There’s a moment in Cat’s Eye when reading it became too much for me. The narrator Elaine, wandering the house of one of her bullies, overhears her tormentor’s mother, Mrs Smeath, describing Elaine to her sister Mildred as “exactly like a heathen”. It’s a moment of ear-burning agony. “What can you expect, with that family … The other children sense it. They know,” says Mrs Smeath. Are the girls being too hard on Elaine, Aunt Mildred asks. Mrs Smeath replies simply: “It’s God’s punishment … It serves her right.”
At this, Elaine flushes with shame and hatred:
I hate Mrs Smeath because what I thought was a secret, something going on among girls, among children, is not one. It has been discussed before, and tolerated. Mrs Smeath has known and approved. She has done nothing to stop it. She thinks it serves me right.
Then Mrs Smeath catches sight of Elaine on the stairs, realises she has heard everything she has been saying about her and
She doesn’t flinch, she isn’t embarrassed or apologetic. She gives me that smug smile with the lips closed over the teeth. What she says is not to me but to Aunt Mildred. ‘Little pitchers have big ears.’
It was at this point that I needed to take a break. The adults in Cat’s Eye were even crueller than the children, even more adept at humiliation. It was too much. It’s fantastic writing, but a powerful and discomforting experience, too.
But to linger too long on Elaine’s early agonies is to give a distorted interpretation of Atwood’s novel. Though she is never entirely freed from her childhood, Elaine’s direct persecution stops halfway through, when her “friends” lose their power to make her do their bidding. “Nothing binds me to them,” she tells us. “I am free.”
After that, Cat’s Eye becomes a different kind of book. It would be trite to say that it becomes about forgiveness, or finding peace. But it is quieter, more reflective – and far less agonising. As a teenager, Elaine represses her memories and becomes a kind of friend to her former chief tormentor, Cordelia. She comes to have power over her, and to abuse that power, even if it feels as if she does so out of a lack of regard for Cordelia rather than any desire for revenge.
It’s only later that she extracts her price. As an adult, Elaine mines her childhood experiences for artistic fulfilment and profit, creating pictures of, among others, Cordelia and the hateful Mrs Smeath. The latter she draws “with malice”, finally painting her pallid body “flabby as pork fat”. Even so, when she reappraises the painting during a retrospective of her work, she sees something sympathetic. Her eyes are “uncertain and melancholy”, “the eyes of a smalltown threadbare decency … She was a displaced person; as I was.” The real Cordelia, meanwhile, doesn’t make it to this quietly triumphant exhibition; Elaine realises that the last view she will have of her was when she went to see her in an asylum. She is probably dead. “So Cordelia, got you back,” she thinks, but then comes the coda: “Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”
There’s no pleasure in Elaine’s revenge – if that’s what it is. But again, that’s not the whole story. So far I’ve succumbed to the temptation of discussing Cat’s Eye as a story about women being cruel to other women. I’ve even described this subject as surprising and unusual, almost like a blue on blue attack or betrayal of “sisterhood”. But as Atwood herself has often pointed out, the idea that women should all have nurturing relationships with each other is far more strange and constricting than the simple truth that not everyone is kind.
The cruelty in Cat’s Eye is brilliantly described – but it also gains power because it feels real. It feels like something that could happen to anyone, including men. It’s worth noting that for plenty of the second half of the book, Elaine is throwing objects at her husband Jon. Her brother, who had always been blissfully removed from her childhood problems, is killed by other men, in an airplane hijacking, a victim of “too much justice”.
So perhaps Cat’s Eye is saying: the universe is cruel. It isn’t just about Elaine. In one late scene, a young woman almost dies after aborting her own baby – possibly with a knitting needle – out of worry about what her older male lover will think about her being pregnant. Elaine finds her, soaked in her own blood, calls an ambulance and holds her “small, cold” hand in the hospital. “It serves her right,” she thinks, echoing Mrs Smeath. At this point, I needed another break. Maybe it’s still that kind of book, after all.
