Margaret Atwood: A Sound Ecologist

This paper is an attempt to explore the ecological issues in Margaret Atwood’s novels. She happens to raise her voices against the demolition of the forests, advocating very strongly to pay attention to ecological principles for the preservation of the environment for the future generation. She tends to express her deep sense of anxiety over the ecological issues as depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and again in the stories and fables of Wilderness Tips (1991) and Good Bones (1992) . Her novel – Surfacing (1972) begins and ends with the forest starting like a detective story. Her most significant search-operation begins when she happens to dive into the lake, looking for the Indian rock paintings recorded in her father’s drawings in chapter 17 of the novel. Environment or wilderness strongly figures out in her fabric of Canadian identity. It has multiple functions : as a marker of geological location, as a spatial metaphor and as a popular cultural myth of Canada . Geographically, it is defined as ‘wild uncultivated land’ . She rediscovers the White English – Canadian construction of identity, charting a distinctive New World positioning in relation to history, geography and culture suggestive of continuity between immigration narratives and a contemporary awareness of psychic location. Environment holds a very significant place in her portrayal of Canadian identity. She personally holds a bitter experience of Colonialism and its outcome on Canada and Canadians in the post-colonial era. Her fiction comprises of several post-colonial themes such as survival, hybridization, isolation, hegemony, displacement, loss of identity, banishment, multiculturalism, homelessness, colonization of the mind and of the natural world. Thus this paper seeks to analyze the different shades of ecology and ecocriticism exploring the organic unity between the man and the environment. This theory has gained a great importance since last few years. The ecological balance between the human and environment is shattered. People have deviated from their moral duties towards nature. Thus as a sound observer of ecology, she finds out the misuse and colonization of the natural world.

www.ijellh.com 76 internal mindscape of the anonymous female narrator and the expedition into the external landscape of Canada. The hero of the novel is searching out her identity and ends with her unification with nature after discarding all symbols of culture. She intends to highlight the unfair power structures that are causing mass destruction like the anthropocentric greed of humanbeings, especially the American consumerism.
Canada is associated with the literary commonwealth of English-speaking nations. and John Moss etc. There writers tend to propound that the literary texts are an outcome of a culture that has an organic unity of symbols, images and myths. Atwood has earnestly raised in her novels the ecologistical issues of the Canadian cultural identity. Infact, this quest for identity is an effort to break away from the colonial past and lay down new critical paradigms and parameters for Canadian writing. There is a strong parallel affinity between the Canadian culture and that of India regarding customs, traditions and conventions. The multilingual and bilingual practices in both of these countries tend to provide an atmosphere of unity in diversity.
In both of these countries, phallocratic system is prevailing where sexual colonialism still dominates. It is very tough situation for a woman to maintain her dignity, chastity and selfesteem in such a male-dominated set-up. A sexist culture comes into being where there occures a power-disbalance between the two sexes-the male being the colonizer and the female being the colonized. Thus females are marginalized in Canada. This one is the patriarchal civilization that She sprinkles out the fragrance of ecologistic sensibility in her famous novel -'Surfacing', when she happens to see a strange blurred image, which might or might not be her father's drowned body. But such a image has so far not been depicted in the story of the novel. It reveals a fairy tale, being at the centre of the novel. There is no description about a marriage, nor a child, only an affair and an abortion. The narrator says:

Earl G. Ingersol, ed. Margaret Atwood : Conversations (London : Virago, 1992) "I could not accept it, that mutilation, ruin I had made, I needed a different version" (143)2
The occidental colonization comprises possession of land occupied by human beings along with the natural world and its biotic communities. According to Garrard -

"America's rapidly growing wealth in 19 th C. was based on destruction and consumption of forests and wildlife so astonishingly voracious that in places, it announced to an ecocidal campaign to exhaust and refashion whole habits".3
SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH The unknown hero of 'Surfacing' echoes exactly this thought when she beholds the

"white birches dying" and the city has "swelled enough to have a bypass".(Atwood)3
She travels down the familiar road to home after nine years. She could notice bulldozed trees with their roots hanging out. She feels very much sad, having found the current state of the dying birches, the growing cities encroaching into the green world. The natural world suffers the joint torment of being encroached upon, uprooted and dislocated. Dignity of literature is depending much more upon the dignity of culture. Such a quality is traceable in her novels.

Bill Ashcraft has minutely observed: -"Post-colonial culture is inevitably a hybrid phenomenon involving a dialectical relationship between the grafted European cultural systems and an indigenous ontology, with its impulse to create or recreate an independent local identity".4
Atwood has maintained her global identity as a sound ecologist through her marvellous Her nameless hero stands not only as a sound ecologist, but she also changes herself into the natural world being one with it. Her voyage into the deep remote setting into the woods in concurrently a voyage into her mindscape. While getting back to the homeland after the elapse of many years, she gets reminded of her-childhood memories. She feels nostalgaic and better on her survival. Her elopement with her previously married drawing master and the subsequent abortion were all actions that drifted her existence to many ups and downs. When she started dreaming to have the baby, however her partner strained her to spoil the pregnancy. When the foetus was removed from her womb, she felt herself like a killer implicated in a cold-blooded murder as she depicts-"they take the baby out with a fork like a pickle out of a pickle jar."

(Atwood 79)
She propounds in her book that the universe is under threat due to human jealousy but there still remains a ray of hope as she briefly says --"There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything"

(Atwood 41)
She happens to warn the humanity about the bad kind and it is time for good kind to prevail. If human-being tends to follow a deep ecological perspective to the natural world,

What man has made of man"
Thus there is an everlasting binding between nature and man. If this chain is broken, man has to suffer in every walk of life. Atwood delivers her message in this perspective that humanbeing's wrong steps bring his doom.
In Atwood's novel --'Surfacing', the blurred floats into the narrator's consciousness and it gives the signal of the beginning of her recovery process, and the search for wholeness, unity of the body and mind, unity of reason and emotion, and the unity of past and present. This internal mental conflict in the narrator's psyche finally disappears after she has realized an experience having the sense of wholeness.
She beautifully projects 'images' and 'symbols' of separation and dualism. One major symbol that represents the idea of unity or wholeness is the 'fish'. This one happens to appear and disappear throughout the narration. Far the narrator, the fish symbolizes wholeness, the unity between mind and body that she is searching out. Fish, like other reptiles, have heads that are directly connected with the body and extend into the shoulders, unlike the human-beings where there is an impedimentthe neck. The neck separates the body from head. She has a great liking for the fish and does not like them to be killed as they represent for her 'wholeness and unity'. Later, the narrator, being alone on the island, has a series of wilderness encounters which have been 'likened to shamanistic initiation rituals'. She undergoes a visionary education where psycho-spiritual experience and sensory perceptions are prescribed as parallel modes of heightened awareness which led to the revision and insight. She realizes that she loves and trusts Joe and feels the child breathing within her womb. She visualizes a future with them. The experience of love for Joe and attachment to her unborn child stirs the "still" emotions within her and helps her see reason as a unified human being. By the end of the novel, the narrator's perceptions of her relation to the world have changed so that she is ready to leave the wilderness to return to the society.
The above discussion leads us to sum-up that Atwood has beautifully scattered the fragrance of her ecologistic sensibility as a very keen observer of the environment and circumstances in her making as a great post-colonial novelist. Being born and brought-up in Canada, she beautifully carries forward the spirit of commonwealth literature. Like a painter, she paints the different colours of multiculturalism and hybridity in her novels.