Female Chauvinism

...anna hasn't the least shred of dignity, and the sheer delight Ms...

...atwood has now absconded with the very image of the bell jar itself: "I believe that an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through the walls of his mother's stomach, like a frog in a jar...

...atwood deftly paints the barren wilderness north of Quebec, viewing the country neither in spectacular shades of technicolor, nor in harrowing black and white...

...Indeed, the absence of any sympathy, the cold pleasure evinced by these scenes, leave a reader with the impression that Surfacing is actually a self-congratulatory pat on the back...

...By repeating the same tired phrases, by sketching the same stereotypes in lieu of convictions, they risk serving neither their art nor women, only themselves...

...David's wife is no less one-dimensional: a passive, dominated painted-doll, anna puts her makeup on while her husband is asleep so that he'll never have to see her without it...

...No longer the butt of jokes told by third-rate comics, feminists such as Ms...

...Yet the story provides little groundwork for the nervous collapse...

...If anything comes to the surface in this thoroughly unconvincing novel, it is probably the need for those at the forefront of the Women's Movement to reassess their roles in respect to those for whom they would speak...

...I don't have time for him, I switch problems...

...all too quickly Ms...

...Her characters cease being people, and her deft strokes become those of a painter by numbers...

...One gets the sense that she is at home herself, and the writing rings with authenticity...

...the heroine is returning to the place where she grew up, in search of her missing father...

...Moreover, not satisfied with imitating Sylvia Plath in her first work, The Edible Woman, Ms...

...This is a very real difficulty that demands to be faced, yet it is not a new one-witness the crises in the careers of black writers like James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones and the path that each man took...

...atwood resorts halfway through the book to a plethora of symbols and images-as if by abandoning the cardboard characters and replacing them with a collage of abstractions, she can create a convincing account...

...Reach down for me, but it won't work...

...Devoid of any dramatic basis, the breakdown, when it arrives, is facile and inconclusive, compelling Ms...

...atwood's heroine thinks: "He puts his hand on mine, he tries that a lot but he's easy to get rid of, easier and easier...

...atwood would have it, a reverse catharsis that enables the heroine to transcend her former self...

...as in The Bell Jar, the narrator's perceptions of the events taking place around her are intended to produce a gradual detachment ultimately leading to a total breakdown or, as Ms...

...atwood to grope frantically for a resolution that adequately suggests the transcendance of self she is attempting to portray...

...These days, of course, this kind of conclusion tends to strain credulity in any case...

...Four people-the narrator, her lover, and a married couple-set out in an old luxury car for an isolated lake island in northern Canada...

...This assurance, however, is brief and unsustained...

...More significantly, this quivering mass of flesh is a disturbing indication of the author's attitude toward women-an attitude that may very well be at the root of the book's failure...

...Even in the hands of the greatest 19th-century authors-dostoevsky and Tolstoy, for example-it now strikes a false note...

...Sorry I blew my cool," he apologizes one paragraph later...

...Her feelings of going back to a spot that was never really her home, her observations of the minute changes wrought by time, contrasted with her companions' roles as tourists-all this is depicted with skill and felicity...

...The story begins smoothly enough...

...at every turn her characters are sacrificed to her ideas...

...The picture of a fetus enclosed in glass, once taken up, is driven into the ground...

...Perhaps recognizing this, Ms...

...The couple has gone to enjoy a vacation away from the city...

...atwood forces the issue, as though lacking the confidence to let her story develop on its own...

...they dwindle, grow, become what they were human," the book seems just plain ludicrous...

...atwood takes in describing her moans of "Jesus" when making love, or in recounting an incident when the two men stripped her and photographed her bellyflopping into the water, smacks of a kind of cruel condescension on the part of a woman who has "made it" toward one who has not...

...This animated cartoon is hardly aided by the pseudohip dialogue crammed into his mouth: "I'm not going to sit up and beg for a little third-rate tail," he declares after being refused by the heroine...

...atwood are in danger of being absorbed by the very society they (to quote the narrator) "refuse to be a victim" of...

...David, the husband, rapidly turns into your typical male chauvinist pig (for those who have read The Edible Woman his name used to be Peter), slapping his wife's ass at the slightest excuse, treating both women as combination sex-and-washing machines, flexing his virility for all to see...

...But when the climactic realization consists of "No total salvation, resurrection, Our father, Our mother, I pray...

...Eventually the plot is twisted out of shape altogether, and the novel's considerable lyric power is subverted-reduced to trite symbolism...

...But then I realized it wasn't the men I hated, it was the americans, the human beings, men and women both," the heroine observes...

...atwood apparently has yet to learn that good literature does not result from disguised political statements...

...or, on a wholly different level, Jean Genet's strange longing at the conclusion of Thief's Journal for a return to his former existence...

...One is left to speculate whether she has in fact "switched problems," or merely lost contact with them...

...It presents so simplistic a thesis about women in capitalistic society that the book loses any impact it might otherwise have...