ECO-FEMINISM IN MARGARET ELEANOR ATWOOD’S 'SURFACING' (Pages 302-313) by Ms. T. Ramya in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Margaret Atwood has been labelled as one of the most important writers of contemporary literature and she has often also referred to as a feminist and environmental reverberator by critics. She is an international best-seller and the winner of more than 50 literary awards, including the prestigious Booker Prize for Literature, as well as Canada’s own Governor General’s Award for both her fiction and her poetry. Her Surfacing reveals the politics and highlights the problems of the postmodern society. The nameless narrator of the story returns to the undeveloped island that she grew up on to search for her missing father by unmasking the dualities and contradictions in both her personal life and her male-controlled society. It is generally observed in almost all her works that Atwood’s novels reflect a world that oppresses and governs both femininity and nature. And thus this paper attempts to focus on how the protagonist in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing retrieves her identity and roots through the struggle by tracing the eco-feminist theory in three specific ways: through the references to patriarchal reasoned dualities between the masculine and feminine world; through the domination and oppression of the feminine and natural world, and through the Surfacer's own internal struggle and re-embracement of nature. The construction of dualities is also a focal point of this paper both in the eco-feminist movement and in the novel Surfacing. Keywords: Margaret Eleanor Atwood, Eco-Feminism, Contemporary literature, Feminism, Surfacing.