Beyond the Logic of Solidarity as Sameness: The Critique of Animal Instrumentalization in Margaret Atwood'sSurfacingand Marian Engel'sBear

Abstract

The question of how to stand in solidarity with the animal and respect its “divergent agency” (Plumwood 201) without instrumentalizing it as an extension of the human self is one that has long preoccupied Canadian writers. In her seminal work of literary criticism Survival, Margaret Atwood observed that Canadian literary texts often rely on images of suffering animals as symbols of Canada's status as a “nearly-extinct” nation threatened by American imperialism (Survival 95). According to Atwood, such representations are driven not by a genuine concern with conservation ethics or animal agency but by a compulsion to police the integrity of the national self against external cultural others. In Surfacing, Atwood ironizes this logic of incorporation through the figure of a nameless narrator who attempts to consolidate her individual and national selfhoods by aligning herself with animal figures whom she regards as victims of American imperialism. Confusing human–animal solidarity with human–animal sameness, Atwood's narrator eventually feels herself morphing into an animal. Her transformation is ironized, however, by revelations of her own complicity in the colonization and exploitation of the very animals with which she identifies. Marian Engel's Bear similarly dramatizes the dangers of confusing human–animal solidarity with human–animal sameness, highlighting the political and ethical implications of this instrumentalizing logic: the protagonist's identification with the title character of the novel, Bear, often borders on a dynamic of indigenization that echoes troubling episodes of Canada's settler–invader history.