Memory and Artistic Dissent: An Analogical Reading of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Atwood’s Surfacing

Introduction

In Sexual Politics (1970), the American feminist critic Kate Millett discusses ‘power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of people is controlled by another’ (Millett, 1990, p. 23). Millett uses ‘politics’ to refer to the power exercised by men over women in family situations and social or sexual relationships. Feminist critics, cultural theorists and writers have examined this male domination over women. However, Millett has argued that such power relations and gender inequalities can be contested and politicized, especially when patriarchy seeks to undermine women’s creative potential or simply render them irrational, uncivilized or ‘insane’, legitimating violence against them. This article aims to show a feminist vision of countering patriarchal authority as manifested in two novels by Virginia Woolf (British writer) and Margaret Atwood (Canadian writer). It explicates two divergent feminist responses to and contestations of the value and function of women’s art in countering patriarchal bias within two literary/historical contexts (modernism and postmodernism).

A preoccupation with gender issues in both Woolf and Atwood can be traced in other works not examined in this article because of space limitations. For example, Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood, 1985) addresses the deprivations women suffer under patriarchal political systems, including lack of control over their own bodies, denial of an equal chance of education, inability to vote, being barred from taking up certain jobs or owning property and thus being subservient to men and sexually objectified in state-sponsored repression. On the other hand, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is a modernist novel highlighting the reactions and impressions of events on a married Londoner, Clarissa Dalloway. Clarissa holds a party and entertains her guests, trying to live a fashionable lifestyle to ignore the frustrations of marriage and war. Looking for domestic security in life, she took a husband and chose to conform to conventional gender roles of housewifery and raising children. Yet, she continually felt lonely and depressed.

‘She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed’ (pp. 5–6). Marrying the man she did not love, the complacent Mrs Dalloway pursued social rank and pastimes and never seriously challenged social norms or gender roles. Hence, both writers are concerned with gender inequality and feminist themes in their oeuvres, and a fuller discussion of their other works can be insightful despite their differing times, contexts and approaches.

In fact, a perusal of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) affords many interesting correspondences between both texts. Both are essentially psychological novels foregrounding female characters who seek to salvage an identity and voice. While To the Lighthouse draws on the stream of consciousness technique and uses multiple points of view to project the theme of subjective time and the repercussions of the passage of time on the Ramsays and their guests, Surfacing (a psychological mystery tale of a daughter searching for her missing father) is a first-person linear narrative in the present tense with multiple flashbacks and an unreliable, self-conscious narrator. In Woolf’s novel, the setting is a summerhouse on an island in the Hebrides (the Isle of Skye), West of Scotland, and Surfacing also takes place on an island in northern Quebec, where the narrator spent her childhood in her father’s cabin and to which she returns with a group of ‘hippies’, shooting a random film. To the Lighthouse covers the time span of 10 years during which WWI unfolds. On the other hand, Surfacing hints at the American war in Vietnam as well as America’s international (imperial) politics.

Both novels dramatize death as a source of a heightened mental state necessary for spiritual and emotional rebirth—the death of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and the death of the narrator’s parents in Surfacing. While Lily Briscoe is a painter in Woolf’s novel, the narrator of Atwood’s text works as a ‘commercial artist’ or an ‘illustrator’ (p. 56). In To the Lighthouse, Lily finishes her art when she has her vision of Mrs Ramsay and completes her painting as the Ramsays fulfil the promised visit and reach the lighthouse. By contrast, the unnamed narrator in Surfacing destroys her art for her job, in order to break all attachments with the subsumptive authorities that dominated her life in the past and achieve, instead, a gratifying unity with the peaceful natural world. Both artists, it can be argued, ‘perform’ their gender identities in the act of painting, though differently in terms of conformity or contestation. In the words of Judith Butler (1988), in gender’s ‘very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status’ (p. 520). In line with Butler’s thought that gender is repeatedly ‘constructed through specific corporeal acts’ (p. 521), Woolf and Atwood make gender what we do rather than how we are born, which carries it to the level of the social, cultural and linguistic construction and counters patriarchal logic on biological essentialism or the sexed body. Hence, choosing to embrace art or renounce it can be deemed as divergent (performative) acts of responding to historical oppression.

