I finally finished reading Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, thanks to the long holiday (Sidebar: In an effort to appease the nation, Arroyo declared Ninoy Aquino day a non-working holiday). As always, Atwood’s writing is lucid and poignant, and among her novels that I’ve read, Cat’s Eye is especially piercing.

The narrator in the novel is Elaine Risley, a female, although not necessarily feminist, surrealist painter. The story develops through Elaine’s recollection of her life, from her childhood in Toronto to her eventual relocation to Vancouver. She remembers her childhood, growing up before and after the war, her parents, her older brother, her childhood friends, her neighbors, lovers, etcetera. But most of all she remembers her oldest friend, Cordelia, her “best friend”/tormenter/anti-thesis/arch-nemesis.

Through the development of the characters of Elaine and Cordelia, the novel is both an exposition and a critique of several aspects of women’s social construction in patriarchal society. The primary exposition, I think, is how women are made to turn against each other very early on in our lives through institutions like the family, school, and the church.

In preschool, Elaine remembers how she found it strange that there were separate areas for boys and girls. She also reflects on how her relationship with her older brother changes as they both grow up, and although it’s made clear in the novel that the siblings remain close all throughout, Stephen’s character is Elaine’s glimpse into the the “other” world of boys, which is juxtaposed, subtly, with Elaine’s relationship with her childhood girl friends.

Cat’s Eye is like Mean Girls, 40’s version, crueler and more vicious because the characters are younger. The cruelty begins very very early on, when Elaine was merely six years old. In one chapter of the story, Elaine is playing with her friend, Grace–they were cutting out women from magazines and brochures, trying to visualize what their future bodies would look like through those images. Elaine “learns” in her initial interactions with Grace that there has to be something “wrong” with her so that Grace will like her. When Grace points out that there’s something in her body that she doesn’t like, Elaine learns that she also has to point to something in her body that she doesn’t like. Later on, two other girls join the group, and at this point the story introduces Cordelia, the Queen Bee in this clique of six-year-olds.

It’s described in the novel that Cordelia’s family is rather rich, relative to those of Elaine’s and the other girls, and this is, I think, is where Cordelia drew her power, although this is never explicity articulated by Elaine in her six-year-old voice. Cordelia eventually takes over the group and institutionalizes “improvement” days. Most of the time, it’s Elaine’s day to be “improved.” The exchanges between Elaine and Cordelia are biting, and as I was reading those parts I would literally wince, even cringe, whenever Cordelia would twist Elaine’s words so that she would have to be “improved.” If Cordelia asks a yes or no question and Elaine’s answer was “I don’t know,” Cordelia would say that she had to be improved. Elaine’s acts of improvement include standing alone against the school wall, scraping of her lips till they bled, and worse, peeling off the skin of her feet. When it isn’t Elaine’s day to be improved, she would participate in improving her other friends, and the six-year-old persona admits to feeling something good when her other friends are made to suffer what she has gone through, because in as much as Elaine didn’t like Cordelia, she also wanted her approval.

One gripping part of the story was when the girls were digging a hole in Cordelia’s backyard. Cordelia didn’t tell them what the hole was for, but the girls did as they were told. Elaine asked a question or said something that irked Cordelia, for some reason (I can’t remember what it was), Cordelia suddenly asked Elaine to go down the hole. Cordelia and the others sealed the hole and left Elaine for hours, until it was already dark. Elaine couldn’t explain why her friends left her trapped in that hole, and she actually thought that it was her fault that she had to be improved.

The most horrifying and crucial part of the story, which I also consider the turning/tipping point in both Elaine and Cordelia’s young lives, occured during winter, when they were 7 years old, (if I remember correctly). The girls were playing in the snow, and they seemed to be having fun until Cordelia thought Elaine was laughing at her for rolling down the snow. As they were walking on a bridge over a ravine, Cordelia grabbed Elaine’s hat and threw it down the frozen stream. With that, Cordelia dared Elaine to climb down the ravine to retrieve her hat, reminding Elaine that she had to retrieve it because her parents will berate her for losing it if she doesn’t. As Elaine was contemplating on what to do, she actually believed that Cordelia was “encouraging” her to do it, as a good friend would. So Elaine went down to retrieve her hat, but as she did the ice cracked and she fell in the ice-cold water. As she was sinking in the water and was desperately calling for help, Elaine realized that Cordelia and the others had already left. By some miracle and strong will, Elaine was able to survive that incident, but that was when she finally decided that she would no longer be friends with Cordelia.

Imagine if something like this happened to you when you were six years old. It would scar you for life, and that’s precisely what happened to Elaine. The second half of the novel details how Elaine tries to pull herself together from the traumas of her childhood. In the next few years Cordelia would reappear in Elaine’s life, through high school and every now and then through her college years, but in the years following the incident at the ravine, it was Elaine who turned into Cordelia. Cordelia, at the end of the novel, shrivelled up and made nothing of her life, while Elaine became a celebrated artist. The ending of the novel suggests that Cordelia committed suicide.

What strikes me about Cat’s Eye is how well Atwood was able to describe this vicious dynamics among girls, that even at a period in our lives when we are not yet conscious about these things, we are actually slowly being introduced to the concepts of insecurity and hate. At one point in the novel, Elaine articulates that she couldn’t even grasp the concept of “sisterhood.” Her experience with Cordelia was that memory looking over her shoulder in all her future relationships-with her parents and lovers, particularly, and her apparent inability to develop intimate friendships with other women.

Perhaps some people would read the novel as anti-feminist, because the resolution is very dark, even bordering on hopelessness. I would understand that kind of reading, however, I also think that the strength of Cat’s Eye is in its exposition, and the ending leaves it up to the readers to come to terms with themselves.

As I was reading the book, I was well aware that it appealed to me because I was reminded of my own experiences as I was growing up, and how I knew even at that time that something was wrong–I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly that was wrong. Now that I’m older I realize just how oppressive this society is to women, and I fear that this will not change unless we do something to reverse this. This is not a call for a liberal notion of  ”sisterhood” that is totally detached from other existing layers of oppression, such as class and race. But I think that a progressive reading of the novel is one which allows us to look at our own experiences, question our own positions, so that we eventually realize who/what the real enemy is. The novel is reflexive in that sense (Elaine’s paintings as representations of the women/women’s issues in  her childhood, is another aspect I think that suggests reflexivity on the part of Atwood), the novel tells us that we are Elaines, and we are also Cordelias, and we shouldn’t allow ourselves to fall into the trap of turning against each other because that’s precisely how patriarchy operates.

So with that out of the way, I’ve turned my attention to The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I must admint that I’m totally hooked, even though the book is unfortunately in the list of Oprah’s book club.

POST SCRIPT:

The title of the book refers to a special marble, the kind that literally looks like a cat’s eye when you peer through it. In the novel, the marble is used as a metaphor for Elaine’s life.