Cabin Fever in Literature: Atwood's Surfacing

(Image: Pix Elate)

Jax-

I happened to be in the middle of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing when we started this blog, and it is oddly apt. It's about a 20-something girl in the 1960s who returns to the family home to find her disappeared father--and home happens to be a minimal, naturalist cabin accessible by lake. Thought the photo above was what the cabin might look like if it were near Miami. 

Anyway, this passage struck me. The girl suspects her father might have gone mad living in isolation at the cabin: 

Total derangement. I wondered when it had started; it must have been the snow and the loneliness, he'd pushed himself too far, it gets in through your eyes, the thin black cold of midwinter night, the white days dense with sunlight, outer space melting and freezing again into different shapes, your mind starts doing the same thing. The drawing was something he saw, a hallucination; or it might have been himself, what he thought he was turning into. 

A good reminder of why we're doing this .... so that fate doesn't befall the members of the Society!