CAT’S EYE

CAT’S EYE

Margaret Atwood

The Author

• Like Risley, Atwood is the daughter of an entomologist.

• Known as a feminist writer.• Her formative years in 1950s & 1960s in

Toronto. • Born 18/11/39• Among most honoured authors of fiction in

recent history.

Margaret Atwood

• Spent much of childhood in backwoods of Northern Quebec.

• Attended school fulltime from 11 years old.• High School – Leaside, Toronto until 1957• Began writing at 6 years old. • Decided to be a writer at 16.• English Masters from Harvard’s Radcliffe.

IRON LUNG

• “Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”

• Brother Stephen

• “You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water.”

• Elaine Risley

Winter Saturdays -Toronto

• Cordelia & Elaine in a streetcar – conspiratorial agreement on the definition of Time. “So?” [pg 4 ]

• If to meet Cordelia again what would E. tell her?

• “The truth, or whatever would make me look good?” [pg 6]

Possible scenarios

• Dying – unconscious• Iron lung – a threat• “She is fully conscious, but unable to move or

speak.” [pg 9]• Ignore her• Hug her• Shake her? [pg 9]

SILVER PAPER

• Hates Toronto.• “Malicious, grudging,

vindictive, implacable.”

• “In my dreams of this city I am always lost.”

• 2 grown up daughters, Sarah and Anne

• Lives in B.C. as far away from T. as I cld get without drowning.

• Husband - Ben, travel agent, Mexico.

• I am a painter more like a valid job than artist - embarrasses her.

• [pg 14 & 15]

Jon – first husband

• Staying with Jon – prefers the “shedding and disorder and personal dirt of people like myself, people like Jon. Transients and nomads.” [pg 17]

• “We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.” [pg 18]

Art Gallery visit incognito

• “Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgment. I have to work up to them.” [pg 21]

• Poster: Risley in Retrospect• Defaced with a moustache.• A public face, a face worth defacing.

Peripatetic lifestyle

• 8th birthday in a motel• Box Brownie camera• Wants silver paper out of cigarette packages.• Wants balloons• Wants some girlfriends.• “Never had any girl friends because I’ve never

been in one place long enough.” [31]

NESTING

• New house out of mud.• Dad marks at night.• Saturdays at Zoology bldg – Dad’s work.• Watch first Santa Parade from there. • New dimension to Santa now – associated

with snakes, pickled eyes, …..[43]

EMPIRE BLOOMERS

• Vancouver – suicide capital of the country.• Elaine feels she is without worth.• “What do you have to say for yourself?

Cordelia used to ask. Nothing, I would say.” [47]

• Changing room cubicle – retrieves wallet. • “Damn you, Cordelia! ….But Cordelia is long

gone.” [pg 51]

Queen Mary Public School

• Separate doors and separate parts of the schoolyard for boys and girls.

• Left to girls – “but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.” [pg 55]

Carol Campbell

• Only school bus girl in her grade. • A stubby girl with a frequent laugh.• Pageboy haircut.• C. & sister having matching outfits for

Sundays. • Big wardrobe• Piano in forbidden living room.• Her parents.

Gossip

• Carol tells all:• Family sleeps on the floor.• Exotic specialities – eating off card table, etc.• “She wants herself to be marvelled at, for

revealing such wonders. It’s as if she’s reporting on the antics of some primitive tribe: true, but incredible.” [pg 57]

• Gossip: not necessarily cruel, but is used by women to show knowledge

The Pageboy

Carol’s other best friendGrace Smeath

• Pointed out as an object to be admired. • A year older, in the next grade up.• Play is mostly Grace’s ideas.• “She gets her own way in everything.”• Movie star colouring book. • Paper-doll cut-outs.• Play school – Grace always the teacher.

Playing with the girls• “Playing with girls is different and at first I feel

strange as I do it, self-conscious, as if I’m only doing an imitation of a girl. But I soon get more used to it.” [52]– Gender comes across as a construct (Elaine is learning

how to be a girl)• Grace’s play and attitude is filled with

conventional feminine behaviours that are passive aggressive rather than confrontational:– “if we try to play anything she doesn’t like she says she

has a headache and goes home…She never raises her voice, gets angry, or cries; she is quietly reproachful, as if her headache is our fault”

• Play is linked to feminine identities of the 40s and 50s– Dress-ups– School (most teachers were women; it was one of the only

“legitimate” professions available to them)– Materialism of post-war America is reflected in the

“accumulation of objects” [53] (the war had disrupted earning, some women left the home to work, now they returned to their proper place as “happy homemakers”)

• Women seem to be set up as false. The way Ca and G behave implies that society expects women to be modest to the point of making them into liars:- ‘“Oh, yours is so good. Mine’s no good. Mine’s awful.”

They say this everytime we play the scrapbook game. Their voices are wheedling and false; I can tell they don’t mean it, each one thinks her own lady on her own page is good. But it’s the thing you have to say, so I begin to say it too” [53]

Materialism

• “I begin to want things, I’ve never wanted before.”

Mrs Smeath• Bad heart – has to take pm rests.• This weakness is turned into an ad-

vantage by Grace and Mrs Smeath (you get your own way): “Bad heartshave their uses” [57]

• Views twin sets with contempt.• No make-up• Print housedresses.• Moustache, smiles but doesn’t laugh. Joyless• Memory – “Lying unmoving, like something in a

museum” [58]• “Why do I hate her so much?” [68]

MARBLES

• Cat’s eye – “clear glass with a bloom of coloured petals in the centre, red or yellow or green or blue;”

Marbles

• Puries – flawless like coloured water or sapphires or rubies.

