"Cat's Eye"

Book Review # 99976

English > Analysis
Literature > Canadian

"Cat's Eye"

This paper examines the core question, in Margaret Atwood's novel "Cat's Eye", about how how women can find a place in history, given that being female is essentially to be excluded from history.

2,865 words () | 1 source | MLA | 2007 United States

Paper Summary:

This essay shows how the character, Elaine Risley in "Cat's Eye", investigates Christianity, with the hope of finding an identity and a history. The paper then looks at how Christianity fails Elaine and the strategies she employs to use religion and religious motifs to create for herself a history, utilising her own vision and her art to do so.

From the Paper:

"Elaine is bought up in a family that appears to be either agnostic or atheist - certainly she receives no religious instruction, and when she tells her parents that she plans to go to Sunday school with the Smeaths, her father direly warns her "Don't believe everything you hear." (Atwood, 128) It is interesting to note that the Risley's "failure" to indoctrinate Elaine in how to think (in a religious way) is analogous to the way they "fail" to indoctrinate her into how to be a girl. In both of these cases, it is left to outsiders to try and coerce Elaine into submission to the dominant patriarchal social mores. "