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_i_Surfacing__i_andtheRebirthJourney.html[(essay date 1981) In the following essay, Pratt examines the use of archetype in Surfacing from the perspective of feminist criticism. She argues that the protagonist’s “rebirth journey” is significant because, through it, she “transforms herself from victim to hero, turning patriarchal space inside out so that it can no longer limit her being.”]
Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing has been generally accepted as an archetypal narrative dealing with a quest for rebirth and transformation. Thus, in a New York Times Book Review column, Francine du Plessix Gray suggested that Atwood has taken a “primeval, matriarchal direction” in her “quest for religious symbols,” and that the “stages of the heroine’s quest are starkly archetypal: Heroine of the thousand faces, she descends, like Persephone, into the world of the dead; she tests, like Perseus, the extreme limits of human endurance; she finds her ultimate vision in the self-enforced solitude.”1 Theologian Carol Christ points out that the hero’s spiritual discoveries by no means alienate her from her own or nature’s body: Atwood, she writes, creates a quest in which “spiritual insight surfaces through attention to the body,” leading to an “achievement of authentic selfhood and power which depends on understanding one’s grounding in nature and natural energies.” Contrasting the spiritual quest, defined as the “self’s journey … in relation to cosmic power or powers,” to the social quest for integration into a collective, Christ nonetheless recognizes that the interiority of such quests as that which structures Surfacing does not necessarily preclude “acommunal dimensions.”2
The journey into the solitary world of the psyche is a process which feminist theoreticians are beginning to recognize as transformational in both the individual and the collective sense. Archetypal narratives, as well as theological formulations and the rituals by which women enact them, are being examined as repositories of power; sources of energy which can enable women to break through social norms dictating gender rigidity into a “new cosmosis,” as Mary Daly puts it, beyond patriarchal space. My intent as a feminist archetypal critic has been threefold: first, to describe the archetypal patterns informing women’s literature; second, to study the way in which such patterns effect literary structures; and third, to speculate about the process by which such texts act upon their audience. In this essay I will be concerned with defining the archetype of the rebirth journey as it applies to the feminine experience in a set of analogous texts. My approach to Surfacing will thus be archetypal and contextual, a process which Black English more aptly defines as “diggin’ out the meaning by shakin’ out the context.” Having placed Surfacing in the context of archetypal and fictional analogues, finally, I will look into the way that such an archetypally informed literary text might effect social change.
The Rebirth Journey
Feminist archetypalists find it helpful to engage in a process which French feminists call volant, punning on the dual connotations of voler as meaning both to steal and to fly away. Descriptions of the process of transformation or “individuation” provided by Jung and his followers are highly informative in elucidating literature. It is important to note, in this context, that Jung deplored the term “Jungian” and disliked his theories to be too rigidly applied, urging each scholar to come to terms with his or her own interpretation of unconscious materials.3 Insofar as it applies to the individual life span (in contrast to the rebirth process of reincarnation or metempsychosis) Jung defines Wiedergeburt as involving either renovation or transformation of an individual so that all of his or her faculties are brought into conscious play. This may involve a “renewal without any change of being, inasmuch as the personality which is renewed is not changed in its essential nature, but only its functions, or parts of the personality, are subjected to healing, strengthening, or improvement.” It may, moreover, take the form of transformation of personality in that the individual undergoes an “essential transformation” or “total rebirth” by taking on the characteristics of a superhuman figure to whom he or she is “initiated in mystery, rite, or dream.”4
The process by which such a crystallization of the personality comes about is one by which the self, which Jung differentiates from the ego, leaves the narrow bounds of its persona or social mask and plunges into the unconscious. The ego, as Jung defines it, “extends only as far as the conscious mind,” whereas the self comprises the “whole of the personality, which includes the unconscious as well as the conscious component. The Ego is thus related to the self as part of the whole.”5 The inner or rebirth journey is at one and the same time personal and communal, in that the world of the unconscious is one shared with the entire human race. The problem which Jung acknowledged, however, is that there is less likely to be a correlation between the world of the unconscious and that of the conscious mind in the feminine as in the masculine experience, since a man can easily discern “definite recognizable patterns” in his inner world bearing analogues to mytho-religious structures provided by his society or mesocosm. A woman’s unconscious, however, is less likely to reflect the received myths of society as known, having its analogues in the pre- or acivilizational worlds of a lost culture. I am suggesting that the various stages of the masculine rebirth journey are likely to be symbolic vehicles for learned experience, whereas the stages of woman’s rebirth quests conform to codes and hieroglyphs alien to western culture. As a result, the male quester will have far less difficulty as a transformed personality in reintegrating into his culture than the woman hero, whose adventures increase her chances for death, madness, self-sacrifice, and accusations of “deviance” at the level of culture.
