Constructing the self through memory: Cat's Eye as a novel of female development

While Elaine is a white Canadian, not ostensibly a member of a minority in Toronto, Atwood encodes racial difference within the text to accentuate Elaine's feelings of oppression. As Elaine surrenders power over her own self-definition, Atwood associates her more and more with the color black while her oppressors, Cordelia, Carol and Grace, are aligned with white images. For example, Elaine derives her strategy for surviving the taunts of her friends through two sources, both associated with blackness. When she discovers a dead raven one summer, she notices that no matter how she pokes it, it does not feel a thing. She notes its color, black like a hole, and reflects that no one can get at it, no matter what they do. When she subsequently blocks her own feelings, she becomes like the dead raven. After fainting at the Conversat, she discovers an even better way of escaping from her tormentors. By holding her bath until she faints, a sensation she describes as blackness closing in around the edges of her eyes, she is able to avoid Cordelia's reprimands.

When Cordelia and the other girls bury her, Elaine has no image of herself in the dark hole, just a square of blackness, because at this point, she essentially loses her identity. Elaine learns to protect herself by not being, not feeling, not talking. In picturing Cordelia pushing her off a cliff, drawing a self-portrait that shows her fire as a small speck of light in the middle of blackness, and finally finding some type of escape through fainting, losing consciousness, and going into a state of nothingness, Elaine works harder and harder to negate herself.

This negation continues until Elaine is able to find a mother figure who can replace the harmful Cordelia and thus fulfill Elaine's pre-Oedipal need to form an attachment with someone like herself. Her need for a mother substitute becomes exacerbated when her own mother's miscarriage and depression distance her from Elaine. At this point, by dreaming that Mrs. Finestein and Mr. Banerji are her parents, Elaine reveals her perception that these characters, as members of ethnic minorities, have more in common with her and thus promise more support as parents than her own family is able to provide. In the same dream, Elaine pictures her mother giving birth to twins, one gray and the other missing. She sees herself as one twin, gray and without identity, and the double, the role Cordelia serves, is missing. At this point, Elaine realizes, through her dreams, the need for a new figure to whom she can become attached.

The figure that replaces Cordelia is an imaginary one that Elaine chooses in deliberate opposition to the society responsible for the erasure of her identity. When Elaine overhears Grace's mother and aunt discussing her, she realizes that despite her efforts to conform, they still view her as a heathen, and more importantly, that the adult society sanctions the abuse she receives from her peen for being different. At this point, in rebellion against the God Mrs. Smeath and her society seem to control, she chooses her own private icon, the Virgin Mary, a figure always in the background in Grace's religion. Elaine rebels against the rules of the "onion church" by aligning herself with an opposed minority, the Catholics, and kneeling as she prays to this alternate mother figure.