Both novels have a tripartite structure. On the one hand, To the Lighthouse consists of three sections: ‘The Window’, ‘Time Passes’ and ‘The Lighthouse’. On the other hand, the three untitled parts of Surfacing can tentatively be the narrator’s homecoming to her childhood place, the search for her father and madness, leading to self-discovery. Much like To the Lighthouse in which Lily has a redeeming vision of a surrogate mother (Mrs Ramsay), the narrator of Surfacing has a vision of her parents and past life that enables her to face the world and reject superimposed systems of oppression. Nevertheless and despite such apparent similarities, the argument below stresses that the two novels constitute two distinct paradigms concerning the value and function of art in modernist and postmodernist literature. One paradigm (the hierarchical, purposeful modernist one dominant in the first half of the 20th century and embraced by Woolf) sees in art a source of order and meaning against chaos and transience. The other paradigm (the anti-hierarchical, playful postmodernist one dominant in the second half of the 20th century and embraced by Atwood) rejects this model by way of suspicion and scepticism, and in favour of personal salvation. In other words, art is not a totalizing grand narrative/myth in Surfacing inasmuch as it is in To the Lighthouse.

Modernists (in the early part of the 20th century) attempted to construct meaning and find coherence in the midst of chaos and waste. For them, art is one redemptive option, and using myth is another. T. S. Eliot, in his 1923 review of Joyce’s 1922 high modernist novel Ulysses, praises the Homeric mythical parallels Joyce employs and asserts that ‘[i]t is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (p. 177). Woolf herself in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1984) gives a deep and meaningful insight into her modernist poetics when she states that scholars should ‘record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’ (p. 161). Hence, she underscores an underlying pattern in the midst of fragments and behind disorienting experiences. In her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1966), Woolf gives what can be considered as her modernist manifesto when she claims that ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed’ (p. 320). This change in human relations in modernity was accompanied by shifting views on the nature of reality and a move towards impressionism and the depiction of inner lives rather than external realism. Modernists thus viewed experiences as fragmentary and in a state of flux. They sought meaning in a fragmented world through various means such as symbols, structural complexities and myths. They pursued form and coherence as a solution to the disorder and chaos of subjective experiences and found in art a uniquely creative product indicative of balance and stability. For modernists, meaning and value are still somehow possible.

Roughly in the second half of the 20th century and after WWII, postmodernists, by contrast, were sceptical about the unitary, subsumptive or totalizing logic. They instead embraced meaninglessness and discontinuity and believed in the impossibility of meaning and values. For instance, the French theorist Jean-François Lyotard (1979/1984), in his introduction to The Postmodern Condition, simply defines the postmodern as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (p. xxiv) caused by the progress of science and the ever-changing Enlightenment ideals. Postmodernists do not adopt hierarchies and fixed power relations. Rather, they subvert hierarchies and opt for chaos, disbelief and instability. Another French theorist, Jean Baudrillard, defines the postmodern in terms of fragmentary images, superficiality and depthlessness. Summarizing this position, Eagleton (1996) in The Illusions of Postmodernism argues that postmodern cultures ‘breed a degree of skepticism about the objectivity of truth, history, and norm’ (p. vii). In line with such views, the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson essentializes postmodernism in his book Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson, 1991) as an ideology of consumerism and post-industrial capitalism. Jameson asserts ‘Post-modernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process’ (p. ix).

