IDENTITY AND SPACE IN THE EARLY WORKS OF MARGARET ATWOOD: SURFACING AND THE JOURNALS OF SUSANNA MOODIE

Margaret Atwood identified her literary endevours with the study of (feminine) identity as early as 1961, when she published her first book of poetry, Double Persephone. Ever since identity and femininity have remained among the main concerns of her work The psychological quest for self-awareness was alternatively considered in the context of history, geography, culture, society and ecology. The quests in Atwood;s works most frequently feature feminine search for self-knowledge and are often related to geographical and social space of Canada. This essay traces the inscriptions of human thoughts in the images of the landscape in the early works of Magraret Atwood with the scope to examine how the landscape both breeds and reflects such categories as gender, identity and the sense of the self. In the novel Surfacing (1972) the quest for psychological harmony is figured as a physical journey through the wild land, while the poetry collection.The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) features a fictive journal of a Cannadian immigrant and her search for the self in a foreign land. In the poems of this collection Atwood examines how the landscape challanges the identity of the viewer and traveller and subsequently provokes her/his psychological transformation. As they describe the landscape of the new land in which Moodie travels and quests the lines of the poems reveal the stages of her transformation and the appropriation of a new identity. The relation between the psyche and the landscape will be analysed within the framework of Sigmund Freud and Jacque Lacan's theories of psyschoanalyses and culture.