beings. She returns to the undeveloped island, Northern Quebec, where she had grown up to find out her missing father ,accompanied by her present lover, Joe, and a married couple, Anna and David. In the process, she unmasks the dualities and inconsistencies in both her personal life and her social life of patriarchal values. Through the struggle to reclaim her identity, a psychological journey begins that leads the protaganist into the natural world ,thereby, realizing the gap between her natural self and her artificial construct .The ecofeminist impact is seen implicit in the novel by the protagonist‘s return into the natural world. Her association with nature raises her consciousness of the victimization towards women. Like a true ecologist, she makes the Earth her literal home for…show more content… ‘ The dark torpedo shapes of the fish are seeing it, sniffing at it, prodding it with their noses. I believe in them the way other people believe in God: I can’t see them but I know they are there.’(p78)
‘ I was disappointed in myself: I must have been a hedonistic child, I thought…, also interested in nothing but social welfare. Or perhaps it was a vision of Heaven’(p116)
The work similarly echoes with the structure of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, as the narrator travels by a car back to her birth place in search of her missing father. The work has also been compared to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar as Plath's Esther Greenwood and Atwood’s unnamed narrator are both driven to psychological breakdowns due to their unwillingness adhere to the social expectations imposed on women by patriarchal society.
As the church imposed things on women in the novel:
….”the women had to wear long concealing skirts and dark stockings and keep their arms covered in church. Shorts were against the law, and many of them lived all their lives beside lake without learning to swim.
