Cat's Eye is a 1988 novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood about fictional painter Elaine Risley, who vividly reflects on her childhood and teenage years. Her strongest memories are of Cordelia, who was the leader of a trio of girls who were both very cruel and very kind to her in ways that tint Elaine's perceptions of relationships and her world — not to mention her art — into her middle years. The novel unfolds in mid-20th century Canada, from World War II to the late 1980s, and includes a look at many of the cultural elements of that time period, including feminism and various modern art movements. The book was a finalist for the 1988 Governor General's Award and for the 1989 Booker Prize.
Contents
Explanation of the title
Elaine and her brother Stephen play marbles as children; Elaine keeps a prized possession, a cat's eye marble, in her childhood plastic red purse. The cat's eye later appears as a common motif in Elaine's paintings, linked with those she perceived to be an ally, although she does not remember why it is associated with those feelings. Elaine rediscovers the red purse years later, and as she looks through it, she regains all the memories she had lost: "her life entire".
Plot summary
Elaine's childhood story is told in the first person narrative in flashbacks with brief snippets from her present adult life.
After being lured back to her childhood home of Toronto for a retrospective show of her art, Elaine reminisces about her childhood. At the age of eight she becomes friends with Carol and Grace, and, through their eyes, realises that her atypical background of constant travel with her entomologist father and independent mother has left her ill-equipped for conventional expectations of femininity. Although initially awkward and naive of childhood politics and social structure, Elaine is accepted, even admired by her new friends. Her lifestyle, even now, is exotic to the others. Elaine, after fantasizing about having girl friends during her nomadic brief existence, begins to settle in and enjoy her new life and new school.
After her first full year of attending traditional grade school, during her summer break, her parents return her to their previous life of travel and insect exploration. After a four-month absence, Elaine returns home to her friends for the next school year.
Upon her return, Elaine finds the dynamic of her group has been altered with the addition of the new girl, Cordelia. Elaine is first drawn in by Cordelia but after a period, sensing her inability to recognize the cruelty, Elaine is bullied by the three girls, her supposed "best friends." The bullying takes place mostly in the form of a seemingly benevolent attempt by the three girls to 'improve' Elaines character and behavior. They seemingly try to educate her and display a constant disappointment in Elaine's inability to comply to their standards.
After mostly destroying any self-esteem Elaine has developed in her new life, she gradually becomes depressed and feels helpless, unable to stand up to them or rescue herself. She continually complies with the demeaning demands of the group and considers the worst transgression she could ever commit would be to tattle on her "friends," a sick loyalty nurtured and fed by Cordelia, who has two older sisters, apparently treating her in a similar manner. Elaine, despite her parents' concern, even accompanies Grace and her family to their church, which, to Grace's amazement and curiosity, is Elaine's first exposure to mainstream religion. Her newly found faith is tested when she continues to be poorly treated, even by Grace's mother.
Themes
Cat's Eye explores the construction of identity; it is written mostly as flashbacks, as Elaine reflects on the forgotten events of her childhood that shaped her personality and struggles to integrate lost aspects of her self. In Elaine's self-portrait, a pier glass reflects three little girls who are not in the painting, demonstrating their simultaneous absence from Elaine's past and their presence in who she has become.
Elaine's story is detailed in rich visualizations and descriptions of her art reflecting her childhood influences, not only by the trio of girls, but also by her rootless untraditional upbringing, and relationships with her parents who remain nameless and unidentified throughout the story; her genius brother and his strange ways and fate; her comforting secret alliances with the male gender; kind and stern female teachers; art instructors; peer artists; the media; motherhood and mid-life confrontation of self. The country of Canada itself also has a prominent role that acts as an additional character with her experiences in Toronto. The British monarchy is featured as a vivid childhood influence with a young Queen Elizabeth II's perceived bravery and aplomb after World War II.
Classification
According to Margaret Atwood the novel belongs to the genre she calls "Best Girlfriend". Atwood further explains:
In the last small while there has been a spate of novels by such leading writers as Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Gail Godwin and Alice Walker examining relationships between women – not the sisters, the cousins and the aunts, the grannies and mothers of books like Joan Chase’s During the Reign of The Queen of Persia and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, nor the lovers of the many novels featuring lesbians that have appeared since Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, but women bound together by ties more tenuous, though no less intense. Chums, as they used to be called.
The genre makes female friendship central to the thematic concern of fiction unlike traditional fiction that treated it as a fringe element. Atwood further emphasises: "girlhood - not childhood, that neutered term, but girlhood and girlish adolescence, when Best Girlfriends seem to mean the most," is what the fiction revolves around. Accordingly, Cat's Eye is an addition to that genre.
Allusions to Atwood's life
Atwood began Cat's Eye in 1964 but put away the novel until the late 1980s. By that time, her daughter was a teenager, and Atwood had had the opportunity to observe the social dynamics of a group of young girls and boys.
The book is sometimes seen as containing autobiographical elements. For example, like Risley, Atwood is the daughter of an entomologist. Atwood rarely, if ever, commented on the similarities directly. However, in Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, she explained that the story is in fact autobiographical, and that her evasion was partly because "the chief perp was still alive".