In fact, Atwood’s Surfacing reflects the preoccupation of postmodern culture with consumerism, as the characters constantly consume canned food, cigarettes, coffee and fish. The narrator picks up ‘miscellaneous tins’ of imported food and bread in ‘wax paper wrappers’ (p. 28). The consumers populating the novel equally blame ‘capitalist bastards’ (p. 12) for the changes brought to the Canadian sociocultural milieu like the introduction of TV sets, electric stoves and seaplanes. The narrator herself sells poster designs and illustrations and discovers that her father’s drawings are simply replicas rather than originals (p. 11), and this explains the prevalence of ‘simulacra’ in texts reverberating with postmodern tendencies and critiques. With respect to narrative fiction, postmodern texts echo modernist contentions in being experimental or self-conscious, ‘using the techniques of modernist fiction while discarding its enabling assumptions’ (Richter, 2007, p. 1923; our emphasis). This schism between modernism and postmodernism in literature can be better understood if we consider how modernists and postmodernists view the theme of art in particular. The two primary texts analysed below elucidate such distinctions whereby one text accepts art as a source of hope and form while the other repudiates it in favour of more practical and individual alternatives.

Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: Redemptive Art

Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is a multidimensional modernist novel that raises questions pertaining to gender equality and women’s artistic productivity. The novel centres on the members of the Ramsay family and tracking their interactions with one another and with their guests at a vacation home over a long period. Overall, the novel foregrounds Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay, two dynamic female characters with an artistic potential. They have a number of commonalties, support each other and pursue divergent yet related strategies of breaking free of the shackles of patriarchy. Despite her initial hesitations and anxieties, Lily forges a nonconforming path for herself as an artist who can create beautiful art contra-instances of loss and prejudice.

As a quintessentially established modernist text, To the Lighthouse conforms to Woolf’s theorizing of modern fiction and character depiction promulgated in her critical essays. The novel endorses subjectivity and fragmentation, suggesting that there is no one way to see reality, but a multiplicity of scattered and yet interconnected narratives. It utilizes a disjointed narrative that provides for timeless moments in the lives of the characters, so life is nonlinearly seen in its exact flashes, moments and impressions rather than as a sequential whole. This artistic strategy is behind the ubiquity of fragmented thoughts and the use of a non-chronological structure.

Most scholars ignore comparative readings and interpret Lily, because of her rejection of the deep-rooted reductions of women as being irrational and emotional, as a reflection of Woolf herself. Curbing such reductive perceptions of women and echoing Lily’s struggle against the marginalization of women, Woolf writes, ‘Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death’ (cited in Sheehan, 2002, p. 121). Woolf transcends prejudiced gender-based systems of subsumption and refutes hegemonic cultural paradigms. As Briggs (2005) phrases it, ‘Lily’s experiences as a modernist artist struggling to express her vision recapitulate Woolf’s efforts to complete her novel’ (p. 178). In addition, many scholars endorse autobiographical readings of To the Lighthouse and view its characters as reflections of Woolf and her family members. They regard Mrs Ramsay as an inspiration to Lily’s artistic production and establish the points of convergence and divergence between both female artists.

Lily realizes that her painting may not be properly valued by others, but this does not thwart her relentless efforts to be an artist who can impart value and shape to an unstable life. She recognizes that both she and Mrs Ramsay generate form and meaning out of chaos. However, they try to make the fleeting moment permanent through art itself (Lily) or simply through the art of living this life (Mrs Ramsay). Groover (2014) underscores that the durability of Lily’s painting ‘derives not from the painting as artifact, but from its enactment of a sympathetic connection between self and other; like Mrs Ramsay’s dinner party, it creates “the thing…that endures”’(p. 227). Moreover, Bezrucka (2009) equates Mrs Ramsay, ‘the artist of life’, who is able to bring together diverse people and weld a harmonious whole out of them, to Lily, who ‘knows exactly how she wants her picture to be’ (p. 333). Munca (2009) contends that ‘Lily Briscoe is looking for images to inspire her and she inevitably turns to Mrs Ramsay’ as a primary source of inspiration (p. 277), which makes memory a vital source of empathy and affinity among female artists.

