Coon,
I finally figured out what I am going to write about. Here it goes:
Cat's Eye is a novel about identity. Elaine, through her retrospective art show and visit to her childhood city of Toronto, embarks on a journey of self-realization. In a sense it is a twisted, circular bildungsroman. Risley does not develop and understand herself in a linear sense. Instead she has to dig through her past and uncover hidden treasures and burried memories in order to piece back the different aspects of herself. She has a complicated past that leaves her troubled and traumatized till the present. During this mid-life crisis, Elaine has to figure out her past while she wanders the streets and galleries of Toronto. What is interesting is that Elaine has no one to confide these dark memories in; she is all alone on her path to self-discovery. In the opening paragraph Atwood describes time as a set of liquid transparencies, in which different things float to the top or vanish behind the layers. Elaine's memories keep resurfacing and she must deal with each one.
I found a term that describes the archetype of this plot: künstlerroman. It is a specific sub-genre of bildungsroman, chronicaling the growth to maturity of an artist. According to Wiki, "such novels often depict the struggles of a sensitive youth against the values of a bourgeois society of his or her time." This struggle is exactly what the young Elaine faces. I have a good JSTOR source called "Constructing the Self through Memory: "Cat's Eye" as a Novel of Female Development." I will be using this as my primary source; however I'm have a lot of trouble finding more sources related to both this topic and to Cat's Eye.
Elaine's overpowering feelings of shame, confinement, paranoia, and fear hold her back from feeling the freedom that a small child should feel. She inflicts self harm and spends years of her life under constant scrutiny of her "friends" and especially under the piercing glare of Cordelia. The only place Elaine finds refuge is hiding at home or when the family goes on vacation; only then is she finally free.
If you have any advice on finding some more articles, that would be extremely helpful, Mr. Coon.
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2 comments:
I found 2 others that look like good possibilities:
* Optics and Autobiography in Margaret Atwood's Cat's EyeOptics and Autobiography in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye
* Molly Hite
* Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 135-158
and
* Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory
* Gayle Greene
* Signs, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Winter, 1991), pp. 290-321
There's also one about Atwood's use of science in her fiction, which references Cat's Eye. Don't know if it fits your thesis, but it certainly sounds like it fits your interest.
* Science for Feminists: Margaret Atwood's Body of Knowledge
* June Deery
* Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 470-486
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