After reading widely in the field of British and American women’s fiction, I found it possible to develop a description of the woman hero’s quest as to some degree different from that of the male. Woman’s ego or persona can be understood as having its day to day life in the world of cultural experience, by definition a world of gender and social norms. This same layer of being, in my formulation, finds its reflection in the layer of unconscious materials, which for convenience I term the subconscious, immediately “below” that of conscious experience. It is from these two “upper” realms of culture and of subconscious reflections of personal and familial roles that the normative values of much of women’s fiction derive, and these realms play an important role in determining the accommodationist denouements of many novels of manners, family life, and even of social protest. When a woman author wants her character to enact possibilities unsuitable to these realms, she cannot choose material from them but must delve into unconscious materials necessarily alien to her mesocosm or social matrix. In taking her hero down into the unconscious and in returning her from it, however, the author almost never lets her bypass these “upper” worlds but depicts her absorbing them and transcending them in a process of working through inauthentic role behaviours. The world of the unconscious in such fiction is quite likely, moreover, to be a timeless one, precisely because it has no correlation to historical time; and, correspondingly, spaceless or obscure in landscape, patriarchal space being alien to it. In such a world the identity of the self seems in flux, undergoing shifts and leaps in harmony with the interior vision and with the universe as a whole but “deviant” in the sense of being strange to the normative perspective. Because the images, symbols, and archetypal narratives of such a world are puzzling, bizarre, even “crazy,” they are extremely difficult to absorb into the day to day life of consciousness, and hence comes the tearing apart of narrative structure, tacked-on denouements, and sense of irresolution characterizing so much of women’s fiction.
The creation of any schema carries with it the danger of being too absolute, of becoming a model so rigid that texts have to be distorted to fit its dictates. In setting forth the following series of stages in fictional rebirth journeys I intend to indicate only the broadest outlines and to call attention to the fact that not every novel proceeds in this particular sequence of phases. There is, nonetheless, significant enough recurrence of most of the phases in such fiction to make the outline helpful in elucidating the texts.
Phase I: Splitting Off from the World of the Ego
This first aspect of the interior journey takes the form of an acute consciousness of dissatisfaction with the roles and norms typically assumed by the persona and of a consequent turning away from society. Marge Piercy, in Small Changes, shows her hero Beth setting out on a social quest after a particularly awful evening with her husband; Nin’s Lillian in Seduction of the Minotaur, like Lessing’s Martha in The Four-Gated City, crosses an ocean to a new world of endeavour; in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Mrs. Ramsay’s plunge into interior space is precipitated after a trying day with her husband, and Atwood’s hero in Surfacing is introduced to the reader driving away from the city where she has had a traumatic experience.
Phase II: The Green World Guide or Token Helps the Hero Cross the Threshold
As in the epiphanic visions of childhood and adolescence, naturistic moments which help fictional heroes aspire to a different realm of being from the ordinary, the rebirth journey hero is helped to cross the threshold into the unconscious world by some ordinary phenomenon which takes on extraordinary portent. Rhoda, in Woolf’s The Waves, enters a trance through the simple device of a puddle; Kate, in Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark, dreams of a seal which she is to carry on her journey; Mrs. Ramsay’s lighthouse and Beth’s turtle in Small Changes perform similar functions. As for Atwood’s hero, “the lake was the entrance for me.”
Phase III: Confrontation with Parental Figures
In women’s rebirth fiction this confrontation most often takes place with memory figures rather than with actual persons, and constitutes an experience which belongs both to the realm of subconscious or societal experience and to the powerful mother- and father-imagos haunting the deepest reaches of the unconscious. It is thus a key phase if the hero is to complete the full plunge to the nadir of her unconscious, and frequently becomes an agon or terminal struggle if unsuccessful. As we shall see below, the heroes in The Four-Gated City and Seduction of the Minotaur, like Atwood’s hero, experience this struggle as a difficult passage crucial to their final developments.
Phase IV: The Green World Lover
Whether as an actual or a reverie figure, an ideal and distinctly non-patriarchal lover often aids in the final journey of the self into the fountainhead of Eros or Libido which contains the drive and energy of the transformed personality. In Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! a tall corn god of fertility and death bears Alexandra through despair to survival; Heathcliff provides such a quasi-naturistic figure leading Brontë’s Catherine on to a consummation after death or liebestod in Wuthering Heights; the love-making of a character called “Three” in June Arnold’s The Cook and the Carpenter becomes a catalyst in the integration of the Carpenter’s personality, and in Atwood’s Surfacing Joe, a figure from the world of the Ego and of the City, is transformed in the hero’s mind into a primevally naturistic lover, a furry buffalo. Sometimes the Green world lover actually is an animal, as may be the case with the unicorn archetype which appears so often in women’s poetry and needlework.6 It appears as a heron in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron,” a fox in Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, a donkey in May Sarton’s Joanna and Ulysses, a stag in witchcraft rituals, and a bull in the Cretan mysteries of Minos. The hero may love it, pretend to be it (as in Jo March’s identification with a horse in Little Women), or follow it. In the modern novel of rebirth such figures seem to represent the incorporation into the personality of one’s sexual and natural energies, one’s Pan, as it were, one’s own internal Adonis.