While Mrs Ramsay, under much pressure from her husband and from the society at large, seemingly conforms to the reproachful notions of women as mere housewives who are programmed to stay at home and sacrifice unconditionally, Lily, more unequivocally, contests and rids herself of the yoke of patriarchy and re-enacts a revolutionary identity for herself as a non-conforming artist. Albeit her seeming compliance with women’s confinements, Mrs Ramsay relates to Lily’s pursuit to go beyond the traditional limitations of women: ‘There was in Lily a thread of something; something of her own which Mrs Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared’ (p. 157). This admiration of Lily, who continues her way despite men’s blatant misogyny, demonstrates that Mrs Ramsay is aware of her underprivileged position in light of that of Lily. It also signals that ‘no man would’ approve of such an attitude of women who try to own their own space and cement an autonomous identity, one that debunks the patriarchal social structure and all systems of domination. Woolf warns against hegemonic forces that interrupt female artistic inspiration and thwart women’s attempts at liberation through art. For instance, Mr Ramsay envisions Lily as a troubled person because of her casting off gender constrictions. Lily sets her canvas upon the easel ‘as a barrier, frail, but she hoped sufficiently substantial to ward off Mr Ramsay and his exactingness’ (p. 125). Interrupted by the looming presence of Mr Ramsay, Lily takes ‘the wrong brush in her agitation at Mr Ramsay’s presence, and her easel, rammed into the earth so nervously, was at the wrong angle’ (p. 132). Mr Ramsay’s authoritative presence and his constant demands for sympathy distract Lily from her artistic endeavours, but she never gives up her faith in art.

Challenging Mr Ramsay’s pejorative stereotypes of women’s passivity and subordination, Lily denies his urgent demands (described in sexually predatory terms) for sympathy and thus demystifies his rigid perceptions of women. However, his presence (and even immediate absence), which is negatively portrayed as being ‘down on me in a moment’ still disrupts the completion of the canvas on which Lily is working: ‘The sympathy she had not given him weighed her down. It made it difficult for her to paint’ (p. 143). Counteracting the oppressive masculinist norms of the society that calls on women to show sympathy at the presence of men, Lily says, ‘no’, and ‘in complete silence she stood there; grasping her paint brush’ (p. 128). Here, silence, which at times outweighs speech acts, becomes a means of defence in the presence of a domineering male authority. It becomes her means of attaining autonomy and liberation, and just like art, silence entails order and stability.

Woolf underlines women’s right to a private space because it indicates internal and external control, one in which the artist can rise above the austerity of her surroundings. The dearth of such a self-contained space justifies the near non-appearance of a tradition of women’s writing and the scarcity of women’s articulate voices. More plainly, women can ‘think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone’ (p. 62). In this uncontested terrain, ‘There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability’ (p. 63). Much like Woolf in her critical averment that a woman needs a room of her own, Lily prefers loneliness to the company of people, for being alone clears her imagination and provides for an artistic muse usually hindered by the agents of patriarchy. Being alone away from any hampering male presence opens new doors for Lily’s memory and her artistic imagination. Hence, ‘sitting alone … among the clean cups at the long table, she felt cut off from other people, and able only to go on watching, asking, wondering’ (p. 123). In this sense, memory is a form of artistic self-sufficiency and inventive imagination.

Lily views painting as a wonderful creative process: ‘She took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air’ (p. 132). Further, the work of art in which she finds herself is timeless, and it remains alive in the memory of the artist regardless of time and space: ‘She remembered, she has sat there last ten years ago … and it had been knocking about in her mind all these years’ (p. 124). All these years, she had in her mind her experience at the Ramsay’s; yet, she is committed to her art in deciding to complete her painting despite the time lapse: ‘One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions… Still the risk must be run; the mark made’ (pp. 123–133). Lily keeps posing existential questions with respect to her place in this world. She asks, ‘What does one do? Why is one sitting here, after all?’ (p. 122). Both her inventive memory and her successful mastery of art endow her life with meaning. After a decade, Lily finishes her painting and substantiates the merit of her life despite the possibility of ignoring her art in an attic or in a servant’s room. This subversive strategy proves that she is not limited by men’s reduction of her. Rather, she inscribes herself a special niche irrespective of any ramifications, as she feels fulfilled when she has her artistic vision. Significantly, Lily completes her painting with the help of her good memory of Mrs Ramsay, and she has her vision as the Ramsays reach the lighthouse. Lily brings together different colours, shapes and lights in order to create something beautiful, stable or lasting from ephemeral experiences. Her picture, aided by her rich memory of Mrs Ramsay, is basically an attempt at order, stability and meaning. Lily invokes the ghost of Mrs Ramsay to finish her art quickly,

as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? She asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (To the Lighthouse, p. 189)

