Title Risking joy: possibilities of unhappiness in margaret atwood’s “surfacing”
Translation of Title Rizikuojant džiaugsmu: nelaimės galimybės Margaret Atwood romane „Surfacing“.
Authors Edmunds, Giedrė
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Pages 42
Keywords [eng] Margaret Atwood, Surfacing, affect, happiness scripts, feminist killjoy, Margaret Atwood, Sugrįžimas, afektas, laimės scenarijai, feministė nuotaikos gadintoja
Abstract [eng] Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing (1972), while producing rather few events in the conventional sense, tells the story of the narrator and protagonist’s affective conversion from complete emotional detachment to a highly sharpened sensitivity. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theorizing of the sociality of emotions and the affective labour of social scripts, this MA thesis explores how the representation of feelings in Surfacing are structured by social and gendered norms. To this end, I will argue that the affective attachments in the narrative work to conceal the normative powers as “truths” and draw the novel’s female characters into the illusion of a great deal of agency. By contrasting the female characters’ affective experiences and attending to the narrator’s suppressed memories, I will examine the effect generated by what Ahmed calls “happy objects” of marriage and motherhood. In so doing I will demonstrate that, by considering happiness as an affective attachment, the narrative reveals not only the limitations of the female characters’ life choices, but also the patriarchal violence which hides unacknowledged within the novel’s characters themselves. Significantly, the false narratives which the unreliable narrator tells herself and the reader protects her not only from the immense pain of the violent abortion, but also from confronting her own vulnerability and complicity with the gender roles of the post-war Quebec. As my analysis of the novel shows, in order to identify violent social structures and break their reproductive cycle the protagonist needs to attend to the negative affects and the history of agreements of which she is not necessarily conscious. Finally, I will reflect on how the novel’s open ending proposes to reconsider happiness as a sense of possibility.
Dissertation Institution Vilniaus universitetas.
Type Master thesis
Language English
Publication date 2026