Discuss the Impact of Childhood Experience on Adult Life Within Atwood’s Cat’s Eye

 Discuss the impact of childhood experience on adult life within Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.

Module Number 14111

Student Number 201206797

word count 2198

Cat’s Eye tells the story of Elaine, the protagonist, growing up in Canada. It is told in the first person by Elaine, the narrator. The past and present are interwoven, although the novel is told in the present tense it exposes how the past is still at the forefront of Elaine’s mind. The main theme Atwood tackles is childhood cruelty and bullying. Elaine was the central focus of this. The impact of these childhood experiences is profound: Elaine struggles to form close relationships particularly with women; attempts suicide; displays insecure behaviour; questions her maternal abilities and struggles with her sense of self-worth at times feeling as if she is worth nothing. She represses many of her childhood memories.

In the first two chapters, a picture develops of how anxious Elaine is to be back in Toronto: “I can feel my throat tightening, a pain along the jawline. I’ve started to chew my fingers again” (p 10). Calling this first section Iron Lung, each section named after one of her paintings, shows how Elaine feels back in this city of her childhood, “unable to move or speak”, from painful childhood memories from this relationship.

Set in post war Canada this was a time when women were encouraged to focus on traditional roles surrounding the home and families, Elaine’s mother did not conform to this role. Spending the first eight years of her life with only her family for company Elaine had a peripatetic lifestyle. She states that they were like “nomads on the far edges of the war?” (p27). Her happiness at this situation is reflected in adulthood when she stays in her ex-husbands studio whilst in Toronto. Disliking the neatness of hotels preferring living a “transient” or “nomad” lifestyle (p16).

For much of the time she was homed schooled by her mother.  Elaine’s early childhood had been unconventional. Her time was spent outside camping and playing in forests. She had a particularly close relationship with her brother and spent much of her time playing male orientated games with him. She hankers after simple possessions: “silver paper” and “balloons”. When she gets her own bedroom for the first time she states: “I’m lonely. I’ve never been in a room by myself at night before” (p35). However, before Elaine starts at her new school in Toronto she recognises that her family is different from the families’ that she sees in her school books. She starts to want friendships, “Friends who will be girls” (p 30) and she starts to draw pictures of them with dresses on.

Elaine is ill prepared for school. She cannot understand the segregation between the boys and the girls entrance and she misses spending time with her brother at school. She should go and play with the girls but feels awkward around them and doesn’t know what to say:

 “But I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder’ (p 52).

Elaine forced friendship with Carol, because she is “the only school bus girl in my grade” (p 52), is initially harmless. Carol marvels at Elaine’s naivety and her primitive home compared with her own highlighting their dissimilarity. Grace joins the group and due to her age becomes the leader. Elaine finds the scrapbook games they play tiresome and she says that their voices are “wheelding and false” (p 59). Although Elaine values their friendship as important as she opens their Christmas presents before any others.

The first incident that has a lasting emotional effect on Elaine is when she is buried during a game in Cordelia’s backyard dressed as Mary Queen of Scots. It is a pivotal moment in the girl’s relationships as it marks the beginning of Elaine’s victimisation.  As an adult recalling the incident she felt isolated from the other girls when they place her in the hole feeling “sadness, a sense of betrayal”. She became frightened in the darkness and this developed into “terror”. (p 120) She can’t remember any other details even her nine birthday, that arrives shortly afterwards, showing what an impact this incident had on her. This is placed in the fourth section and is called “Deadly Nightshade”. In the previous section Cordelia referred to the plant telling the girls that the juice of nightshade berries “could turn you into a zombie” (p 85) which is just what Cordelia did to Elaine. Elaine paints a portrait of Cordelia and calls it “Deadly Nightshade” symbolising her persecutor. McDermott (1989) states “Cordelia appears in every image Elaine has of herself, every self-doubt, every fear, in her every wish to be loved.”

The next section named “Wringer” is a metaphor for how Elaine herself is put through the wringer by Cordelia. Whilst doing the washing with her mother to get away from the girls she describes how “A whole person can go through the wringer and come out flat, neat, completed, like a flower pressed in a book” (p 139), which exactly what she believes Cordelia is trying to achieve with her. Cordelia as the ringleader, is relentless with her intimidation, manipulation and bullying of Elaine. The result is that Elaine feels she is constantly being watched and can do nothing right:

“They comment on the kind of lunch I have, how I hold my sandwich, how I chew. On the way home from school I have to walk in front of them, or behind them. In front is worse because they talk about how I am walking, how I look from behind. ‘Don’t hunch over’, says Cordelia. “don’t move your arms like that” (p 135).

The bullying caused Elaine to self-harm. She deliberately “peeled the skin off her feet” to such a degree that it was painful to walk, stating “The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold onto”. She also chewed the ends of her hair and gnawed the cuticles off from around her fingernails, leaving welts of exposed, oozing flesh..” She states she did this constantly, though subconsciously (p128).