Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye

Cat’s Eye, a novel by Margaret Atwood published in 1988, coincides in dates with the roots of the third significant transformation in feminism and the rise of poststructuralist concepts of gender and sexuality. This work applies a poststructuralist feminist literary approach to the novel, focusing on time and identity, psychoanalysis, gender representations, and otherness.
The framework of the analysis lies within the narrated story and the narrator’s experience, and not in the text beyond fiction, or rather in Atwood’s consciousness, conventions and life.

Many critics have pointed out that when Christianity appears in Margaret Atwood’s work it is patriarchal, authoritarian, closed, institutional, and repressive. Others have indicated the ways in which much of Atwood’s work endorses a perspective that could be considered implicitly or explicitly religious in other respects. This perspective most often involves a kind of personal “spirituality,” one that is anti-patriarchal, nature-centered, and humanistic—and definitely not Christian. In contrast to this dominant critical understanding, a handful of scholars have noted that, even though Atwood appears to promote a total break with Christianity, her writing in fact at times favors this tradition in certain ways.

Cat’s Eye offers an important example of a text that embodies this complex regard for Christianity, and that also demonstrates Atwood’s trademark use of mimesis. The novel’s religious ambivalence in fact becomes apparent specifically through an examination of its mimetic tropes. This examination is undertaken using two different theoretical approaches—which themselves incorporate considerations of Christianity—provided by the work of Homi Bhabha and René Girard. Bhabha’s model focuses on the relationship between colonialism and mimicry, while Girard’s is concerned with mimetic conflict and sacrifice. Examining Cat’s Eye through the respective lenses of these theories reveals that, although Cat’s Eye offers a critique of Christianity that in many ways mirrors Bhabha’s own, in the end the novel promotes a particular understanding—and affirmation—of the tradition that is fundamentally Girardian.

"In this new book Douglas Glover includes essays on Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and Hubert Aquin; three interviews and a memoir; and three considerations of the nature of fiction and one on comedy. In them, he establishes paternity, explanations and justification for the non-narrative novel, what Glover refers to in one essay title as the novel as poem. Again and again he cites John Hawkes’s much-quoted remark that the enemies of the novel are “plot, character, setting, and theme.” And he rounds up the usual suspects in marshalling his arguments: Nabokov, Paul Valery, Samuel Beckett, Victor Shklovsky. This kind of writer, Glover argues, chooses less than he is chosen. Writing becomes an act of survival, if it is even, ever, that: “Christa Wolf is hiding in California, living the life of one of her own characters, hounded out of Germany for being politically incorrect. Leonard Cohen stopped writing novels after Beautiful Losers. And Hubert Aquin killed himself. Exile, silence and death, which are optional modes in a piece of fiction, seem, in the lives of certain writers, to take on a kind of necessity–there is only this and writing, or, perhaps, this or writing. For this kind of writer, there are no safe havens, no fire exits, and the patient never recovers.” It is a particular strength of this collection that Glover not only demonstrates how much Canadian fiction is part of the avant-garde non-narrative novel but also that the circumstances of Canada invite just such writing: “These are writers and artists … who see marginality (Canadianness) as a metaphor for the self in the modern age–that self which everywhere feels somehow exterior and irrelevant to its own destiny.” To understand it this way is to see Canadian writing in a new way." (Review of Contemporary Fiction)

Table of Contents

The Novel as a Poem — Her Life Entire (on Margaret Atwood) — The Essential Furniture of the World — Difficulty and Revolution (on Hubert Aquin) — The Net and the Quest for Christa T. (on Christa Wolf and women's writing) — Laughter and Anxiety (on comedy) — Nihilism and Hairspray — Gertrude, or the Postmodern Novel — A Feeling for History — The Masks of I — Beautiful Losers (on Leonard Cohen) — The Sparks that Fly off when Two Skins Touch — The Familiar Dead (memoir).