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Science for feminists: Margaret Atwood's body of knowledge
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by June Deery
More philosophically, Atwood relates this fear to women's epistemological and hence ontological subordination. Women's edges are uncertain and their self-definition blurred because, Atwood suggests, they do not know or see themselves - though they are beginning to. Her women characters, so long ignored or relegated as Other, still mostly see themselves as men do, as fragments, as fetishized and commodified erotic parts. They therefore fear self-disintegration, they fear being stretched and losing shape altogether. Since her first novel, The Edible Woman, Atwood has made it clear that a woman's tendency to intermingle and be diffuse is not an advantage but indicates a lack of power. The experience of fission also reflects the demands of women's positions in a social field where they are subject to contrary forces and are expected to play plural roles.
Atwood's male observers try to impose on women a definite and containable shape or shapes to their liking. Josef, her art teacher, at one point transforms Elaine into a Pre-Raphaelite figure so that she hardly recognizes herself. All her life Cordelia is shaped and misshaped under her father's observation. Elaine notes the patriarchal perturbation:(9) "Dinners at Cordelia's house are of two kinds: those when her father is there and those when he isn't." When he is not there, everything is casual, and mother and sisters come and go randomly. But when her father is present, they set themselves and the table more formally, and everyone stays in her place (Cat's Eye 267). In other regards, the father does not have to be physically present to keep his wife and children in line. Like other fathers in the novel - and, by implication, like God, the Father of fathers - he is often invisible but strongly present. Atwood's point is that it is difficult to say what women are without male observation: Women have always been women-as-observed-by-men, just as the subatomic object is what it is because it is being observed. Outside this observation, it is difficult to say what exists. For example, light takes different forms, waves or particles, depending on the experimental apparatus used. So too have Atwood's female characters been determined by men. They feel the constant surveillance. Roz, a powerful CEO, describes "the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur" (Robber 388). Women have been taught to internalize this scrutiny and to enforce gendering on each other. This is Atwood's focus in Cat's Eye, a novel that painstakingly reconstructs how Elaine's friends/enemies instruct her in femininity. It appears to be an account of infra-female interaction, but the male voice is ever present. For example, Cordelia upbraids Elaine for not "measuring up" (124), a key male and scientific term Cordelia would have heard from her father. That patriarchy has always depended on this kind of compliance is a point heavily underscored by Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's social model is not a linear power hierarchy but a more complex Maxwellian, or Foucauldian, field of action.
