SOURCE: "In Pursuit of the Faceless Stranger: Depths and Surfaces in Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm," in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1990, pp. 76-93.

In the following essay, Lucking discusses the motifs of depth and surface in relation to Atwood's "thematic concern with the quest for authentic selfhood" in Bodily Harm.

Margaret Atwood's recurrent use of the descent motif to dramatize her thematic concern with the quest for authentic selfhood makes her work a tempting target for explication in terms of the initiatory archetype as this has been analyzed by such writers as C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell. This aspect of her writing has come in for considerable attention on the part of critics who, like the novelist herself, experienced the impact of Northrop Frye's theories concerning the relationship between myth and literature in the late fifties and sixties. At the same time, the irony...