CAT’S EYE

1. CAT’S EYE Margaret Atwood

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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]

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]

7. 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]

8. 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]

9. 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.

10. 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]

11. 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]

12. 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]

13. 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]

14. 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.

15. 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

16. The Pageboy

17. 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.

18. 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”

19. 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]

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

21. 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 hearts have 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]

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

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

24. Marbles • BOWLIES –metal • AGGIES like marbles only bigger. • Waterbabies – with undersea filaments of colour suspended in them.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. 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.

31. Nightshade

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. 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.

37. 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.