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Article Excerpt
This study investigates how Cat's Eye, a novel about an artist's development, explores the complex interrelationship between trauma, identity, and culture, and specifically, how trauma shapes the construction of the protagonist's gendered identity and visual sense while her artistic discipline mediates trauma and helps her decipher fantasies perpetuating her emotional stasis.
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Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood's 1988 novel about an artist's development, explores the complex interrelationship among trauma, identity and culture, and more specifically, how trauma shapes the social construction of the protagonist's gendered identity and the possible routes of creative expression in revealing and resisting such construction. Acknowledging trauma as an indicator and consequence of power relations, Atwood measures power's devastating effects on identity, compromised by a lost sense of agency that is unconsciously associated with death by trauma sufferers. In the novel, such associations motivate many of painter Elaine Risley's conflicts and the imagery and fantasies she creates to resist fears of personal annihilation. Important symbolic antidotes to death and stasis in the text are Risley's variations of a Virgin Mary figure, interweaving contemporary women's concerns with traditions of restoration and transcending mortality. Atwood illustrates how the fragmenting, isolating, and dissociative elements of traumatic experience problematize identity and find unconscious expression in Risley's artistic vision and works. Though her paintings and symbolism reveal repressed but lingering emotions, her artistic discipline and culturally inflected imagery mediate trauma and help her decipher defensive fantasies that have perpetuated her emotional stasis. In Atwood's representation, trauma has raised the emotional stakes and purposes of Risley's art, while at the same time artistic expression reveals trauma but also provides evidence and structure with which to work through it.
Previous criticism of Cat's Eye and Atwood's work in general has focused on her protagonists' search for identity and their uneasy relations with or mistrust of others, in this case particularly after a period of childhood trauma. Roberta Rubenstein notes that Atwood is frequently preoccupied in her novels with "anxieties of relationship and separateness, not only as emotional and social matters, but as existential, cultural and ideological ones" (111). Other critics have analyzed the role of various mother figures who have destructive or problematic effects on daughters (see Osborne, Banerjee, McCombs). A particular critical focus for Cat's Eye has been the gaze and the implications of its power in relation to Risley's identity and artistry (see Mycak, Hite, White). Risley's interactions with others are interpreted as "structured by various dynamics of looking and being looked at, and that in this intersubjective mode, the gaze endangers as well as positions the subject" (Mycak 210). Other Atwood scholars have explored her proposal of a feminist art, where her protagonist utilizes a female iconography that challenges traditionally male-defined images of women (see Staels 187-88; Strehle 181).
This essay touches upon these issues within the context of trauma, and sometimes engages the arguments of other scholars who have examined Atwood's handling of trauma in relation to narrative form (Banerjee; Bouson), characterization (Davidson; Staels), and artistic identity (McCombs). I also focus on trauma's effects on Elaine's vision and artistic expression, which carry imprints of death, a common fear of trauma survivors (Lifton 18). The link between trauma and visualization is salient here as traumatic memory usually emerges in visual images or other sense memories and affects, rather than narrative articulations, indicating an incomplete and conflicted relation to memory (Brett and Ostroff 417-21; Van der Kolk 296). Elaine's bonds to her disturbing past are revealed in the traumatic residues of emotional constriction and affective eruptions in her art, but she gains insight into her traumas in part through her ability to personalize and reinvigorate artistic traditions. Atwood depicts the artistic process as a safe environment that both expresses and disguises personal anguish, and as a form of personal agency.
The lingering effects of childhood trauma emerge in an internal struggle within Elaine between repression and re-emergence of traumatic memories that becomes the focus of the novel and is externalized in her adult relationships and in her paintings. Crucially, fear of death or annihilation haunts her at every stage. Years later, a retrospective of her paintings enables her to reassess her past. With the passage of time, a healthy marriage, motherhood, and a satisfying career as a painter, she attains the perspective and life connections she needs to reconcile the past. Atwood illustrates dimensions of trauma in a less extreme context than much trauma fiction, which often deals with situations of extreme violence (Vickroy 1-18), but importantly demonstrates how trauma is part of more normative but critical and troubling situations of human development and creative survival.
Atwood explores the shaping of a malleable and conflicted identity through her protagonist's socialization, which becomes traumatic in its relentless surveillance and the ruthless enforcement of its rules. When Elaine's father, an entomologist, takes an academic job in Toronto, the family ends their nomadic existence during the war years and settles in the conservative, religious, and British-identified community in Toronto. At ages eight and nine, she endures her friends' Grace, Carol, and Cordelia's aggressive attempts to indoctrinate her into conventional gender and religious practices. Her sense of self is forever altered by these experiences. "In the novel's analysis [...] the social construction of feminine identity is viewed as a formative trauma" (Bouson 164). The girls' constant dissatisfaction with and correction of her clothes, family, behaviour, and body language establish within her an association between sight, cultural meaning, and power. Further, the unquestioning religious practices of the Smeaths devalue the scientific skepticism of Elaine's family. Elaine manifests many traumatic symptoms in this period: a sense of fragmentation and disconnection from her past and her family life, helplessness, and diminished self-worth. Her lost sense of competence to act or live in the world is evident in Elaine's self-destructive behaviour (pulling off her skin) and in the dissociative tactics of avoidance, fainting, and splitting off from her own body by which she creates a provisional sense of control to alleviate her suffering. Traumatic experience has helped shape Elaine's artistic vision and forms of expression: she eludes, or dissociates from, her abusive playmates by transforming them into shapes and patterns, aided by the cat's eye marble (Ljungberg 89). "It is Elaine's...
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