Phase V: The Shadow
Although the figure of one’s “shadow” or worst personality, one’s anti-self, does not necessarily appear as such in all rebirth novels, at some phase in the inner journey there tends to be a coming to terms with all that is negative or destructive prior to tapping one’s deepest streams of creativity. Martha, in Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, overtly struggles with a figure she calls her “self-hater” as she is guided by the “devil” through a series of self-recognitions which she calls the “stations of the cross.” Nin’s Lillian finds herself denying help to her animus-figure or potential guide in Seduction of the Minotaur, and, indirectly, taking responsibility for his death; the shadowy or life-denying side of Mrs. Ramsay’s lighthouse seems to claim her for death a third of the way through the novel, and Atwood’s hero is constantly aware of her brother as the technologically violent, murderer-side of her own personality.
Phase VI: The Final Descent to the Nadir
Psychoanalytically, the plunge to the nadir of the unconscious is a fulcrum of danger, taking one to the self beneath self, and as likely to lead to madness as to transformation. Fictional heroes often experience a chaos of surreal images and symbols at this phase, disassociated fantasies and chaotic noises that mimic clinical madness. This experience, which I would term “literary insanity” in contrast to the objective horrors of true madness, can either disintegrate the hero entirely or provide the turning point in her quest. The problem is that “insanity,” as Phyllis Chesler and others have documented, tends whether literary or clinical to mimic the accepted role of women in society, that of a victim trapped and suffocating within an enclosure. Even if she is able to take the leap through this layer of being, the transformed hero is going to have difficulties at the ascent phase in re-integrating herself into “normal” society.
Phase VII: Ascent and Re-Entry into Society as Known
Although there is no doubt that the masculine hero who has assimilated his “anima” or “feminine other” as well as his “shadow” into a fully integrated personality may have some difficulty in a gender role oriented society, such heroes are depicted returning to the level of the ego and contributing the elixir they have won to their civilizations. For the fully transformed woman hero, however, re-entry is far more problematical, since her assumed role in society is by necessity secondary or auxiliary and thus her elixir is not only devalued but a threat to civilization. She is met upon her ascent, thus, with a forceful backlash, an attempt to dwarf her personality and re-accommodate her to secondary status. It is for this reason that so many women’s rebirth novels are, at best, open-ended, the hero’s precise place in society being left to guesswork on the part of the reader. Sometimes, however, a non-civilizational “new space” is actually provided for her, as in the case of the post-nuclear-holocaust island where Lessing’s Martha finds her collective. Although the returning woman hero is unlikely to be able to affect a broad sector of her society, however, she is quite often depicted as passing on her boon or elixir to one apprentice, a younger woman who may in turn pass the tradition of transcendence to her own initiate. Lily Briscoe is such an apprentice to Mrs. Ramsay, Rita to Martha in The Four-Gated City, the young woman interviewer to Mrs. Stevens in Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, etc. In many cases the hero seems to initiate herself, looking back to her own mother or to an idealized mother-figure as model. This seems to me to be the case with Atwood’s hero in Surfacing and with Nin’s Lillian in Seduction of the Minotaur. Sometimes, finally, the transformed woman hero seems to be transferring her boon of power not to any figure within the text but to the woman reader herself.
Although a full scale textual analysis of a series of rebirth novels would be too cumbersome for my purpose here, it seems helpful to approach Surfacing obliquely, by comparison to several texts structured in conformity to the same archetypal narrative. Since I have written elsewhere about Mrs. Ramsay’s rebirth journey in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,7 I will summarize here those broad features which are of help on providing a context for Surfacing, and then develop an analysis of Seduction of the Minotaur for the purposes of comparison and contrast.
Mrs. Ramsay and the Androgynous Elixir
With a markedly erotic set of kinesthetic images, Woolf describes Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse as barren and sterile, having to be completed by Mrs. Ramsay’s pouring of a “delicious fecundity,” a “fountain and spray of life” into his empty being. This experience of plunging down into her own “fountainhead” of energy and giving life to the world through it is linked consistently with the figure of the lighthouse through imagery of rising, illumination, circling, and stroking. The actual lighthouse, contemplated by the weary Mrs. Ramsay, thus becomes an inner imago or archetypal symbol around which she rallies her self be repeated journeys into the depths of her unconscious. The rays of the lighthouse become, thus, emanations of an inner or green world lover, “as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight.” Wholly an inward and nonsocial force, the lighthouse provides her with escape from her world, “something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband.” Ultimately, then, Mrs. Ramsay turns away from those she has attempted to fructify with her inner elixir, and dies of “a stroke.”8
Although empowered by an unusual androgynous fusion of forces normatively considered “male” and “female” in sexual import, Mrs. Ramsay is not able to survive with the totality of self she has achieved, the process having, apparently, been too one-sided. “When the libido leaves the bright upper world,” writes Jung, “whether from choice, or from inertia, or from fate, it sinks back into its own depths, into the source from which it originally flowed.” Once back at the sources of being, however, a fulcrum is reached which is a “dangerous moment when the issue hangs between annihilation and new life.”9 It is at this point, I would conclude, that Mrs. Ramsay becomes unable to return to the level of the ego, and perishes. In the structure of the novel, “Time Passes” in turn constitutes a fulcrum of the tripartite plot division, in which Mrs. Ramsay becomes embodied in the “ebb and flow” of objects which take over the abandoned house at their will, arranging themselves not according to human dictates but according to a timeless and spaceless essence. The process by which the house and its contents settle into a personless flux of “things as they are” and are rescued only at the last moment by the return of the family constitutes a rebirth experience within the wider rebirth structure of the total text. As a tour de force of lyric prose, “Time Passes” provides a variation on the tranquil, personless state of mind which is at one and the same time Mrs. Ramsay’s elixir and her nemesis.
