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Constructing the self through memory: Cat's Eye as a novel of female development
Frontiers, 1994 by Osborne, Carol
The memory is a living thing--it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives--the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.
--Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings, 114
But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
--Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye, 3
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It is against blockage between ourselves and others--those who are alive and the who are dead--that we must work. In blocking off what hurts us, we think we are walling ourselves off from pain. But in the long run the wall, which prevents growth, hurts us more than the pain, which, if we will only bear it, soon passes over us. Washes over us and is gone. Long will we remember pain, but the pain itself, as it was at that point of intensity that made us feel as if we must die of it, eventually vanishes. Our memory of it becomes its only trace. Walls remain. They grow moss. They are difficult barriers to cross, to get to others, to get to closed-down parts of ourselves.
--Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar, 353
Recovering memories of the past leads Margaret Atwood's protagonist in Cat's Eye to her own recovery. In having Elaine create a complete sense of herself through art, dream, and memory, Atwood revises the structure of the traditional bildungsroman and kunstlerroman, privileging what feminist psychoanalytic theorists have posited as a feminine way of achieving self-knowledge. Instead of following a linear plot that emphasizes separation from the past as the mark of maturity, Atwood creates a circular structure emphasizing the protagonist's return to the scenes of her childhood and her reunion, if only in her imagination, with key figures from her past.
In her exploration of memory and the importance of the past for her protagonist, Atwood is part of a trend in contemporary fiction, represented particularly in the works of African-American women writers. Such a parallel is noteworthy, for Elaine identifies with members of minority groups in Canada as she faces the pressures of conforming to white, protestant, middle-class standards. Atwood's alternate plot structure, emphasis on memory, and attention to the pressures placed on minorities link her project in many ways with the concerns of such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones.
The traditional bildungsroman traces the development of the male protagonist in a linear fashion to the end of adolescence when he declares himself free and independent. In Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for example, Stephen first appears as a young boy being initiated into language as his father tells him stories of the moocow and baby tuckoo. The plot progresses chronologically, with a wave-like pattern of epiphanies ending each chapter, until Stephen is able to turn his back on family, nation, and religion "to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race."(1) His gestures are of renunciation; he severs all ties so that he can "fly by those nets" of "nationality, language, religion"(2) to become the independent artist who "remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent."(3) Such a structure emphasizes the male's Oedipal phase in which the boy defines himself in contrast to the mother and in alliance with the father. Stephen rejects his mother and Ireland, "the old sow who eats her farrow," in favor of his symbolic father, Daedalus, the artificer he addresses in the last lines of the novel.(4)
In contrast to this model, many contemporary women writers are adopting structures of circular return.(5) These plots, in emphasizing a woman's need to define herself relationally, reflect the differences in male and female identity formation noted by such feminist scholars as Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, and Margaret Homans.(6)
In structuring Cat's Eye, Atwood mimics the wave-like motion of Joyce's Portrait, but in a much more complex way. The book begins with Elaine's return to Toronto on the occasion of a retrospective a show. The return to her childhood home, along with the review of her art, causes her to reconstruct the past, assembling the fragments, as she has subconsciously assembled fragments of her past in her paintings, only this time making sense of them by confronting the memories directly and arranging them in some kind of order. In each section, the reader travels along the same path. Beginning each part of the book in the present tense with Elaine in Toronto, Atwood then switches to the past tense when the surroundings spark a particular memory of Elaine's childhood. Then the reader becomes completely submerged in the past event when Atwood begins narrating this episode in present tense. These moments from the past progress chronologically, following Elaine's development from age eight to the point of her mother's death a few years before the art show.
