The mapping of the self : a Jungian analysis of Atwood's Surfacing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Surfacing (1972) is one of Margaret Atwood's most successful works.Accordingly, the novel has been studied from diverse points of view, among which the feminist and ecocritical approaches are currently the most common.The present research aims to provide a different perspective of analysis regarding Surfacing: that of C. G. Jung's analytical psychology.Through the application of this theoretical framework, the main thesis that has been reached is that the story presented in Atwood's Surfacing may be interpreted as a process of individuation.The protagonist suffers from an internal division that needs to be fixed; the whole novel deals with her journey to wholeness.In order to demonstrate such claim, the plot of Surfacing has been analyzed and compared with the concept of individuation presented by C. G. Jung.This way, it has been possible to identify the coincidences and dissimilarities between the two.The findings resulting from this procedure include two main ideas.First, the protagonist's process of individuation is composed of a number of stages.The first one corresponds to the reason that motivates such a process.During the next stages, her journey is led by a series of archetypal symbols, some related to Canadian landscape and others corresponding to Jungian concepts.Both types of archetypes play complementary roles in the development of the protagonist's journey towards wholeness: the Jungian archetypes represent certain aspects of the protagonist's unconscious that she needs to assimilate in order to overcome her past traumatic experiences, and the Canadian wilderness provides a means of linking one stage with the nextthat is, in Surfacing nature acts as a tool of self-exploration, helping the main character to advance in her healing process.The Jungian approach proves to be adequate for the analysis of Surfacing due to the fact that it can provide explanations for the events that occur inside the protagonist's mind, which constitute, indeed, the main plot of the novel.Although previous studies have also made use of Jung's ideas, they are usually applied to one particular feature of this work; thus, there are no complete Jungian analyses of this novel by Atwood.In conclusion, this project sheds new light on Surfacing's critical history in the sense that it offers a psychoanalytical reading of the whole plot of this fictional work.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".