The third section of To the Lighthouse reverses the archetypal Demeter/Kore narrative (although Jane Ellen Harrison notes that mother/young woman or mother/daughter are always interchangeable in import) in that Lily Briscoe is apprenticed to the spirit of the mother figure who is depicted as having descended into the world of the dead. Brooding over the painting and adding in brush strokes in a kinesthetic pattern reminiscent of Mrs. Ramsay’s lighthouse trances, Lily seems to perceive the older woman leaving the world behind for the realm of the dead. She sees that she has let her “flowers fall from her basket, scattered and tumbled them on to the grass and, reluctantly and hesitatingly, but without question or complaint,” is journeying away “Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-strewn.”10 The field of flowers suggests the Rharian plain at Thria which Demeter fructified after the restoration of Persephone, and the spilled basket the basket of flowers which Persephone dropped when she was abducted from a field by Pluto. The basket may also represent Demeter’s Cista Mystica of the Eleusinian mysteries, the basket in which she keeps the sacred (and purportedly androgynous) symbols sought by the initiate. Lily is able to put the final stroke to her painting when Mr. Carmichael, whom she perceives as Neptune, stands erect and looks out to sea: she has perhaps been empowered by an appearance of Poseidon, lover of Demeter and father of Persephone. Where in the Demeter/Kore narrative and in the rites based upon it the mother grieves after the abduction and rape of her daughter and quests through heaven and earth to bring her back to life, in To the Lighthouse Lily as daughter or younger woman apprentice seeks the meaning of Mrs. Ramsay’s life after her death. Her role is one of enquiry into the source and nature of Mrs. Ramsay’s unique elixir, of absorption of it into her own art, corresponding perhaps to the quest of the Eleusinian initiate for an understanding and assimilation of the power of the goddess. As a rhetorical structure, To the Lighthouse constitutes a ritual of passage in which a younger woman learns, on the one hand, to preserve herself from such tyrannical (and gender-rigid) demands as Mr. Ramsay’s; and, on the other hand, to absorb sufficient inner and asocial powers to pursue her own creativity.
Seduction of the Minotaur and the Hieroglyphic Elixir
Anais Nin’s Seduction of the Minotaur is the last novel in the five volume Cities of the Interior, a multivolumed work which differs from such novel sequences as Lessing’s The Children of Violence and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage in being less sequential than cyclical, dealing not with the development of one hero but with the interaction of three—Lillian, Sabina, and Djuana. The first and last volumes nonetheless are chiefly concerned with Lillian’s quest for selfhood, and the final volume is structured as a rebirth journey which she undertakes upon a “solar barque” to the land of “Golconda,” which is also the land of her own unconsciousness. Lillian’s descent into the underworld parallels Mrs. Ramsay’s in some ways, but the denouements form an interesting contrast: where Mrs. Ramsay’s power is explicit in nature and absorbed by Lily, Lillian is left without a full understanding of what she has experienced, her elixir or goal of her quest being hieroglyphic.
Before she is able to proceed into the depths of the unconscious, Lillian must come to terms with personal material having to do with memories of her mother and father and of how they perceived her. “Already,” she muses, “she regretted having come. This was not a journey in her solar barque. It was a night journey into the past, and the thread that had pulled her was one of accidental resemblances, familiarity, the past. She had been unable to live for three months a new life, in a new city, without being caught by an umbilical cord and brought back to the figure of her father.” Lillian’s problem is that she cannot perceive herself adequately behind the mirrors of her parents’ eyes: “Lillian had never seen herself with her own eyes … You retained as upon a delicate retina, your mother’s image of you, as the first and the only authentic one, her judgement of your acts.” What Lillian needs to grow is the ability to possess her own self-vision, in spite of or in contrast to the way husband/lover/mother/father have previously defined her personality. She is beset and confused not only by these familial distortions of her authenticity but also by gender expectations to which she does not conform. As an adolescent, Nin remarks in the first volume of the sequence (Ladders to Fire), she has been both “aggressive” and “womanly,” and although Nin associates the one with masculinity and the other with femininity she sees her hero as one human unity: “She had two voices, one which felt deep like the voice of a man, and another light and innocent. Two women disputing inside of her.”11
As an inner and empowering imago paralleling Mrs. Ramsay’s lighthouse, Lillian carries inside of her mind an “inner chamber” containing a figure which is neither herself nor her own mother but an idealized archetype of maternity:
The mother madonna holding the child and nourishing it. The haunting mother image forever holding a small child.