These empty steps symbolize the death/loss of Mrs Ramsay, which is echoed in the blurred canvas. The line drawn in the centre signifies the role of art in shaping memory and ordering experience. Mr Ramsay is ready to do anything in his power to prevent any reunification between Lily and his late wife by denying her access to her paintings in the lighthouse. Having refused him the sympathy after which he craved, Lily is prevented of any identification with his dead wife or with her former art: ‘You shant touch your canvas, he seemed to say, bearing down on her, till you’ve given me what I want of you’ (p. 144). This situation illustrates the underpinnings of Woolf’s sound feminist postulations that women’s financial independence is inseparable from their social and academic well-being, for hegemonic figures threaten to cut the resources of women when they say no. Aware of Mr Ramsay’s patriarchal attitudes towards women, Lily contemplates the kind of reaction expected from her. However, she settles on rejecting his urges and dismissing any distortions of women.

Lily declines Mrs Ramsay’s arrangements to marry her off to William Bankes because one could not take her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and Mrs Ramsay liked her for it; so, remembering her promise, she bent her head (p. 139). These contemplations traverse Mrs Ramsay’s mind while she is posing for Lily’s picture. There is much emphasis on Mrs Ramsay’s attraction to Lily’s strength and independency: ‘There was in Lily a thread of something; something of her own which Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared’ (p. 157). Definitely, there is a price for this self-assertion Lily enacts and Mrs Ramsay admires. She can only achieve this autonomy through distancing herself from this subsumptive society, one that pigeonholes women into the realm of the irrational or unlawful and thus normalizes oppression against them.

Conscious of the injustices on which marriage can be based, Lily shuns it in favour of art, preferring to paint as she finds herself in her art. Thus, when Mr Ramsay asks her if she had everything that she wanted, questioning her contentment with the manless path she carved for herself, she replies, ‘Everything’ (p. 127), affirming her satisfaction with the life she has forged for herself as an artist. Lily disapproves of the covenant of marriage as a kind of submission to male authority. This rejection is not a refusal of marriage per se but a protestation against the confinement of women artists.

In one of the most provocative moments in the novel, Lily ‘heard some voice saying she couldn’t paint, saying she couldn’t create’ (p. 133), and this turns to be the voice of the young philosopher Charles Tansley, who strives to put women down. She struggles with the reductionism entailed in this sexist comment stemming from a lack of a tradition of women writers, artists or thinkers, and yet, she continues with her art, proving the philosopher wrong and contradicting these widely held cultural curtailments of women. Counteracting Tansley’s exclusionary discourse, Lily produces a beautiful painting exactly at the same time Woolf concludes the novel, confirming that women can paint (Lily) and can write (Virginia). In a sense, she employs her positive memory of a fellow artist figure and woman (Mrs Ramsay) to produce enduring art and thus abort Tansley’s patriarchal logic. On the other hand, Tansley and Mr Ramsay hold negative stereotypes about women and their artistic potential. According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (2014), a stereotype becomes ‘harmful when it limits women’s or men’s capacity to develop their personal abilities, pursue their professional careers and make choices about their lives and life plans’ (para. 6). Patriarchal bias against women artists as inferior to their male peers falls under this category of detrimental gender stereotyping.

Like Lily, Woolf is herself a pioneering female writer who is concerned with the socioeconomic conditions necessary for women’s academic and artistic success. In A Room of One’s Own (Woolf, 1929), an extended essay on the causes of a lack of women’s literary history, Woolf’s contention is that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (p. 6). Woolf, who endured marginalization and felt dismayed at the near absence of opportunity for women in literature, brings into question the social orders that financially deprive women of the prerequisites needed to write fiction. She attributes women’s impoverished academic situation to the fact that they are not paid for the amount of work they do. Again, Tansley’s statement—teeming with biases and prejudices against women—is directed at talented women in general, but Lily (or Woolf) takes up the fight for all women. Hence, she paints to prove that women can excel in painting and other matters like writing.

