Affective Cartographies of the Canadian North: Trauma, Embodiment, and Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Netflix’s Keep Breathing

Abstract

This article explores how Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) and the Netflix limited series Keep Breathing (2022) reimagine the Canadian North as an affective geography. Moving beyond representations of wilderness as a fixed geographical setting or a symbol of national identity, it argues that both narratives construct the North through embodied encounters with memory, trauma, and sensory experience. Drawing on spatial theory, phenomenology, affect studies, ecofeminism, and trauma theory, the article proposes the concept of affective cartographies of the North to describe landscapes that are continuously produced through the interaction of body, place, and emotion. While Surfacing imagines psychological transformation through descent, immersion, and the gradual resurfacing of memory, Keep Breathing reconfigures survival through movement, breath, and the search for home. Read together, the two works reveal complementary philosophies of survival articulated across different historical moments and media. By placing a canonical Canadian novel in dialogue with a contemporary streaming series, the article demonstrates how literature and audiovisual storytelling construct wilderness as an active participant in the formation, fragmentation, and reimagining of female subjectivity.