Then there was the child itself, the child inhabiting a world of peaceful, laughing animals, rich trees, in valleys of festive color. The child in her eyes appeared with its eyes closed. It was dreaming the fertile valleys, the small warm house, the Byzantine flowers, the tender animals and the abundance. It was dreaming and afraid to awaken. It was dreaming the lightness of the sky, the warmth of the earth, the fecundity of the colors.
It was afraid to awaken.12As in the Demeter/Kore archetype, in which mother and daughter mingle in being and take on each other’s powers, Lillian, in this passage, is at one and the same time mother and child. The inner world of the child is the paradisiacal vision of the green world filled with friendly animals which occurs so often in women’s embroidery and tapestry work as the tree of life or the island of animals dominated by a beneficent goddess and her maidens. The madonna figure represents a positive imago in contrast to Lillian’s maternal experiences both with her own mother and as a mother to her children, whom she has left behind with her husband because they were imposed upon her by social norms and not sprung from the inner authenticity of her own choices:
Who had desired the children? She could not remember the first impetus, the first choice, the first desire for these, nor how they came to be. It was as if it had happened in her sleep. Lillian, guided by her background, her mother, her sisters, her habits, her home as a child, her blindness in regard to her own desires, had made all of this and then lived in it, but it had not been made out of the deeper elements of her nature, and she was a stranger in it.13The world to which she turns for renewal of self in Seduction of the Minotaur is the green and tropical land of Golconda, and she attempts through it to undo the alienation from nature that has made her bear children in this absent-minded fashion. During her re-immersion into the plant and animal world of Golconda the memories of mother and father are dealt with, and Lillian is enabled to undertake the plunge into the unconscious through the guide or animus figure of Dr. Hernandez. He dies before he is able to help her to complete her quest, however, and she realizes that having failed him, she has failed herself: “If only they had gone down together, down the caverns of the soul with picks, lanterns, cords, oxygen, x-ray, food, following the blueprints of all the messages from the geological depths where lay hidden the imprisoned self.” He cannot go with her, however, and she must undertake a journey without the help of all the tools that he might have provided. As a result:
She was now like those French speleologists who had descended thousands of feet into the earth and found ancient caves covered with paintings and carvings. But Lillian carried no searchlight and no nourishment. Nothing but the wafer granted to those who believe in symbolism, a wafer in place of bread. And all she had to follow were the inscriptions of her dreams, half-effaced hieroglyphs on half-broken statues. And no guide in the darkness but a scream through the eyes of a statue.14This chaotic world of jumbled signals is that timeless realm of surreal imagery and confused voices which Lessing’s Martha as well as Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay and Atwood’s hero experience. She has no true nourishment with her, only a “wafer” which is at one remove from bread, a merely sacramental food which is useless to Lillian since she does not have any “blueprint” to the mythological or theological system informing it. Like the hieroglyphs in the caves and the inscriptions in her dreams, the bread is at a level removed from helpful substance, a symbolic and ritual vehicle which has lost its referent. In this way it corresponds to the empty forms and puzzling masks surviving from prepatriarchal times, coded ciphers which are confusing, at best, and more often horrifying to the visitor from the world of “normal” society.
The incomplete nature of Lillian’s inner quest is recapitulated in a vision that she has of her own reflection in the window of the airplane in which she is flying home. She sees not herself but a “minotaur,” which “was not a monster. It was a reflection upon a Mirror, a masked woman, Lillian herself, the hidden masked part of herself unknown to her, who had ruled her acts.” In the pre-Hellenic Cretan religion the minotaur was the animal lover of the queens, the “bull of Minos” corresponding to the horned god of the witches. He thus represented the animus and the green world lover for the queen, who participated in a Hieros Gamos or love-making ritual with him in order to establish her erotic, political, and religious hegemony. Queen and Minotaur, like Lady and Unicorn, Indian Maiden and Buffalo, are powerful figures of feminine autonomy and erotic power. For Lillian, however, the minotaur is merely at the level of “mask” worn as cover to the self, the indication being that the archetype is not wholly assimilated or integrated with her self and that she is not fully transformed. Her persona or ego is thus at the denouement in disjunction with its own unconscious materials, the hieroglyphs containing her elixir remaining encoded.
Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and the Elixir of Maternity
Where the outcome of Lillian’s quest is problematical, that of the hero of Atwood’s Surfacing is as precise as Mrs. Ramsay’s. As in To the Lighthouse, a quest is described in which the hero plunges down through subconscious to unconscious materials and is empowered by absorbing the archetypal symbols available to her at the fountainhead of her personality and being. This achievement, moreover, is at one and the same time a spiritual and a markedly naturistic one, the green world and a green world lover or erotic figure making the outcome an integration of body and soul. As in Woolf and in Nin, moreover, the text is structured according to a penetration of a world of unconscious materials which are at one and the same time so wholly new as to seem bizarre and, through analogy with such archetypes as the Demeter/Kore narrative, wholly and radically “old.”
The island in the Canadian lake constitutes a green world of childhood remembered and a locus of transformation or rebirth, thus conflating Lillian’s child’s dream and the land of Golconda as well as unifying the consciousness Woolf divided between Mrs. Ramsay and her disciple, Lily. The hero brings her own patriarchal space or subconscious gender world with her in the form of David and Anna, a couple hideously involved in normative “male and female” behaviour.
The hero’s mother and father provide her with figures both from the subconscious or familial and from the unconscious realms. On the one hand, they represent her memories of her actual parents, but on the other hand they bring gifts, like Mrs. Ramsay’s, which transcend the personal. These gifts, moreover, constitute hieroglyphs which, unlike Lillian’s, are translatable into agents of transformation. The hero comes to the island because of reports that her father, who has been living alone following her mother’s death, is missing. Looking at his scribbled notes, she is at first fearful that he has gone mad but soon realizes that they are sketches of ancient Indian cave drawings and symbols. Whether her father is dead, mad, or returned from the dead becomes all one to the hero, who finds herself drawn by the power latent within these archetypal figures into a world which she seeks for her own sake. Having found the site of the drawings, and having dived down to it from her canoe, she comes upon 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.” It is, in actuality, her drowned father, but it also suggests the memory of the foetus whose abortion had traumatized her and of the frogs and snakes that her brother had put to death in closed jars, “evil grails.” She realizes that her father had achieved a new and powerful world, whose elixir she in turn desires to absorb.
He had discovered new places, new oracles, they were things he was seeking the way I had seen, true vision; at the end, after the failure of logic. When it happened the first time he must have been terrified, it would be like stepping through a usual door and finding yourself in a different galaxy, purple trees and red moons and a green sun.15The “new places” which she will seek are repositories of power finding their expression in an old/new language of hieroglyphs, alinguistic, prespeech, and implicitly acivilizational like so much of the content of women’s unconscious realms. Where the father has translated them for scholarly interpretation, the hero will have to find some far less culturally acceptable use if she is to become an effective woman self.
“It would be right for my mother to have left something for me also, a legacy,” she realizes. “His was complicated, tangled, but hers would be simple as a hand, it would be final.” To a certain extent the mother’s legacy is the image of herself as a strong figure close to nature, able to scare away bears, rescue her son from drowning, and tame the wild birds. More personally, the hero finds her mother’s boon in a scrapbook of her own childish drawings, specifically one of “a woman with a round moon stomach: the baby was sitting up inside her and gazing out. Opposite her was a man with horns on his head and a barbed tail.” The gift of her own drawing is a gift from her own unconscious, and although at first glance Atwood seems to be sexually stereotyping these figures, they represent, when taken together, the same type of androgynous projection as Mrs. Ramsay’s “masculine” and “feminine” qualities and the mixture of two voices, “male” and “female,” in the unitary woman, Lillian. The dual symbol is analogous to the powerful queen and her horned consort, and in turn to the figure of a witch with her stag lover. The hero has deplored the split in herself between “head,” which she associates with “the gods of the head,” “antlers rooted in the brain,” and the round moon body. The goal of her quest is to integrate body and head, nature and mind, in one personality. Her transformation consists, thus, in taking over one by one the faculties which she has projected upon others rather than bring them to consciousness as parts of an integrated selfhood. Thus her decision to get pregnant by Joe, whom she associates, archetypically, with a buffalo, seems at first glance to be one which will force her back into a social role but is actually a self-actualizing choice, in that it is derived not from the subconscious realm of personal or gender role expectations but from an unconscious world where maternity is a form of power. Her act of conception, self-initiated and self-contained, is one in which she is wholly central and authentic:
He trembles and I can feel my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has been prisoned for so long, its eyes and teeth phosporescent; the two halves clasp, interlocking like fingers, it buds, it sends out fronds. This time I will do it by myself, squatting on old newspapers in a corner alone; or on leaves, dry leaves, a heap of them, that’s cleaner. The baby will slip out easily as an egg, a kitten, and I’ll lick it off and bite the cord, the blood returning to the ground where it belongs; the moon will be full, pulling. In the morning I will be able to see it: it will be covered with shining fur, a god, I will never teach it any words.16The lost child is in one dimension the aborted foetus, the imagery of leaves and fronds contrasting to the metallic imagery surrounding an operation which the hero regrets. It is also, however, her own lost child or childhood, surfacing to empower her, an inner self that she is delivering into personal transformation that is the rebirth experience. By uniting herself with nature, literally floating naked in the water and wandering at one with the island in a prelinguistic, “mad” state, she conceives new life in an affirmation of a woman’s unique powers of birth. All of this is done wholly in rejection of her culture, which, in the guise of David, considers her a deviant, a man hater. In Mary Daly’s terminology, she goes “crazy” deliberately in order to empower herself through “the role of witch and madwoman … tantamount to a declaration of identity beyond the good and evil of patriarchy’s world, and beyond sanity and insanity.”17 Where Mrs. Ramsay dies, leaving Lily a heritage which she can personally assimilate but which has little import for her role in society; and where Lillian returns to her family without having fully absorbed her elixir; Atwood creates a hero shockingly deviant precisely because, having fused in her personal transformation both spiritual and natural powers, she fully intends to complete her rebirth journey by returning to the mesocosm.
