CAT’S EYE

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CAT’S EYE Margaret Atwood

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CAT’S EYE. Margaret Atwood. The Author. Like Risley, Atwood is the daughter of an entomologist. Known as a feminist writer. Her formative years in 1950s & 1960s in Toronto. Born 18/11/39 Among most honoured authors of fiction in recent history. Margaret Atwood. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Transcript of CAT’S EYE

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The Author

• Like Risley, Atwood is the daughter of an entomologist.

• Known as a feminist writer.• Her formative years in 1950s & 1960s in

Toronto. • Born 18/11/39• Among most honoured authors of fiction in

recent history.

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Margaret Atwood

• Spent much of childhood in backwoods of Northern Quebec.

• Attended school fulltime from 11 years old.• High School – Leaside, Toronto until 1957• Began writing at 6 years old. • Decided to be a writer at 16.• English Masters from Harvard’s Radcliffe.

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IRON LUNG

• “Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”

• Brother Stephen

• “You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water.”

• Elaine Risley

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Winter Saturdays -Toronto

• Cordelia & Elaine in a streetcar – conspiratorial agreement on the definition of Time. “So?” [pg 4 ]

• If to meet Cordelia again what would E. tell her?

• “The truth, or whatever would make me look good?” [pg 6]

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Possible scenarios

• Dying – unconscious• Iron lung – a threat• “She is fully conscious, but unable to move or

speak.” [pg 9]• Ignore her• Hug her• Shake her? [pg 9]

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SILVER PAPER

• Hates Toronto.• “Malicious, grudging,

vindictive, implacable.”

• “In my dreams of this city I am always lost.”

• 2 grown up daughters, Sarah and Anne

• Lives in B.C. as far away from T. as I cld get without drowning.

• Husband - Ben, travel agent, Mexico.

• I am a painter more like a valid job than artist - embarrasses her.

• [pg 14 & 15]

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Jon – first husband

• Staying with Jon – prefers the “shedding and disorder and personal dirt of people like myself, people like Jon. Transients and nomads.” [pg 17]

• “We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.” [pg 18]

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Art Gallery visit incognito

• “Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgment. I have to work up to them.” [pg 21]

• Poster: Risley in Retrospect• Defaced with a moustache.• A public face, a face worth defacing.

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Peripatetic lifestyle

• 8th birthday in a motel• Box Brownie camera• Wants silver paper out of cigarette packages.• Wants balloons• Wants some girlfriends.• “Never had any girl friends because I’ve never

been in one place long enough.” [31]

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NESTING

• New house out of mud.• Dad marks at night.• Saturdays at Zoology bldg – Dad’s work.• Watch first Santa Parade from there. • New dimension to Santa now – associated

with snakes, pickled eyes, …..[43]

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EMPIRE BLOOMERS

• Vancouver – suicide capital of the country.• Elaine feels she is without worth.• “What do you have to say for yourself?

Cordelia used to ask. Nothing, I would say.” [47]

• Changing room cubicle – retrieves wallet. • “Damn you, Cordelia! ….But Cordelia is long

gone.” [pg 51]

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Queen Mary Public School

• Separate doors and separate parts of the schoolyard for boys and girls.

• Left to girls – “but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.” [pg 55]

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Carol Campbell

• Only school bus girl in her grade. • A stubby girl with a frequent laugh.• Pageboy haircut.• C. & sister having matching outfits for

Sundays. • Big wardrobe• Piano in forbidden living room.• Her parents.

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Gossip

• Carol tells all:• Family sleeps on the floor.• Exotic specialities – eating off card table, etc.• “She wants herself to be marvelled at, for

revealing such wonders. It’s as if she’s reporting on the antics of some primitive tribe: true, but incredible.” [pg 57]

• Gossip: not necessarily cruel, but is used by women to show knowledge

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The Pageboy

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Carol’s other best friendGrace Smeath

• Pointed out as an object to be admired. • A year older, in the next grade up.• Play is mostly Grace’s ideas.• “She gets her own way in everything.”• Movie star colouring book. • Paper-doll cut-outs.• Play school – Grace always the teacher.

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Playing with the girls• “Playing with girls is different and at first I feel

strange as I do it, self-conscious, as if I’m only doing an imitation of a girl. But I soon get more used to it.” [52]– Gender comes across as a construct (Elaine is learning

how to be a girl)• Grace’s play and attitude is filled with

conventional feminine behaviours that are passive aggressive rather than confrontational:– “if we try to play anything she doesn’t like she says she

has a headache and goes home…She never raises her voice, gets angry, or cries; she is quietly reproachful, as if her headache is our fault”

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• Play is linked to feminine identities of the 40s and 50s– Dress-ups– School (most teachers were women; it was one of the only

“legitimate” professions available to them)– Materialism of post-war America is reflected in the

“accumulation of objects” [53] (the war had disrupted earning, some women left the home to work, now they returned to their proper place as “happy homemakers”)

• Women seem to be set up as false. The way Ca and G behave implies that society expects women to be modest to the point of making them into liars:- ‘“Oh, yours is so good. Mine’s no good. Mine’s awful.”

They say this everytime we play the scrapbook game. Their voices are wheedling and false; I can tell they don’t mean it, each one thinks her own lady on her own page is good. But it’s the thing you have to say, so I begin to say it too” [53]

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Mrs Smeath• Bad heart – has to take pm rests.• This weakness is turned into an ad-

vantage by Grace and Mrs Smeath (you get your own way): “Bad heartshave their uses” [57]

• Views twin sets with contempt.• No make-up• Print housedresses.• Moustache, smiles but doesn’t laugh. Joyless• Memory – “Lying unmoving, like something in a

museum” [58]• “Why do I hate her so much?” [68]

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MARBLES

• Cat’s eye – “clear glass with a bloom of coloured petals in the centre, red or yellow or green or blue;”

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Cat’s Eyes

• Elaine examines new ones alone, “turning it over and over in the light.”

