Margaret Atwood

In Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood depicts the powerful impact of girlhood on Elaine Risley, a middle-aged female artist. Returning to Toronto, the town of her childhood, for a retrospective on her art, she is incessantly haunted by her traumatic experiences as a young girl and her tormentor called Cordelia. In fact, Atwood exerts the greatest impact on the reader in her segments that portray the treacherous alliances formed between Cordelia and the other girls, Carol and Grace. What is so disturbing about these segments is that Atwood has shattered the conventional view of the play of little girls as being innocent and innocuous. Instead, she plunges the reader into a world in which young girls can single out one person in the group to torment and control her to the extent of leaving her to die in the icy water. Without mediating the devastating effects of traumatic experiences of the past, Atwood produces a lead character who is not only haunted by her past, but has also suppressed it by taking on the mean and callous characteristics of her tormentor. Even though the rest of the book seems flat and lifeless compared to the portions of the book from Elaine's childhood, Atwood succeeds in demonstrating her point that Elaine has lost the vital part of herself because she has never recovered from the loss of her innocence. The tragic nature of the book lies in the fact that Elaine has become Cordelia in a way.

From the very beginning, Atwood defies the chronological concept of

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er unusual perspective on the Eaton's Catalogues is particularly humorous. When she lives in the outdoors, Eaton's Catalogues are used as toilet paper in the outhouses. However, in the bedroom of her friend's house, "we treat these catalogues with reverence" (Atwood 56). She is eager to learn and adapt to her new existence (Atwood 57). However, the emergence of Cordelia alters Elaine's experience of the world of girls. A skilled writer, Atwood does not hesitate to bring out the sinister quality of Cordelia. Even in the innocent game of playing pretend meals with nightshade berries, Cordelia claims that one drop of the berries will turn them into a zombies. Furthermore, when the girls return the next day to find the berries missing, Cordelia asserts that the dead people took them (Atwood 80). The shocking effect of Cordelia's power over the group of girls is heightened by the rapidity in which the girls' play crosses the line and becomes malicious. Elaine's nightmare begins dramatically when she is plunged into a deep hole Cordelia has been digging into the backyard. Elaine's realization that something is wrong with this activity is neatly summed up in a sentence: "When I was put into the hole I knew it was a game; now I

Category: Literature - M