"Cat's Eye"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines Margaret Atwood's novel "Cat's Eye" which depicts the powerful impact of girlhood on Elaine Risley, a middle-aged female artist who is incessantly haunted by her traumatic experiences as a young girl and her tormentor called Cordelia. It shows how Atwood has succeeded to capture the devastating effects of the traumatic girlhood and manages to presents convincingly the dynamics of the relationships forged between the young girls, which ultimately degenerates into something sinister and terrifying. It discusses how by vividly recreating the memories of the past through an artist's perspective, Atwood shows the lingering scars on the middle-aged woman who cannot shed her past.

From the Paper:

"From the very beginning, Atwood defies the chronological concept of story telling by thrusting the readers into the past and the present. By doing so, she recreates powerfully the experience of the middle-aged Elaine whose mind is suspended between the past and the present as she walks on the streets of Toronto. Obsessed with the image of Cordelia that she conjures and manipulates in her imagination (Atwood 6-8), she has the air of an eternal outsider looking at the world around her as though she were from a different planet. She is distanced from the people around her, deliberately "[looking] down at the sidewalk, like a tracker" (Atwood 9)."

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