THE VOICE OF SUBALTERN IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S SURFACING: AN ANTICOLONIALIST APPROACH TO THE NOVEL
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My paper analyzes Margaret Atwood's Surfacing from the perspective of anti-colonialism, employing the concepts of voice and from Spivak's work. The novel was published in 1972 and it occupies a place of prominence in Atwood's substantial body of literature. The novel is mostly concerned with women's equality, the violence committed against women and the natural destruction in Canada. Ecofeminism builds a kind of bridge between these two theoretical groundings and tries link feminism and ecology in the sense that the oppression of women and the oppression of the environment are two issues, which are closely connected. Oppression of women in a patriarchal society and exploitation of nature by means of new technologies are the major themes of her novel, which I approach as colonial oppression of female and nature. Actually, in this novel all kinds of ideological oppression are bitterly criticizes in the sense that not only the women but also the nature is decreased in to an object, which can be manipulated by the oppressive ideological system. Besides this, ecological awareness is a constant issue and the importance of nature in the protagonist's psychological development expresses this awareness. Atwood also tries to show people that Canada has been suffering from the impact of the society in which modern technology has an important role. In Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak critiques the essentialist underpinnings of Subaltern Studies, where the marginalized subaltern subject is always defined via his or her difference from the elites (Lane 247). In the novel, wilderness, protagonist and her friend Anna are subaltern and subordinated. The subordinated can never express their feelings, emotions and thoughts. The only way to be heard is to speak the language of subordinator. In Surfacing the female protagonist has no name and this represents that she has no identity and she doesn't belong to any culture. The unnamed protagonist goes to a remote island to search for her missing father where she grew up. The island takes place in the wilderness of Canada and it is clear that the unnamed protagonist comes back to her birthplace after many years. During the investigation she is accompanied by her boyfriend Joe and another couple Anna and David. But when they can't find her father, they decide to stay on the island for a week.While Atwood portrays the struggle of female characters in search of a fixed self-identity, which rises against the male domination, in Surfacing the female subject is also depicted as rising against all kinds of oppression including colonial exploitation, capitalist exploitation and yet, most importantly ecological repression. In this paper, basing on the readings on Surfacing, I will focus on aspects in which Atwood metaphorically criticizes the oppression of both the female-self and the nature-self. Therefore, the novel can be analyzed from ecofeminist point of view. According to Greta Gaard, Ecofeminism's basic premise is that the ideology, which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality and physical abilities, is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature. Ecofeminist theorists consider the interconnections between sexism, the domination of nature, racism, speciesism and other social inequalities (1).In the novel, from the ecofeminist point of view the connection between women and nature can easily be seen. Atwood makes it clear that the unnamed protagonist sets up an inner journey through the nature and during this journey she challenges the idea of women's and nature's inferiority against men and culture. The heroine undergoes a deep process of selfanalysis throughout her investigation. The struggle to find her father becomes an excuse for the inner journey which leads her to natural world and helps her to find herself at the end. When protagonist travels into nature, she realizes that there is a gap between her and nature and nature is victimized by Americans. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".