Cat's Eye

Cat’s Eye has violence at its heart: From her earliest childhood, Elaine is interested in the reality of harm. She and Stephen pick scabs until they bleed to examine them under the microscope. However, if the specter of male violence against women lurks in the background, the novel’s most vividly depicted violence comes from female characters. The threat of masculine aggression remains almost entirely an abstraction, while the cruelty of Elaine’s girlhood friends constitutes the plot’s backbone.

The first real mention of potential male violence is connected to the wooden footbridge over the ravine, where “bad men” are said to reside. The ravine thus appears to embody the dangers threatening the characters’ idealized suburban life. However, the ravine and the bridge’s primary narrative function is as the habitual locale of Elaine’s torture by the other girls; the later description of a girl who has been murdered in the ravine only serves to underline the vivid reality of Elaine’s near-death experience at Cordelia’s hands. The girls’ attacks on Elaine’s individuality, creativity, and sense of self constitute a kind of violence that is less overt than the murder of the dead girl, but still damaging.

However, Elaine struggles to name what Cordelia and the others do to her as violence. She calls Cordelia her friend in implicit contrast to the “enemies” that come with World War II or even school rivalries. Antagonism and hatred are consistently gendered masculine, whereas Elaine’s female relationships are apparently the result of love. The violence of the war or the boys’ interschool rivalry is always in the background, whereas Cordelia’s violence is inescapable. The real harm Mrs. Smeath inflicts on Elaine is similarly set in contrast to the absent violence of the other girls’ fathers. The cruelty of Cordelia’s father is only ever alluded to and is almost entirely absent from Elaine’s memory of her early childhood; likewise, the violent punishment Carol’s father inflicts on her for wearing lipstick takes place in the background, evident only from the marks on her skin. While these marks seem to prove the “real, unspeakable power” of the father (176), this power is wielded beyond Elaine’s realm of perception: “[A]ll fathers […] are invisible” (176).

Some of the only explicit violence enacted by men in the novel is the violence that springs up in Elaine’s relationship with Jon. However, this violence is reciprocal, and it is Elaine who ensures that the objects she throws hit Jon, while he seems deliberately to miss her. The feminist meetings Elaine attends identify male violence as the source of women’s suffering, but Elaine finds it difficult to relate to the other women, feeling she has not “suffered enough” to belong in their company. The other men who are central to Elaine’s life—her father and her brother—are both gentle and non-threatening. Although Stephen likes to play at war and her father speaks of the future violent demise of humanity, these violences again remain abstract and theoretical.

It is significant that the only real scars that Elaine retains were inflicted not by men but by women—including herself. That the generalized fear of male aggression pales in comparison to the novel’s female-led violence does not mean that the novel is unconcerned with misogyny. Rather, Atwood complicates simplistic assumptions about gender and violence by showing the ways in which women internalize misogyny and enact it upon one another.