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Marissa Cook
Dr. Vivian
ENG 365
15 December 2015
A Retrospective: Breaking the Cycle of Female Misogyny in Cats Eye
Perhaps the most illuminating way to understand the mind of an artist is through her
artwork. The paintings done by Elaine Risley, the protagonist of Margaret Atwoods novel Cats
Eye, are complex, surreal images that often involve objects from the artists past jumbled
together in a dreamlike fashionsome aspects of which, it seems, Elaine must approach through
the subconscious rather than directly. The depictions that Atwood crafts serve to point to the
psychological trauma experienced and reciprocated by Elaine in her childhood; but more than
that, they deepen the texts discussion of female misogyny. Through the portraits of Mrs. Smeath,
the two separate portraits of Cordelia and Elaine, and the depiction of the Virgin on the bridge, in
particular, the paintings described in the text and Elaines reflections on them imply that violence
from women toward women works only to perpetuate a vicious and misogynistic cycle, perhaps
just as harmful and far more ignored than misogyny that comes from men.
One of the figures from her childhood that Elaine regularly paints is Mrs. Smeath,
Graces mother. Mrs. Smeath initially procures Elaines hatred by approving of the cruelty
Elaines friends display toward her, claiming that Its Gods punishmentIt serves her
right(199). Elaine relates that she is frozen with hate upon hearing this, hatred of a
particular shape, the shape of Mrs. Smeaths one breast and no waist (198). That shape finds its
manifestation in the many disparaging portraits of Mrs. Smeath done later in Elaines life, such
as Rubber Plant: The Ascension, which pictures Mrs. Smeath wearing nothing but her flowered

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one-breast apronreclining on her maroon velvet sofa, rising to Heaven (93). Another, White
Gift, depicts Mrs. Smeath progressively unwrapped until in her saggy-legged cotton
underpants, her on large breast sectioned to show her heartthe heart of a dying turtle (384).
The images, by Elaines own admission, are washroom graffiti raised to a higher order, and
when she sees a woman who she thinks is Grace, she is perfectly aware that she has gone way
too far in her naked, exposed, desecrated images of Mrs. Smeath (385). That Elaine has
perpetuated through her paintings the hatred she received from and returned to Mrs. Smeath
becomes all the more clear in AN EYE FOR AN EYE, in which Mrs. Smeath stands in front of
her sink, drawing on the image of the night in the kitchen when Elaine first comes to hate her,
her wicked paring knife in one hand, a half-peeled potato in the other (383). The repetition of
the image and the title itself points to the vengeance that Elaine enacts through her painting: in
response to Mrs. Smeaths negative behavior toward her, Elaine will equally insult Mrs. Smeath.
It is at Elaines retrospective, however, that she becomes aware of what she has been doing. She
now sees that she has painted Mrs. Smeath with considerable malice, and she looks again at
the eyes that she thought were self-righteous eyes, piggy and smug, realizing that they are
also defeated eyes, uncertain and melancholy, heavy with unloved duty (443). Now distanced
from the circumstances, Elaine sees Mrs. Smeath as a displaced person, as [she] was, and
accepts that I have not done it justice, or rather mercy. Instead I went for vengeance (443). The
paintings, themselves a means by which the cycle of violence against women and by women
perpetuates itself and is further illustrated in the text, also ends Elaines hatred for Mrs. Smeath.
As Elaine concludes, An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness (443).
Two other portraits, Half a Face, the only one of Cordelia, and Elaines self-portrait,
Cats Eye, and particularly Elaines retrospective commentary on the two images, likewise help

