How Did Margaret Atwood Updates The Traditional Bildungsroman

Lynne Segal articulates that one way which literary feminism can be defined is through “women’s writing on the female bildungsroman form (Segal 120).” Surfacing by Margaret Atwood updates the bildungsroman form by mapping out the journey of a female protagonist as ‘anybody,’ who faces universal paradoxes and perils regarding the coming of age. Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are is a text about growing up into midlife while still carrying the weight of one’s own identity questions in relation to the world’s expectations. Atwood updates the traditional Bildungsroman form by using a marginalized women to represent ‘everyman.’ Munro similarly inverts the traditional Bildungsroman genre by using a woman to explore the deprecating question

However, the narrator comes back to life with society because for her the "alternative is death" (Atwood 191). In the article interview titled "Breaking the Circle," Margaret Atwood is interviewed by the author Rosemary Sullivan who argues that the story’s narrator realizes she cannot transcend her “human flaws” after her return to civilization, and that this realization does not mean the narrator has failed as a Bildungsroman protagonist (290). Atwood presents the heroine's decline from society, although mythic in it’s form (if wilderness hallucinations can be stretched to that) as a fantasy. Contrary to most mythic heroes, Atwood restrains the outcome of the protagonist’s voyage, explaining that the realistic inability to become apart of the world of the dead is a good thing that teaches her something new and gives her the push to create her own life (Sullivan 290). The underlying notion in this is that the heroine simply comes to terms with the strengths and weaknesses of her humanity, instead of finding from this mystical state of being, an ethical and absolute answer to her existential crisis. In this construct of ancient and mythic templates, Atwood depicts the human mind as it seeks out and forfeits falsehoods that may give it the opportunity to

For example, in chapter eight (regarding her brother’s drowning) she thinks that to be raised from the dead would mean she “would have known things most people didn't" (Atwood 174). To have learned something from being raised from the dead like she mentions is to characterize herself as ‘other,’ instead of a part of finite humanity. In this sense, it is almost offensive to deliberately alienate herself from the rest of humanity just because she would think she is better than the rest, and this is what she later does avoid. Her mystic and primitive experience helps her own up to her involvement in humanity's wrongdoing and corruption, she later understands this is inevitable when she says she is “powerless” and because of it nothing she can do “will ever hurt anyone" (191). Another example is when she states there are “no gods to help” her and that they are “questionable,” idealized, and provide only “one kind of truth” (189). This acknowledgement of the real world proves her own humanity has no “total salvation," and that the wisdom someone is able to return with from an experience into the mystical primitive world is always going to be incomplete