The Rhetorical Effect of Rebirth Fiction
Feminist critics have sometimes worried that writers like Woolf, Nin, and Atwood focus too narrowly upon inward, “personalistic” visions, to the point of suggesting a retreat from social life rather than engagement with it. “For Mrs. Ramsay,” writes Elaine Showalter, “death is a mode of self-assertion. Refined to its essences, abstracted from its physicality and anger, denied any action, Woolf’s vision of womanhood is as deadly as it is disembodied. The ultimate room of one’s own is the grave.”18 My hypothesis, in contrast, is that the retreat into sanctuaries and rooms constitutes a reculant pour mieux sauter, a drawing back in order to leap further; and that fantasies are indeed prevalent in women’s fiction but to a positive effect, constituting projections of worlds of being desired by author, hero, and reader alike, treasure houses of energies locked into symbols whose import has been forgotten. As Mary Daly puts it, the contents of our inner selves constitute “those flames of spiritual imagination and cerebral fantasy which can be a new dawn.” It becomes the task of the feminist archetypalist to decipher these symbols through comparison to a broad range of analogues not only in literature but in the preliterary materials of folklore, craft, and mythology.
As I have indicated throughout this essay, one variety of archetypal rebirth narrative seems particularly helpful in elucidating Surfacing and analogous texts—the Demeter/Kore story, dealing with the Anabasis of the daughter from the world of the dead and leading to mysteries or rituals in which initiates reenact Demeter’s quest and rescue. Scholars have long recognized that the Demeter/Kore archetype and its embodiment in the Eleusinian rituals constitutes a uniquely feminine experience, in the sense that its appeal and ultimately its empowering effects are felt far more strongly by women than by men. Jane Ellen Harrison was perhaps the first to point out that the material is “almost uncontaminated by Olympian [Aryan/Patriarchal] usage” and that it derives from pre-Hellenic Thrace and Crete.19 Jung recognizes that, although a male initiate might experience the Demeter/Kore figures as animas, they are of far greater importance as imagos representing the superordinate or fully integrated feminine personality of the woman: “The Demeter-Kore myth,” he asserts, “is far too feminine to have been merely the result of an anima-projection. Although the Anima can, as we have said, experience herself in Demeter-Kore, she is yet of a wholly different nature. She is in the highest sense femme à homme, a man’s woman, whereas Demeter-Kore exists on the plane of mother-daughter experience, which is alien to the man and shuts him out. In fact, the psychology of the Demeter cult has all the features of a matriarchal order of society, where the man is an indispensable but on the whole disturbing factor.”20 The effect of participation in the Demeter/Kore mystery, and of absorbing its underlying archetype, Jung feels, is one in which by a mutual empowering, an intermingling of the elixirs of mother and daughter, an individual achieves “a place and a meaning in the life of the generations” and, at the same time, “is rescued from her isolation and restored to wholeness. All ritual preoccupation with archetypes ultimately has this aim and this result.”21
Women’s rebirth fiction represents, it seems to me, one form of “ritual preoccupation with archetypes” having as its effect the transformation not only of the hero but of the reader. The archetypal narratives and symbols that one finds in such fiction (and which may indeed be remnants of a far more coherent tapestry than has been imagined) make of each novel a ritual experience for the reader analogous to participation in such mysteries as that enacting the Demeter/Kore narrative. The novel, and indeed all of our literature, might be defined as a literate or written-down variation on pre-literary and folk practices which are available to the reader as to the author in the realm of the unconscious, even when they have long been absent from day to day life. A woman knitter once wanted to learn to spin wool for herself, and found the directions in the handbook to spinning difficult to follow. When she actually picked up her spindle and began to wind the threads through it and to twirl it in rhythm she found that her fingers knew already what was arcane to her intellect. She coined the term “unventing” for such a rediscovery of a lost skill, through intuition, a bringing of latent knowledge out of oneself, in contrast to “invention” or creation from scratch. Following this model, I would suggest that the woman’s novel is a form of “unvention,” depending upon a repository of knowledge lost from the mesocosm but still available to the author and recognizable to her reader as deriving from a world with which, at some level of her inner mind, she is already familiar.