Against a tradition of prejudice, Lily is aided in her unconventional endeavours by her bitter memory of Tansley’s harsh comments, yet her good memory of Mrs Ramsay. Lily’s art becomes a response to the passage of time apparent in the novel’s middle section and the losses caused by war as well as the chaos of life. Art is a source of order, meaning and value in the midst of change. It is what redeems Lily from men, pain and the passage of years. Her vision of Mrs Ramsay allows Lily to deal with emptiness and loss symbolized by the empty stairs Mrs Ramsay once occupied when alive. Hence, Lily has her fulfilling vision and completes her painting after 10 years with a single line down the centre of the canvas just as Mr Ramsay and his children successfully reach the lighthouse after the unsuccessful trip of 10 years ago when the weather did not allow for that. Sympathy and empathy among women prove productive for women as a source of intragender support. The line in the centre that completes the artwork of Lily signifies, for modernists, the redemptive role of art in bridging gaps and dealing with shifts and breaks.

Atwood’s Surfacing: Commercial Art

As it is the case with Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, comparative readings of Atwood’s novel are also scarce. Existing scholarship on the novel is mainly feminist (gender oriented) or postcolonial in nature. For example, Banerjee and Mukherjee (2017) argue that the main trope in Atwood’s text—a daughter’s search for her missing father—functions as ’a signifier for the search and reclamation of identity, roots and oneness with nature’ (p. 40). Another critic, Wright (2012), labels Surfacing as an instance of postcolonial Canadian literature (p. 223), enacting ‘shifting power dynamics’ and involving the indigenous people, the English, the French and the Americans (p. 224). In a poststructuralist fashion, Wright contends that breaking boundaries, barriers and surfaces enables the narrator to access ‘a new kind of dynamic awareness as she moves beyond the static and fixed world of binary oppositions’ (p. 214). Unlike Mrs Ramsay who seeks order in the midst of chaos, the narrator of Surfacing, like Lily, seeks to subvert established orders, norms and socially constructed institutions such as marriage and patriarchy.

Aside from the interpretations sampled above, the theme of art in Surfacing largely remains unexplored. Essentially, the unnamed narrator in this novel is an unsatisfied ‘commercial’ artist who unintentionally found herself doing such commercial work (being an illustrator) in order to find something to ‘sell’ (p. 56) and because she needs the money (p. 57). Reflecting on her current project of illustrating a book of Canadian folk tales, she remarks, ‘I do posters, covers, a little advertising and magazine work and the occasional commissioned book like this one’ (p. 56). She is an escape artist rather than a real artist revisiting her childhood place and finding in relevant memories an escape from her current fragmented life. She finds deep thought and harmony in nature as well as deep communication among birds and animals. She composes, for example, a rudimentary form of language in birdsongs while renouncing the communicative efficacy of art. She claims, ‘Linguistics, I should have studied that instead of art’ (p. 45). She is currently doing book illustrations for a children’s book called Quebec Folk Tales because she needs money. But she is not making much progress as a result of masculine demands and interventions. Much like Lily who faces obstacles completing her artwork owing to male intrusions and prejudiced attitudes, the narrator in Surfacing is distracted by her male companions David and Joe, who rely on her for food and shelter during their visit to her father’s island: ‘I’ve had the typescript three weeks, I haven’t come up with any final illustration yet. As a rule I work faster than that’ (p. 57). Wet papers (p. 61) or stiff fingers (p. 58) spoil the princesses she is drawing for the book of folk tales she is illustrating. Because of her hesitations and anxious nature, she ends up dissatisfied with the result and tries to work again.

