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Apr 23, 2007 · Her father refused to send her to university because she was "frivolous," so she taught school, saved the money for her own fees, and won a college scholarship, just to show she could. In 1935 ...
Her upbringing was unconventional. Her father, Carl Edmund Atwood, was an entomologist, and her mother, Margaret Dorothy Killam, was a former dietician and nutritionist.
Dec 31, 2006 · Mother of famed writer Margaret Atwood. Sister of children's writer Joyce Barkhouse. Margaret Killam was born in 1909 in Kings County, Nova Scotia. Her parents were Dr. Harold Edwin Killam and Ora Louise Webster. She was a dietitian and nutritionist. She taught school, saved the money for her own fees, and won a college scholarship.
- Female
- June 8, 1909
- Carl Edmund Atwood
- December 31, 2006
The Poems of Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood Early life and education. Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the second of three children[5] of Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist,[6] and Margaret Dorothy (née Killam), a former dietitian and nutritionist from Woodville, Nova Scotia.[7]
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Media Adaptations
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Compare & Contrast
Margaret Atwood's second novel, Surfacing, earned critical and popular acclaim in Canada and the United States after its publication in 1972. Surfacing is structured around the point of view of a young woman who travels with her boyfriend and two married friends to a remote island on a lake in Northern Quebec, where she spent much of her childhood,...
Margaret Atwood was born November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to Carl Edmund (an entomologist) and Margaret Dorothy (Killam) Atwood. As she was growing up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto, she spent a great deal of time in the woods where, like the narrator of Surfacing, she developed an enthusiasm for environmental issues. She beg...
Part I
Surfacingopens with the unnamed narrator exclaiming, "I can't believe I'm on this road again." She is traveling with married friends, David and Anna, and her lover, Joe, to a remote island on a lake in Northern Quebec, where she spent much of her childhood, to search for her missing father. As they travel, Joe and David shoot a film that they will call "Random Samples," a compilation of shots "of things they come across." The narrator admits that she doesn't actually want to see her father; s...
Part II
When Joe tells her, "we should get married," she notes, "I wanted to laugh…. He'd got the order wrong, he'd never asked whether I loved him, that was supposed to come first." She tells him, "I've been married before and it didn't work out. I had a baby too…. I don't want to go through that again." Disregarding what she said about the baby, Joe responds, "it would be different with us." When she will not agree, Joe turns angrily away from her. She thinks back to the day she and the father of h...
Part III
That night she and Joe make love out of doors, and she hopes he will impregnate her. She decides she will stay on the island alone and so escapes in a canoe when the others come to tell her it is time to leave. After the others leave, she goes back to the cabin and thinks she sees her mother feeding the birds. However, the vision quickly disappears. After she enters the cabin, she smashes everything she can and tears her clothes and linens, determined to live outside of civilization. The next...
Anna
Anna is David's wife and the narrator's "best woman friend" for the past two months. Although she appears "always cheerful," Anna Her battles with her husband have prompted her feelings of both love and hate toward him. She continually complains to the narrator about his efforts to humiliate her, but when he propositions her friend, she forms a temporary alliance with him. She also shows little regard for her friend when she has sex with Joe to get back at David. The narrator explains another...
David
David is Anna's husband. David teaches communications classes in an adult educationprogram with Joe. Although he tries to pass himself off as a "man of the people," the narrator eventually sees through him. He is a misogynist (one who dislikes women) who torments his wife by continually trying to humiliate her. He tells his wife about his various affairs with other women to prove to her that she cannot control him. When the narrator confronts David after he has just propositioned her, he clai...
Father
The narrator's father is dead at the beginning of the novel, but she strongly feels his influence throughout her time on the island. She admits both of her parents were innocents who had cut themselves off from reality. She notes, "they were from another age, prehistoric, when everyone got married and had a family." As a result, she never told them the truth about her affair with a married man or her abortion. She describes her father, "islanding his life, protecting both us and himself, in t...
Surfacingwas made into a film by a Canadian production company in 1981. It starred Joseph Bottoms and Kathleen Beller, was directed by Claude Jutra, produced by Beryl Fox, and adapted from Atwood's...
Appearances and Reality
One the novel's main themes involves the tension between what appears to be and what is. Closely related to that is the theme of deception. The truth about the narrator's past emerges slowly because she has avoided much of the pain she experienced during an abortion she had a few years ago. The pain has been so great that she has deceived herself and others into thinking that she had been married and that she gave birth to a child who she subsequently gave up to her husband. A hint of the tru...
Memory and Reminiscence
As the novel progresses, another theme, memory and reminiscence, emerges in Atwood's characterization of the narrator. After she returns to the island where she grew up, the narrator begins to al-low memories of her past to emerge. She acknowledges, though, that her memory is fuzzy: Her confusion about her past stems from her suppression of her abortion and the painful relationship she had with the man she refers to as her husband.
Investigate the history of relations between Canada and the United States. Why do you think the narrator has such a strong dislike for Americans?Henry C. Phelps, in his article on the novel in the Explicator, writes that the novel presents a "remarkably insightful portrait" of the sixties. Research the social changes that took place during...Write a poem or a short storyabout a time when you felt victimized. What tone do you think will best help you present this feeling? Consider carefully your tense and point of view.Compare and contrast the themes of Surfacingwith another novel by Atwood. What themes do you find that appear in both novels? Why do you think Atwood seems to explore similar issues in her novels?...Point of View
The novel is related through the narrator's point of view. Atwood never provides her protagonist with a name, which helps readers submerge themselves into her subjective world. Structuring the novel from the narrator's point of view also helps Atwood develop her themes, especially her focus on appearance, reality memory, reminiscence, and a search for self. Since readers understand the development of the plot from the narrator's limited point of view, we see firsthand her struggle to establis...
Symbols
Tom Marshall, in "Atwood Under and Above Water", in his Harsh and Lovely Land: The Major Canadian Poets and the Making of a Canadian Tradition, concludes, "In Surfacingthe repeated imagery of bottled, trapped and murdered animals builds powerfully to the key scene in which the father's corpse and the aborted foetus are encountered." The heron that has been killed and strung up by hunters becomes the most dominant symbol of death and of the narrator's past. As she walks the island, she keeps i...
A Woman's Place
Women's struggle for equal rights in the Western world gained slow momentum during the middle decades of the twentieth century. During World War II, women were encouraged to enter the workplace where they enjoyed a measure of independence and responsibility. After the war, they were expected (and required) to give up their jobs to the returning male troops. Hundreds of thousands of women were laid off and expected to resume their place in the home.
1970s: Canadians, as well as their American neighbors, struggle over the issue of abortion. Although abortion is legal, courts try to find ways to restrict it, as one Canadian judge did when he det...1971: This year begins a period of rapid decline in the birthrate in Canada, which in 1971 is 3.2 children per family. By the late 1980s, the average will have dropped to 1.7 children per family. T...1970: The resurgence of the French-Canadian separatist movement in the sixties reaches a crisis point this year when the Quebec Liberation Front conducts terrorist acts. The terrorism includes the...Biography. PDF Cite Share. Margaret Eleanor “Peggy” Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, on November 18, 1939, the second of three children of Margaret Dorothy (Killam) and Carl Edmund...
Mar 13, 2009 · Margaret Atwood Describes her Mother Margaret Killam was born in 1909 in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. Her father was a country doctor, and she grew up as a socially shy but physically brave tomboy. Unlike her academically brilliant sister, Kae, she was not a natural student.