In very few instances in women’s fiction do we find a hero who has been able to return to the “upper world” of the ego wholly in control of the “unvented” archetypal materials experienced in the rebirth journey. What makes Surfacing so unique in this genre is that the hero seems wholly transformed and wholly determined to “surface” in her full powers back into the world of culture. What has happened to her is that she has been so empowered by her fusion of spiritual or psychic and natural energies that she has brought about an implosion of her own world, a shifting of her selfhood from its stance on the margins of male society to a state of being in which her own feminine personality is central and patriarchy has itself moved to her margins. She thus transforms herself from victim to hero, turning patriarchal space inside out so that it can no longer limit her being. Although the reader does not experience the hero’s return to society, her impression is that she can never be returned to a peripheral or secondary status.
In what way, then, does the novel as experienced ritual affect the reader and lead, in turn, to social change? The restorative power of women’s fiction upon both the individual and her collective, it seems to me, consists in the dialectical nature of its rhetorical process. Most novels, indeed, seem to be strung upon a deadlock between contrary forces—societal and gender norms, on the one hand, and the desire of the heroes for human development, on the other—and rarely is this polarity resolved into synthesis within a given text. Even, as in the case of Surfacing, when the process which dialecticians describe as aufheben—to negate, absorb, and transcend—seems most fully carried out, the social future of the hero remains uncertain. Such texts seem to provide a description of blue and yellow and of the process by which they will become green, only to launch their messages into a color blind society. Insofar as it negates patriarchal behaviour patterns, absorbs (via the hero’s coming to terms with the materials of the subconscious) social roles, and points towards a consciousness that transcends gender, the novel is a symbolic vehicle indicating a state of being which it does not in and of itself contain. It asks a question, poses a riddle, cries out for action, but remains essentially rhetorical, an artifact or ideal equation but not a mode of action. Life does not, however, consist in hypotheses or in ideas but in the affecting of society by individuals. In my hypothesis, the final element in the fictional dialectic, the synthesis, does not occur within the text but in the mind of the reader, the text being social only insofar as he or she is prepared to put the symbolic message into action. Such a relationship between fiction and its audience, or between any work of imagination and the perceiver, is comparable to the relationship between dream and dreamer. In our waking life we derive benefits from those long hours of the night spent in the world of the unconscious, where we flex our psychic muscles in the face of nightmare and vision alike. Fiction is recreational in the same sense as the dream, “made up” for essentially ethical ends, for praxis, and its effect is to bring us face to face with both negative experiences and visions of the good so that we may negate the one, absorb the other, and thus prepare ourselves for transcendence.
Women novelists (to put it another way) have been gathering us around campfires where they have “spooked” us with horrific lore and provided us with adventures for emulation. They have given us maps of the patriarchal battlefield and of the landscape covering our ruined subculture, and they have brought out of those ruins the lost symbols of our power. Most importantly, they have puffed up the worst aspects of the enemy so that he/she becomes laughable, a paper monster. They have strengthened us with moments of epiphany when we feel a quality rising from our depths which altogether transcends gender polarities so destructive to human life. They have dug the goddess out of our ruins and cleansed the debris from her face, casting aside the gynophobic masks hiding her power and her beneficence. In so doing, they have made of women’s fiction a pathway to the authentic self, the roots of our selves before consciousness of self, and shown us the way to the healing waters of our innermost being.
Notes
1. Francine du Plessix Gray, “Nature as Nunnery,” New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1977, p. 29.
2. Carol P. Christ, “Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest and Vision,” Signs, 2, No. 2 (Winter 1976), 330, 317.
3. See Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time (New York: Pantheon, 1975), p. 3.
4. C. G. Jung, “Concerning Rebirth,” The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 114.
5. C. G. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious, p. 187.
6. I have written an article on this subject entitled “‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’: Notes towards a Pre-Literary History of Women’s Archetypes,” Feminist Studies, 4, No. 1 (February 1978), 163-94.
7. “Sexual Imagery in To the Lighthouse,” Modern Fiction Studies, 18, No. 3 (Autumn 1972), 417-431.
8. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth, 1960), p. 95.
9. C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 293.
10. To the Lighthouse, pp. 308-9.
11. Anais Nin, Cities of the Interior (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1974), pp. 531, 540, and from Ladders to Fire, p. 58.
12. Ibid., Ladders to Fire, p. 14.
13. Ibid., p. 18.
14. Seduction of the Minotaur, p. 544.
15. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Popular Library, 1972), p. 171.
16. Ibid., p. 191.
17. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 65-66.
18. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 297.
19. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 120.
20. C. G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 177, and as quoted in C. Kerenyi, Eleusis—Archetypal Images of Mother and Daughter, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. xxi-xxxii.
21. “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” p. 188.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Pratt, Annis. "Surfacing and the Rebirth Journey." Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 371, Gale, 2015. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1100118846/LitRC?u=glen55457&sid=LitRC&xid=90954b12. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018. Originally published in The Art of Margaret Atwood, edited by Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson, Anansi, 1981, pp. 139-157.Gale Document Number: GALE|H1100118846