The patriarchal world hinders her and dictates her artistic choices. Her ex-husband, for instance, believed that she should go into design and fabric patterns rather than real art because ‘there have never been any important woman artists’ (p. 56), which is reminiscent of Charles Tansley’s prejudiced comment in To the Lighthouse that women can neither paint nor write. Unfortunately, she even came to accept his position and believe that there have never been serious women artists (p. 56). Her male publisher Mr Percival objects to one of her scary drawings, not because children like to be frightened, but because it is their parents who buy such books (p. 57). Her reaction is one of submission to patriarchal, commercial culture: ‘So I compromised; now I compromise before I take the work in, it saves time’ (p. 57). Towards the end of the novel, she revolts against this docile role of women by rejecting the art of illustration altogether, unlike Lily, the traditional artist who embraces redemptive art as a way out in Woolf’s novel. Moreover, she discards to fire the ring as a symbol of male domination over her (p. 189) although she previously viewed it as a useful source of safety for ladies in patriarchal societies (p. 25). Much like Lily, she views established marriage as a form of imprisonment.

Diving into the lake, the narrator encounters no Indian painting sites as she expected from searching into her father’s papers, but a vision of death in the form of what she deems as her aborted baby (or alternatively her father’s corpse). This climactic vision is crucial for her subsequent deterioration and awakening:

It was there but it wasn’t a painting, it wasn’t on the rock. It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, 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. (Surfacing, p. 152)

Matching Lily’s difficulty with a blurred space on her canvas of Mrs Ramsay’s portrait that she tries to solve by moving the tree to the middle, the narrator of Surfacing has a blurred vision, confusing her memory of abortion with the corpse of her drowned father.

In contrast to Lily, the unnamed narrator in Atwood’s novel gives up her art in order to do away with the patriarchal past that dominated her life. Her drawings and book illustrations aimed at making money and thus satisfying her male publishers. In an attempt at purgation, however, she purifies her soul through burning such patriarchal past and all of its attachments. Alone in her father’s island cabin, she rekindles the breakfast fire to rebel against a constricting patriarchal capitalistic culture and the fears that have inhibited her:

I snap the catches of my case and take out the drawings and the typescript, Quebec Folk Tales, it’s easily replaceable for them in the city, and my bungled princesses, the Golden Phoenix awkward and dead as a mummified parrot. The pages bunch in my hands; I add them one by one so the fire will not be smothered, then the paint tubes and brushes, this is no longer my future. There must be some way of cancelling the Samsonite case, it can’t be burned. I draw the big knife across it, x-ing it out. (Surfacing, p. 189)

She also discards, in the fire, the ring her ex-lover gave to her (p. 189), which signals a disposal of an agonizing past and thus eliminating a traumatic history. She throws away books, glassware, blankets and parents’ clothes (p. 190). She also burns the album of her mother’s photographs (p. 190). Then she goes to the lake to complete her purification and thus emerges as a new woman: ‘When I am clean I come out of the lake, leaving my false body floated on the surface, a cloth decoy; it jiggles in the waves I make, nudges gently against the dock’ (p. 191). In her effort to rejuvenate, she achieves a complete unity with nature. And in the process of psychic healing, she has a vision of her parents. In particular, she dreams of the recurrent image of her mother feeding the birds, and thus giving to life rather than taking from it:

Then I see her. She is standing in front of the cabin, her hands stretched out, she is wearing her grey leather jacket; her hair is long, down to her shoulders in the style of thirty years ago, before I was born; she is turned half away from me, I can see only the side of her face. She doesn’t move, she is feeding them: one perches on her wrist, another on her shoulder. (Surfacing, p. 196)

While Lily was supported by the recurring, inspiring image of Mrs Ramsay in the window or on the steps of her drawing room reading to her youngest son (which allowed her to complete her artistic vision), the narrator in Surfacing has another maternal vision necessary for renewal and for breaking free from the shackles of male authority. She has to accept ‘the smell of loss’ she senses on her mother’s jacket as ‘irrecoverable’ (p. 186), which is a necessary step towards reconciliation and inner peace.