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to illustrate a perpetuation of hurt between women. Elaines self-portrait, for instance, shows
only part of her face; in the center of the picture a pier glass hangs in the empty sky showing the
back of a young Elaines head, along with three small figures, dressed in the winter clothing of
the girls of forty years ago(446). Again Elaines art connects back to her partially obscured
childhood traumas, much of which was caused by the three girls in the paintingone of whom is
Cordelia. As for Cordelias only portrait by Elaine, the eyes that were meant to be defiant,
almost belligerent, as Cordelia was a thirteen, instead look tentative, hesitant, reproachful.
Frightened (249). Looking back at her painting of Cordelia, the eyes that she could not make
strong enough, Elaine reflects that Cordelia is afraid of me, in the picture, and then, mirroring
the statement, I am afraid of Cordelia (249). In fact, the two characters act as mirrors of each
other in a sense, a point touched on by the pier glass in the self-portrait Cats Eye, reflecting a
younger Cordelia with Carol and Grace. Elaines retrospective thoughts also bring this up
directly: A reflection. This is the part of herself I could give back to her. We are like the twins in
old fables, each of whom has been given half a key. Accordingly, the negative treatment that
passes from Cordelia to Elaine later passes from Elaine to Cordelia. Regarding Half a Face,
Elaine adds that I am not afraid of seeing Cordelia. Im afraid of being Cordelia. Because in
some way we changed places, like reflections of each other in a mirror (249). Just as Cordelia
once led the bullying against Elaine, Elaine starts to use her teenage mean mouth on Cordelia
as target practice (258). Later, when seeing Cordelias fathers obvious disappointment in her,
Elaine, rather than feel sorry, feels angry, asking, how can she be so abject? When will she
learn? echoing, partially, Cordelias attitude toward Elaines younger self. In spite of this spiral
of victimization, however, it is once again the paintings in Elaines retrospective that in part
makes her begin to understand Cordelia, to see the eyes as frightened and, more importantly, to

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want to break the vicious cycle personified in the relationship between the two of them. Elaine
even silently appeals to an absent Cordelia to Get [her] out of this, that she [doesnt] want to
be nine years old forever (437). Further, Elaine wants a reconciliation between her and Cordelia
that she knows exists outside the rang of possibility: in a plane after her retrospective, she sees
two old women who now, or a short while they can play again like children, but this time
without the pain. Elaine wants not something thats gone, but something that will never
happen (462), a healing of the divide between her and her reflection, Cordelia, so they can come
together and step outside the never-ending cycle they personify.
Yet another significant aspect of Elaines paintings is the image of the Virgin, who she
calls the Virgin of Lost Things. Vastly different from the usual Virgin images she saw in art
history, dough-faced and solemnsome anxious looking (309), or on the leaflet from Our
Lady of Perpetual Help, all in blue and white and smiling sadly in a disappointed way (201),
Elaine dresses her Virgin in Unified Field Theory in black, in shadow, and holding a blue cats
eye marble (447). Clearly, this is a reflection of the Virgin who Elaine believes came to her when
she almost froze to death in the ravine, who says to her, You can go home now It will be all
right. Go home (208). In Unified Field Theory, the same dark-cloaked Virgin figure stands
above the bridge and the ravine, but underneath the bridge is the night sky, as seen through a
telescopeOr so you thinkbut this is the underside of the ground (447). Encompassing all
space and the depths of the earth in the painting that this Virgin presides over seems to draw
attention to the figure as an archetypal Great Mother, a powerful and protective feminine force.
In this image of positive femininity, there is a gateway for Elaine to be reconciled to herself as
female and to other women. After the retrospective, Elaine returns back to the bridge and the
experience that was the impetus for the painting and imagines her reflection there, Cordelia. She

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feels suddenly the remnants of childhood pain: the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the
same knowledge of my own wrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the
same loneliness; the same fear (459). Now, however, she is armed with the knowledge that
these are not [her] own emotions any more. They are Cordelias; as they always were (459).
Elaine sees Cordelia beneath the bridge, where she once had been, and she knows that If she
stays here any longer she will freeze to death; she will be left behind, in the wrong time, and so
she [reaches] out [her] arms to her, hands open, and repeats the words she heard as a child:
Its all rightYou can go home now. Elaine, saved and empowered by the Virgin of Lost
Things, now becomes that figure in order to save the imagined Cordelia. Finally, she will break
the cycle of violence and loss.
The artwork in Atwoods Cats Eye works to illustrate not only Elaines early traumas
through another lens, but to form a means through which the past can be reflected on and
overcome, especially pointing out the vicious cycle of emotional trauma inflicted on women by
other women. The malicious portraits of Mrs. Smeath act as Elaines vengeance, but also her way
to look back on the woman she hated and learn to understand. Her portraits of herself and
Cordelia further establish the microcosm of reciprocated violence against other women
personified in Elaine and Cordelia, who exist almost as reflections of each other. Finally, the
depiction of the Virgin of Lost Things as a powerful feminine force both leads Elaine out of the
grip of Cordelia and empowers Elaine to save Cordelia, if only in her mind. The cruelty
perpetrated in an endless cycle between hurt women, especially young women, the paintings and
Elaines reflections on them seem to imply, can be ended when one takes a moment to see.