fetus is a crime to be compared with the killing of an animal. The novel condemns all unnecessary killing. The protagonist's abortion was arranged to suit her lover's interests, and he justified it by saying it was "only an animal." The protagonist's feeling about the pregnancy is never mentioned. From what is specifically said in the novel, we can only say that it condemns an abortion not willed by the mother and in which the fact that

22. Underhill, p. 116. The altogether serious suggestion of Christopher Stone that trees, rivers, and forests be given the rights of "persons" under the law is a logical exten- sion of the novel's ethical vision. As Stone notes, the right to life for persons is not absolute, but limited by societal needs. Similarly, the conferring of rights on the environment would not protect it from all killing, but would insure that its rights be taken into account in the community of interest which the law attempts to adjudicate (New York Times [August 29, 1974]).

23. In the letter to Dan Noel (n. 10 above), Atwood stated that she would be "most upset if my book were to be construed as an antiabortion tract."

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the killing of an animal occurs is denied. The novel may be construed to allow for abortion when the woman feels it is necessary to protect her sense of her life. She would not take the abortion lightly, however, or tell herself that it is "nothing." Rather she would recognize, as she does in eating, that some killings are necessary for other life, and the proper response to the sacrifice of one life for another is worship and gratitude. The novel's ethical vision, then, does not necessarily conflict with the feminist position on a woman's right to choose abortion.

Female Vision and Feminism

The argument of this essay raises a significant question for feminist theory and vision. Is power to be achieved through the acceptance or rejection of female biological roles? Is the traditional identification of women and nature a legacy of oppression or a potential source of power and vision? The possible use of the novel as a right to life tract signals a danger to women in affirming body and nature. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss Atwood's vision as antifeminist. The conflict women experience about the body and nature does not reflect a feminist/traditionalist split, but a split within feminism itself.

One of the early and continuing splits in the feminist movement has been over the valuing of female sexual power. On the one side, men- struation, pregnancy, and childbearing are viewed as the revenge of nature on women, the first victims. In an early and controversial work of the feminist movement Shulamith Firestone24 applauded the day when test-tube pregnancies would free women from their servitude to the body and nature. Some west coast feminists practice menstrual extrac- tion to rid themselves of the monthly reminder of bodily servitude. The denial of female biology was anticipated in Simone de Beauvoir's valua- tion of male transcendence over female (biological) immanence.25 On the other side, Elizabeth Gould Davis and others call for a return to matriarchal vision in which mothers and the earth are supremely valued.26 Our Bodies, Ourselves27 has stressed the sense of vision and power some women gain through the experience of pregnancy. At the Woman Spirit tribal gathering in Oregon, women celebrated the power of their bodies and the earth by ritually marking each other with drops of menstrual blood,28 suggesting the tremendous power of female- centered rituals.

24. The Dialectics of Sex (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1970). 25. The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). 26. The First Sex (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973). 27. The Boston Women's Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 1973). 28. Hallie Montain Wing, "A Ritual Celebration," Woman Spirit 2, no. 5 (1975): 25-28.

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What is the feminist as person and as critic to make of this split? Certainly, biological arguments have been a powerful tool to oppress women. But, as one critic has written, to reject entirely the identification of women with the body and nature might be "to neglect that part of ourselves we have been left to cultivate and to buy into that very polar- ization [of culture and nature] of which we have been the primary victims."29 More important, it may lead to the kind of psychic suicide the first part of Surfacing so well portrays.

It seems to me far wiser for women as persons and as critics to name the power which resides in our bodies and our potential closeness to nature positively, and to use this new naming to transform the pervasive cultural and religious devaluation of nature and the body. Atwood's novel suggests that the opposition of spirit and body, nature and person, which is endemic in Western culture is neither necessary nor salutary. Her novel suggests that spiritual insight surfaces through attention to the body, and that the achievement of authentic selfhood and power depends on understanding one's grounding in nature and natural ener- gies.

Department of Religion Columbia University

29. Rosemary Ruether, "Motherearth and the Megamachine," Liberation Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1972), p. 124.

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