67 pages • 2 hours read
Margaret AtwoodCat's Eye
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye has been described as Atwood’s most autobiographical novel, and Atwood herself has acknowledged certain autobiographical connections. Born in Ottawa, Atwood spent much of her childhood in northern Quebec and Ontario, where her father, like Elaine’s, worked as an entomologist. Like the novel’s protagonist, Atwood struggled to adjust to life in the city when her family moved to Toronto and to make friends in the mainstream education system. Also, like Elaine, she found herself set apart from other girls, who found her love of insects strange and her unwillingness to wear dresses unusual. At one time, she became the target of severe bullying, an experience mirrored in Elaine and Cordelia’s difficult relationship. Atwood has suggested that writing about Elaine’s traumatic childhood allowed her to confront the emotions she too had suppressed from her own childhood. Atwood’s experiences therefore heavily inform the novel’s exploration of The Specter of Male Violence and the Reality of Female Violence.
The theme of Vision and Visual Art also draws inspiration from Atwood’s own life. Like Elaine, Atwood was a visual artist before she was a writer, attending first the University of Toronto and then the Sheridan College of Art. Elaine’s affair with Josef Hrbik was in part based on a complicated dynamic Atwood experienced with her own drawing teacher. Just as Elaine both engaged with the feminist movement and later rejected the label of a feminist artist, Atwood has had a complex engagement with feminism throughout her life and is reluctant to allow critics to label or quantify her own work.
Sociohistorical Context: Second-Wave Feminism
Emerging in the 1960s, second-wave feminism built on first-wave feminism—best remembered for achieving the expansion of suffrage—by advocating for greater equality and opportunities for women in society. It particularly challenged societal and gender norms that restricted women to positions as housewives and mothers. Second-wave feminism focused heavily on social rather than merely political issues, including sexuality, family, the workplace, and reproductive rights. Its aims included equal pay, access to contraception and abortion, and the reduction of domestic abuse and rape.
Margaret Atwood emerged as a writer during the rise of second-wave feminism, and Cat’s Eye addresses many of these issues. Elaine defies many traditional expectations of women, engaging in premarital sex, forging a career of her own, and eventually leaving her husband and asserting her independence. The novel also confronts sexual violence, both in the inequitable relationship Elaine and Susie have with their art teacher as well as through Susie’s botched illegal abortion. Cat’s Eye shows women struggling with societal limitations and finding agency through art, friendship, and sisterhood.
Literary Context: Künstlerroman
A Künstlerroman is a type of novel that focuses on the development of an artist from childhood to maturity. Like the bildungsroman, it is a coming-of-age narrative. A key theme is the protagonist’s inner struggle to discover their artistic talents and establish their creative voice. Some of the earliest examples of the Künstlerroman emerged in the 18th century, like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The genre became more defined and popular in the 19th century, with novels examining the personal struggles and growth of fictional artists and integrating details of contemporary artistic movements. Canonical examples include James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus.
Atwood’s focus on Elaine’s development defies the tradition of the male-centric Künstlerroman. In Cat’s Eye, Elaine Risley is an emerging artist (although she terms herself a painter) who must navigate her difficult background, complex interpersonal relationships, and the societal limitations on women pursuing art. The novel follows Elaine from girlhood into adulthood as she hones her craft and aesthetic vision. Her development as an artist is inseparable from her psychological maturation and from Memory and the Passage of Time; Elaine uses painting to exorcize childhood traumas like her toxic friendship with Cordelia. Central to Elaine’s evolution as an artist is accepting that her subject matter stems from a need to interpret her past through painting. The novel suggests that Elaine can only attain success by confronting painful memories—a process both cathartic and creatively liberating.
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