Marbles

• BOWLIES –metal

• AGGIES like marbles only bigger.

• Waterbabies – with undersea filaments of colour suspended in them.

Cat’s Eyes

• Elaine examines new ones alone, “turning it over and over in the light.”

• The cat’s eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats.They’re the eyes of something that isn’t known but exists anyway;”

• “My favourite one is blue.”• “I risk my other cat’s eyes to be shot at, but not

this one.” • It comes to symbolise hope and the part of

Elaine that cannot be touched by the bullies. It can also symbolise how others see her.

CORDELIA• Taller than Grace & Carol• Wears corduroys & a pullover. Not as overtly

feminine as the othet two.• Thin without being fragile• Top lip a little skewed, as if it’s been cut open and

sewn up crooked. A broken mouth, out of which comes poison.

• Smile like grown ups learned, doing it out of politeness. An actress with the name of Shakespeare’s most honest character.

• Wants to shake hands.

Cordelia’s games• She has the power to belittle or include• Dress up costumes.• Act out plays – C. directs.• Feeling of inadequacy at home transforms into a need to control

others?• Memories connected with blood from Part I – red liquorice, penny

gumballs, orange popsicles – are introduced with Cordelia [74]• Foursome walking home. Cordelia points out weeds and Deadly

Nightshade. “Cordelia points out if you want to poison someone this would be a good way”. Infer a mean or morbid mind?

• knows a lot from older sisters, Perdie & Miranda• Cordelia is the only sister named after a tragic heroine. Her harsh

words contrast with the gentleness of Lear’s Cordelia.• Cordelia is immediately linked with the forbidden ravine – dead

people story, disappearance of the flower meals.

IV: DEADLY NIGHTSHADE• Galleries are too much like

churches• Painting of Mrs Smeath

done 20 years earlier – Rubber plant: The Ascension. Is Elaine mocking Mrs Smeath’s sense of martyrdom?

• Both Mrs Smeath and the plant are “distanced” from life. One is gazed at from behind glass doors, the other is forbidden to be touched.

Interview• Elaine feels uneasy. Is conscious of scrutiny.– I should be grateful, these women are on my side...but I still

feel outnumbered, as if they are a species of which I am not a member

• Elaine can’t wait for Jon’s return - from here he looks like relief.• Andrea checks out the powder-blue jogging suit. • Very uncomfortable with interview.• Is she a realist or cynical about her fame? – Fame is Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage. This stuff is just a media

pimple.• Elaine resists “conventional” feminist interpretation, possibly

because these women still see her gender before they see her.

9 year olds at play• Cordelia’s dug hole: a morbid mind, or just play?• Elaine as Mary Queen of Scots – headless already. How can

this be “play”?• Trapped in hole, soil thrown over top– I feel sadness, a sense of betrayal. Then I feel the darkness

pressing down on me; the terror.• This foreshadows the ravine, and is a turning point in the

relationship between the girls as it marks the beginning of Elaine’s victimisation. She sees it as The point at which I lost power.

• The fact that she can’t remember her ninth birthday party suggests to readers that the months following her premature burial must have been traumatic.

Nightshade

Wrong memory

• Nightshade…It’s a dark word. • Nightshade is a common weed. • But the flowers, the smell, the movement of the

leaves persist, rich, mesmerizing, desolating, infused with grief.

• Nightshade can symbolise deception, danger, and death.

• Symbolises Cordelia and the bullying Elaine receives at her hands.

V: WRINGER• Materialism – shop windows & disgruntled

mannequins. I guess this is the look now: surly aggression. These are echoes of Cordelia.– Cordelia with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, her

eyelids half closed, trying for sultry. Ultra –sharp.

• Anti-ageing products – a religion. Voodoo and spells. – I’d use anything if it worked [to]…stop the drip drip of time,

stay more or less the way I am.

• Children’s clothing section and tartans recalls the little girls with their assessing eyes, their slippery deceitful smiles, tartaned up like Lady Macbeth.

VOODOO• In the endless time when Cordelia had such power over me, I

peeled the skin off my feet.• Recalls part III: Cordelia tells the others that the juice of

nightshade berries could turn you into a zombie. Cordelia’s poison has made Elaine into a zombie.– Skinned her own feet– Gnawed her hair and nails

• She physicalises the emotional torment Cordelia puts her through. Also, this is pain she is able to control herself.

• Elaine compares her own girls – they seem sane, her saving graces. They are not the helpless, evasive girls Elaine grew up with.

Santa parade from Museum• Separate window ledges; Cordelia, Grace and Carol

aren’t talking to Elaine. Ostracisation. – When I’ve guessed the right answer, then they will speak

to me again.

• How can she guess the “right answer” when the rules keep changing?– Everything will be all right as long as I sit still, say nothing,

reveal nothing. I will be saved then, I will be acceptable once more.

– Instead, she gets this response from Cordelia: How could you?...You know what this means, don’t you? I’m afraid you’ll have to be punished.

• She tries to play by the rules, but there are none.

BULLYING• At age 9, Elaine scrutinized her daughter’s

fingers for bites, their feet, the ends of their hair.

• So anxious that they are being harrassed.• Once her daughters reached adolescence –

sighed with relief.– Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To

one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Bullying• Sometimes takes the form of twisted

deportment lessons as they stalk Elaine– Stand up straight!– Don’t hunch over– Don’t move your arms like that.

• The confusion of bullying within “friendships” - With enemies you can feel hatred, and anger – and how victims justify what happens to them: But Cordelia is my friend. She likes me, she wants to help me, they all do…I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please.