The narrator of Surfacing revolts against patriarchal demarcations, mechanisms and discursive violence. Her madness can be interpreted as a form of dissent against oppression and a step towards re-birth. She was entrapped or suffocated in a previous marriage/relationship and now seeks an escape. The misogyny she has endured for a long time is manifest in cases like the abortion and the gruesome killing of a heron by some male tourists (pp. 124–125). The narrative implicitly parallels patriarchal and imperial structures and juxtaposes the exploitation of both the female body and the Canadian landscape. As one critic succinctly put it, ‘Wåomen as well as countries are displaced and deterritorised: both women’s weak bodies and fertile lands are conquered and raped’ (Zidan, 2013, p. 130). In the words of critics Gautam and Sinha (2012), Atwood’s novel shows ‘men’s misuse and women’s use of nature’ (p. 3). While Lily in To the Lighthouse resorts to self-assertion and communion with female figures and surrogate mothers like Mrs Ramsay in her rejection of patriarchal figures, the narrator of Surfacing resorts to both natural surroundings and her memory of a repressed, painful past as a means of empowerment.

The hegemonic world in which Atwood’s narrator lives detracts attention from her job of illustrating books and threatens to make her mad. However, it is her rich memory together with seclusion and inspirational art that offers to redeem her. Her father’s interest in Native American art only enhances her memory of a painful past. However, her journey into the past teaches her that she should counteract and deal with this past before she can overcome it. She has to subvert patriarchal culture even at the expense of her illustrations. She dismisses her past life, including her career, husband and scrapbooks to liberate herself and move from feelings of guilt to hope and regeneration (pregnancy). She links women to spirituality and nature and men to aggression and abusive power. Ultimately, her difficult quest for freedom and peace ends with a strongly desired state, which accounts for the grail allusions in the text. According to Sue Thomas,

These grail motifs facilitate a reading of the narrator’s experience in Surfacing as a process of emerging restoration to spiritual health and reproductive, creative vitality. That restoration to health and vitality necessarily involves recognition of the extent and nature of the narrator’s malaise and the cultural conditioning of false values which produced it. (Thomas, 1988, p. 79)

At the end of the novel, and after many flashbacks, the narrator refuses to be a victim, deciding to be in control, and to reunite with her lover Joe. Unlike Lily Briscoe, she renounces art in favour of life. Inspired by her memory of her parents, she decides ‘To prefer life, I owe them [her parents] that’ (p. 202). Joe calls for her, and she, getting to trust him, reasons that he ‘won’t wait much longer’ (p. 208). Surfacing closes with an affirmation of life and a renunciation of conventional art dominated by men. The pregnant narrator is symbolically pregnant with life and hope. As opposed to To the Lighthouse which ends with the completion of an artistic vision necessary for the continuation of life, Surfacing concludes with a refutation of the restrictions imposed by art on women. Such disavowal, we have argued, demonstrates a dramatic shift between endorsing modernist views on art and sceptical postmodernist ones.

Conclusion

Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Atwood’s Surfacing focus on female protagonists in search of order and meaning in their lives, yet represent two dissident worldviews—modernist and postmodernist—in their take on art. Both texts engage with serious issues pertaining to memory and the passage of time in order to cope with past traumas or death. However, Woolf’s painter, Lily, adopts redemptive art against patriarchal restrictions to prove that women can write and create. This performative act of painting defies male authority and subverts any superimposed restraints on women. In a parallel vein, Atwood’s protagonist rejects the same patriarchal hegemony through getting rid of her job illustrations in favour of a fresh start in life, which is another conscious act of performing one’s gender identity. This dichotomy in reacting to art ranging between acceptance and repudiation can be understood in terms of the two theoretical frameworks the two novels utilize: modernism and postmodernism. The former finds in art an attempt to impose order and form on the flux of experience, transience and death. The latter model, characterized by incredulity towards permanent or fixed meanings, favours mini-narratives of personal salvation rather than art as an ideal. Both novels, however, should be praised for their feminist vision and sympathetic depiction of female artists resisting patriarchal logic and negative gender stereotypes.