SOURCE: "'After the Failure of Logic': Descent and Return in Surfacing," in her Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978, pp. 91-115.

In the following excerpt, Rigney discusses the theme of discovering the self through descent and return in Atwood's Surfacing.

It is inevitable for Margaret Atwood's nameless protagonist of Surfacing that there should occur a "failure of logic," for her journey "home" is an exploration of a world beyond logic. Her quest, like that of Jane Eyre, Clarissa Dalloway, and Martha Quest Hesse, is for an identity, a vision of self. She must find that self—not only through the father for whom she searches the Canadian backwoods, but also through the mother for whom she must search in the depths of her own psyche.

Atwood, much like Virginia Woolf, juxtaposes and compares two internal worlds: the world of the male...