Gender Identity, Ecological Consciousness, and Ecofeminist Spirituality in Margaret Atwood''s Surfacing

• Main Authors: Hsin-Fan Chen, 陳信帆
• Other Authors: I-Min Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/95682614239363881411

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 93 === Through an ecofeminist reading, this thesis attempts to examine the themes of sexism, naturism, and hierarchical dualism underlying the Western conceptual framework in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972). Being a Canadian woman writer, Atwood presents not only the oppressions of women and nature but also their link to an oppressive dualistic thinking. To dismantle such conceptual system of dichotomies, Atwood portrays the narrator’s spiritual journey to offer a new identification among women-men and human-nature relations. To aim at this purpose, I will divide my thesis into five chapters. The first chapter begins with an overview of the author, text, and context of this novel. To define this novel as an ecofeminist literary work, I first delineate the main ecofeminist theories, and then explore the textual interaction to ecofeminism. Chapter Two will focus on the patriarchal language and the objectification of women and animals. From an ecofeminist perspective, I will interpret how patriarchal consciousness in the novel conceptually disparages the ontological meanings of women and animals. The third chapter mainly discusses how the narrator overturns the mind-body dichotomy and perceives American-Canadian and American-machine comparisons from a boundary-blurring concept. Chapter Four and Five concentrate on how the narrator’s spiritual transformation corresponds to ecological consciousness and ecofeminist spirituality. Crossing the binary oppositions and getting along with nature, the narrator is no longer a victim; instead, she accepts the unfortunate past through the healing process of encountering nature, realizes nature-human interrelatedness and the cycle of life force, and finally returns to the city with a new identity.