Body Politics And The Construction Of Female Subjectivity In Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing

As a prolific writer and versatile social critic, Margaret Atwood is very good at depicting women’s living situation who suffer a lot in both body and spirit. Surfacing, one of her representative novels, is viewed as a classic of feminism. And most of the critics have studied it from the macro aspects of feminism. Since a systematic research on the micro-politics of Surfacing is still a blank field, this thesis attempts to interpret it from the perspective of Foucault’s theory of power to explore how the political ideology and power mechanism discipline individual’s body and soul; and how an individual positively molds her own body to seek freedom and identity.According to Foucault, disciplinary power aims to create docile bodies. Basically, there are three means through which disciplinary power takes effect:constant surveillance or hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. It is not difficult to see that the females in Surfacing face two aspects of oppression imposed on their bodies, that is, men’s invisible surveillance on their bodies and behaviors, and their internalization of this surveillance. Under this circumstance, female body becomes a political field, engraved by power relations. However, in Foucault’s opinion, where there is power, there is resistance. To get rid of the past and be the owner of herself, the anonymous protagonist has successfully completed the self-reconstruction by her descent into the underground, claiming of motherhood and a spiritual quest. It can be concluded that a woman’s body is the product of patriarchal culture and the object of discipline and punishment, and it is also the weapon by which women fight against power imposed on them to rebuild their subjectivity.