Children and Childbearing

For a novel with essentially no children in it, it's kind of striking how often the twin topics of children and childbearing come up. The novel seems pretty preoccupied with (and ambivalent about) the power of the female body to conceive a child within it.

In certain cases, this power is presented as a burden, something to be protected against—and the protections themselves can be pretty dangerous, too, in the novel's world. For example, when the narrator and Anna are discussing birth control pills (which were a relatively new thing then), they trade stories about the horrific side effects that the Pill had had for them, including blurry vision and blood clots.

Anna seems angry and resentful at being expected to take on these risks to avoid pregnancy—and, too, at her husband's casual attitude about those risks (hey, it's not his health on the line):

"Bastards," she said, "they're so smart, you think they'd be able to come up with something that'd work without killing you. David wants me to go back on, he says it's no worse for you than aspirin, but next time it could be the heart or something. I mean, I'm not taking those kinds of chances" (9.23).

The narrator, for her part, envisions the Pill turning her into a "chemical slot machine" (9.24)—not exactly an appealing thought.

Although one could argue that a woman's control over pregnancy and its prevention is empowering, in Surfacing it's portrayed as potentially burdensome and even dangerous, placing lopsided responsibilities and risks on women.

Then, there's the novel's presentation of actually being pregnant and giving birth. Although we later learn that the narrator never actually had a baby, her "memories" of birth say a lot about how she initially views motherhood and maternity and the power it confers on women—or, rather, doesn't:

After the first I didn't ever want to have another child, it was too much to go through for nothing, they shut you into a hospital, they shave the hair off you and tie your hands down and they don't let you see, they don't want you to understand, they want you to believe it's their power, not yours. They stick needles into you so you won't hear anything, you might as well be a dead pig, your legs are up in a metal frame, they bend over you, technicians, mechanics, butchers, students clumsy or sniggering practising on your body, they take the baby out with a fork like a pickle out of a pickle jar. After that they fill your veins up with red plastic, I saw it running down through the tube. I won't let them do that to me ever again. (9.24)

So, yeah, in the narrator's view, pregnancy and birth are horrific, invasive processes.

We later learn, of course, that the pregnancy she remembers throughout the book actually ended with an abortion rather than a birth. Just as she associated her false memories of birth with being victimized and not in control, the narrator recalls not having the reins in her decision to abort, claiming it was her boyfriend's idea: "He said I should do it, he made me do it; he talked about it as though it was legal, simple, like getting a wart removed" (17.24). Then, "he expected gratitude because he arranged it for me, fixed me so I was good as new; others, he said, wouldn't have bothered" (17.24). The narrator's profound passivity in the whole matter is pretty striking—it's clear that she feels like she is completely powerless to control the situation, even though her body was the "battleground" for everything that was happening.

The novel refers frequently to the narrator's passivity and feelings of powerlessness, and the story of her abortion really highlights those qualities in a big way. Also, the narrator's references to maternity, birth, and abortion seem to draw attention to some potential funkiness and asymmetry in the sexual politics of the time, which may have played into her feelings of powerlessness…