Survival In The "Space Between"

To most Americans, and indeed to many Canadians, the existence of Canada is problematic. They wonder if it exists at all apart from the United States. Such "Americanized" Canadians have often been the men who can get economic profit from the powerful neighbor country, expecting to bring the two countries' economic bases closer together, or straightforward to erase other differences between the two countries. But in opposition to the Americanized Canadians has stood a group of Canadian Nationalists, some in government, some at universities, especially many artists and writers, including Margaret Atwood, an outstanding woman writer, have argued that Canada's slightly but notably different cognition of economy, ideology, and culture sets Canada apart from the United States.However, Canada, "is a country often defined as that-which-is-North-American-but-not-American, and female is that-which-is-human-but-not-male; the difference between the terms is power." 4 Just as Margaret Atwood argues in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972): Canadians, having existed in a colonial relationship first to England and then to America, are not only alienated from their environment (nature) but are obsessed with a sense of themselves as victims, and consequently Canadians are in short of national identity. Therefore, victimization and survival are recurring themes in Canadian literature, and meanwhile the bedrock of national canon. Therefore, many Canadian writers, Atwood and Laurence for instance, have consciously or unconsciously carried on a task of establishing a national cultural4 Shannon Hengen, Margaret Atwood's Power Mirrors, Reflections and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry, Toronto: Second Story Press, 1993, p. 12.-3-identity for Canada, at the same time, seeking individual identity for women.Margaret Atwood is a prestigious contemporary Canadian woman writer with international reputation. Since the 1960s, she has created fourteen volumes of poetry, ten novels, and many other literary works, and has received numerous awards and honors, including two Governor General's Awards (the most important literary award in Canada) and a Booker Prize. Like those of her intellectual colleagues in Canada, Atwood's novels are obsessed with the desire to earn identity for women, and more importantly, for Canada. While the most striking thing that differentiates Atwood from others is her display of numerous polar opposites of the world, and her emphasis on the unity of opposites. This thesis will focus on Surfacing (1972) and The Handmaid's Tale (1985), two of Atwood's best-known novels, exploring the unity of opposites in her depiction of omnipresent oppositions in the world.According to Atwood, alienation, whether nature's alienation caused by civilization (as in Surfacing) or women's alienation resulting from the patriarchal system (as in The Handmaid's Tale,) is the direct outcome of the "self-versus-other" thinking, or in another word, mutually exclusive oppositions. This pattern of thinking prevents a harmonious relationship with the environment, and therefore, needs to be replaced by the "self-and-other" thinking pattern梩he ideal of "unity of opposites". As Atwood once said: "I think there has to be a third (way) again; the ideal would be somebody who would neither be a killer nor a victim, who could achieve some kind of harmony with the world, which is a productive or creative harmony rather than a destructive relationship-4-towards the world."5 The third way is the way out of the static situation of mutually exclusive oppositions towards a richer, more harmonious, all-inclusive, and more meaningful life.This third way shows the acceptance of multiplicity and difference of the world, and has been identified as Canadian state policy. Due to this policy, Canada is striving to shake off the sense of themselves as victims so that they can obtain a distinctive culture identity, and survive in the "space between".