• The cat’s eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats.They’re the eyes of something that isn’t known but exists anyway;”

• “My favourite one is blue.”• “I risk my other cat’s eyes to be shot at, but not

this one.” • It comes to symbolise hope and the part of

Elaine that cannot be touched by the bullies. It can also symbolise how others see her.

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CORDELIA• Taller than Grace & Carol• Wears corduroys & a pullover. Not as overtly

feminine as the othet two.• Thin without being fragile• Top lip a little skewed, as if it’s been cut open and

sewn up crooked. A broken mouth, out of which comes poison.

• Smile like grown ups learned, doing it out of politeness. An actress with the name of Shakespeare’s most honest character.

• Wants to shake hands.

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Cordelia’s games• She has the power to belittle or include• Dress up costumes.• Act out plays – C. directs.• Feeling of inadequacy at home transforms into a need to control

others?• Memories connected with blood from Part I – red liquorice, penny

gumballs, orange popsicles – are introduced with Cordelia [74]• Foursome walking home. Cordelia points out weeds and Deadly

Nightshade. “Cordelia points out if you want to poison someone this would be a good way”. Infer a mean or morbid mind?

• knows a lot from older sisters, Perdie & Miranda• Cordelia is the only sister named after a tragic heroine. Her harsh

words contrast with the gentleness of Lear’s Cordelia.• Cordelia is immediately linked with the forbidden ravine – dead

people story, disappearance of the flower meals.

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IV: DEADLY NIGHTSHADE• Galleries are too much like

churches• Painting of Mrs Smeath

done 20 years earlier – Rubber plant: The Ascension. Is Elaine mocking Mrs Smeath’s sense of martyrdom?

• Both Mrs Smeath and the plant are “distanced” from life. One is gazed at from behind glass doors, the other is forbidden to be touched.

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Interview• Elaine feels uneasy. Is conscious of scrutiny.– I should be grateful, these women are on my side...but I still

feel outnumbered, as if they are a species of which I am not a member

• Elaine can’t wait for Jon’s return - from here he looks like relief.• Andrea checks out the powder-blue jogging suit. • Very uncomfortable with interview.• Is she a realist or cynical about her fame? – Fame is Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage. This stuff is just a media

pimple.• Elaine resists “conventional” feminist interpretation, possibly

because these women still see her gender before they see her.

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9 year olds at play• Cordelia’s dug hole: a morbid mind, or just play?• Elaine as Mary Queen of Scots – headless already. How can

this be “play”?• Trapped in hole, soil thrown over top– I feel sadness, a sense of betrayal. Then I feel the darkness

pressing down on me; the terror.• This foreshadows the ravine, and is a turning point in the

relationship between the girls as it marks the beginning of Elaine’s victimisation. She sees it as The point at which I lost power.

• The fact that she can’t remember her ninth birthday party suggests to readers that the months following her premature burial must have been traumatic.

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Nightshade

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Wrong memory

• Nightshade…It’s a dark word. • Nightshade is a common weed. • But the flowers, the smell, the movement of the

leaves persist, rich, mesmerizing, desolating, infused with grief.

• Nightshade can symbolise deception, danger, and death.

• Symbolises Cordelia and the bullying Elaine receives at her hands.

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V: WRINGER• Materialism – shop windows & disgruntled

mannequins. I guess this is the look now: surly aggression. These are echoes of Cordelia.– Cordelia with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, her

eyelids half closed, trying for sultry. Ultra –sharp.

• Anti-ageing products – a religion. Voodoo and spells. – I’d use anything if it worked [to]…stop the drip drip of time,

stay more or less the way I am.

• Children’s clothing section and tartans recalls the little girls with their assessing eyes, their slippery deceitful smiles, tartaned up like Lady Macbeth.

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VOODOO• In the endless time when Cordelia had such power over me, I

peeled the skin off my feet.• Recalls part III: Cordelia tells the others that the juice of

nightshade berries could turn you into a zombie. Cordelia’s poison has made Elaine into a zombie.– Skinned her own feet– Gnawed her hair and nails

• She physicalises the emotional torment Cordelia puts her through. Also, this is pain she is able to control herself.

• Elaine compares her own girls – they seem sane, her saving graces. They are not the helpless, evasive girls Elaine grew up with.

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Santa parade from Museum• Separate window ledges; Cordelia, Grace and Carol

aren’t talking to Elaine. Ostracisation. – When I’ve guessed the right answer, then they will speak

to me again.

• How can she guess the “right answer” when the rules keep changing?– Everything will be all right as long as I sit still, say nothing,

reveal nothing. I will be saved then, I will be acceptable once more.

– Instead, she gets this response from Cordelia: How could you?...You know what this means, don’t you? I’m afraid you’ll have to be punished.

• She tries to play by the rules, but there are none.

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BULLYING• At age 9, Elaine scrutinized her daughter’s

fingers for bites, their feet, the ends of their hair.

• So anxious that they are being harrassed.• Once her daughters reached adolescence –

sighed with relief.– Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To

one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

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Bullying• Sometimes takes the form of twisted

deportment lessons as they stalk Elaine– Stand up straight!– Don’t hunch over– Don’t move your arms like that.

• The confusion of bullying within “friendships” - With enemies you can feel hatred, and anger – and how victims justify what happens to them: But Cordelia is my friend. She likes me, she wants to help me, they all do…I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please.