Margaret Atwood’s Postcolonial and Postmodern Feminist Novels with Psychological and Mythic Influences: The Archetypal Analysis of the Novel Surfacing

Abstract

The paper analyzes Margaret Atwood’s postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels from the psychological perspective of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes and from the perspective of Robert Graves’s mythological figures of the triple goddess presented in his work The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1997). In this regard, the paper focuses on the mythic and psychological roles embodied and played by Atwood’s victimized female protagonists who actively seek their identity and professional self-realization on their path towards personal evolution in the North American patriarchal society of the twentieth century. Thus, they are no longer passive as female characters of the nineteenth-century colonial novels which are centered on the male hero and his colonial adventures. In her postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels, Atwood further introduces elements of folk tales, fairy tales, legends, myths and revives different literary genres, such as a detective story, a crime and historical novel, a gothic romance, a comedy, science fiction, etc. Moreover, she often abuses the conventions of the existing genre and mixes several genres in the same narrative. For instance, her narrative The Penelopiad (2005) is a genre-hybrid novella in which she parodies the Grecian myth of the adventurer Odysseus and his faithful wife Penelope by subverting Homer’s serious epic poem into a witty satire. In addition, the last part of the paper analyzes the author’s cult novel Surfacing (1972 (1984)) according to Joseph Campbell’s and Northrop Frye’s archetypal/myth criticism and it demonstrates that Atwood revises the biblical myth of the hero’s quest and the idealized world of medieval grail romances from the ironic prospective of the twentieth century, as it is typical of postmodernism.