Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood, 1972
Cat’s Eye is a book about retrospect. Elaine, a woman in her middle age, returns to her hometown of Toronto for an art gallery thrown in her honor. The art gallery gives the book a sort of meta quality, as it is done in a set of portraits which we later find is how the novel is formatted (split into fifteen parts).
Elaine (based on Margaret Atwood herself) is peeking back on her life in retrospect through these retrospective portraits—each part of the novel narrates a phase or a time in her life. What’s notable here is that through language, instead of art, she is essentially creating portraits of herself and seeing herself anew. This is my big takeaway from Cat’s Eye—the way that retrospect changes things. Despite her objective tone, Atwood shows the way her childhood self was mistreated and the way she sees it now. The novel oscillates between the portraits of her growing self against her present-day adult self to show the way the mistreatment in her youth created a perpetual sense of self-consciousness and self-criticality.
The narrative begins where Elaine’s earliest memories start as a young girl, and they stretch up until her second marriage. Her first memories are from before settling in Toronto. Most of her childhood is spent nomadically during the Second World War. She has fond core memories of playing in the woods with her brother (older by a few years) and sleeping in tents with their parents before settling in a house of “post war mud” when her father lands a job as a zoology professor. They are known in the neighborhood as a quirky, poor, irreverent family. Elaine is a product of her environment: ungraceful, awkward, and boyish.
The bulk of the novel depicts her friendships with the girls from school: Carol, Grace, and Cordelia. Being friends with girls is new to her—before living in Toronto, she was home schooled with only her brother to play with. Suddenly it’s fun to be girlish. Girls act coy and play dress up and compliment each other’s hairstyles. It’s much easier than playing in dirt. Quickly, however, her friends note her difference. They are wealthy, prim, elegant, and she (at least in how she perceives herself) is not; they are experienced in girlhood while, again, she is not.
Cordelia, the leader of the pack, inducts Elaine as the perpetual scapegoat. The other girls report to Cordelia about everything Elaine does “wrong.” Together they chastise and “punish” her, which is done in mostly little ways, such as making her walk behind them on the sidewalk or leaving her out of playtime. Eventually the game goes too far; they have her fetch her hat in the frozen ravine, where she hallucinates and nearly drowns. Following this, before entering middle school, it hits her that she doesn’t have to, nor want to, be their friend. Their friendships fizzle out, the other girls change schools, and Elaine mostly forgets them until years later when Cordelia returns (after being kicked out of catholic school) and her mother requests the girls make it a routine to walk together to the bus stop. Elaine comes to see Cordelia differently. Their dynamic shifts as Elaine grows and Cordelia grows more troubled.
At the beginning of each separate part (again there are 15), we are returned to the present day. While in Toronto for her art gallery she is staying at the unoccupied studio apartment of her ex husband. The women who are setting up her art show are young and pretty and they appear artsy, while she, the artist, doesn’t. She is tense and insolent and rude being the elder woman.
If the novel were adapted to the screen, there would be many shots of the 50 something year old woman walking down the street reminiscing about old buildings and noting what has changed in thirty years. This is why Cat’s Eye has not to my knowledge been adapted to the screen: it is incredibly internal. It is so internal that when she cheats on her current husband with her ex husband, it is done fluidly and rationalized so innocuously that we don’t actually feel like an injustice has been done. Nostalgia is a crucial piece of retrospection.
Elaine tends never to sympathize with herself. This can be related to the bullying in her youth, but we see how it bleeds into her adulthood when she is groomed by her first art professor in college. He takes her virginity and is very needing of her, which she likes until she realizes he is only deeply miserable. She is the other woman. He’s possessive and has sex with her even when she’s not fully awake. For years she doesn’t mind this, until she meets her first husband Jon and chooses to be with him because he’s the professor’s total opposite.
The thing about Jon is that he doesn’t need her at all. He is a cheater, but they have fun together. Despite having a child, Elaine doesn’t feel like a mother, nor a wife, nor an adult. It is as if she is faking it all. Her imposter syndrome is defining and detrimental. Their divorce is quite anti-climactic, which is nice because so is their sex when she cheats on her current husband with him in the present. It’s as if it isn’t a big deal to the novel. She makes a note about how there’s no stakes with Jon. This is something that never changes. The divorce happens when her art begins to take off. After it’s confirmed that he cheats on her (which she’s already known), she goes to an art show in Vancouver and from there she is single again. She meets Ben, her current husband, and she finds comfort with him. It is all very normal.
More interesting than her retrospection on her romantic relationships is her retrospection of Cordelia, who she keeps returning to. Cordelia is the reason for her imposter syndrome. Her entire youth was spent trying to earn Cordelia’s approval, until they meet again as teenagers and there is a change. With Elaine’s impending self-awareness, she is able to see that Cordelia is worse off than Elaine ever was. The last active scene with Cordelia is a visit to her in the psych ward. Cordelia requests Elaine’s help to escape, but Elaine doesn’t help her.
The novel’s end is Elaine is flying home after her art show, where she had an episode with her past, being tortured by thoughts of the girls who bullied her (which the paintings reflect). She expects Cordelia to walk into the art show, but Cordelia doesn’t show. Elaine cries. This may be the most emotionally charged she is through the whole novel—more so than the scene in which she tries to commit suicide during her marriage with Jon.
Through the novel, Elaine does not change. She is sentimental about her past in the beginning the same way she is at the end. This is her life—to regard her past as the past, but to regard it often, as her past. On the plane home, Elaine is stuck regretting that she and Cordelia could not grow old together. It is as if Cordelia was a good friend after all. Again, retrospect changes everything. Suddenly, Elaine was the bad friend.
5/5. This book is for the thought daughters. Trigger Warnings: self-harm, suicide, abortion, religious trauma, bullying, grooming.
The real highlight of these book is the writing, see attached are my favorite quotes:
We’re impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen.
In my dreams of this city I am always lost.
“Big hugs,” I said into the empty space.
They tell Cordelia there are some things she’s too young to understand, and then they tell these things to her anyway.
When we bend our heads to pray I feel suffused with goodness, I feel included, taken in. God loves me, whoever he is.
In the moment just before giving, I am loved.
This must be what my own backbone is like: hardly there at all. What is happening to me is my own fault, for not having more backbone.
My laughter is a performance, a grab at the ordinary.
For a long time, I would go into churches.
Cordelia, I think. You made me believe I was nothing.
Occasionally I do cry for no reason, as it says you’re supposed to. But I can’t believe in my own sadness, I can’t take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.
She’s balanced on the ledge of an artificial hilarity that could topple over at any moment into its opposite, into tears and desperation.
I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea.
She would lie on the floor, moaning, hanging on to Mr. Hrbik’s legs, her hair falling like bland seaweed over the black leather of his shoes (he would have his shoes on, being about to stalk out the door).
On sundays we sleep late, make love, go for walks, holding hands.
Whatever has happened to me is my own fault, the fault of what is wrong with me.
Grace’s hands are fists, her fatted chin is trembling, her eyes are pink and watery, like laboratory rabbits. Is that a tear? I am aghast. She is making a spectacle of herself, at last, and I am in control.
He calls long distance, his voice on the phone fading in and out like a wartime broadcast, plaintive with defeat, with an archaic sadness that seems, more and more, to be that of men in general. No mercy for him, the women would say. I am not merciful, but I am sorry.
Because I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came out of me. I’m what’s left over.
I’m not like this in other places, not this bad. I shouldn’t have come back here, to this city that has it in for me. I thought I could stare it down. But it still has power, like a mirror that shows you only the ruined half of your face.
We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key.
This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
