Resumo de Cat?s Eye - Margaret Atwood

Elaine Risley returns to Toronto
for a retrospective Exhibition of her paintings hosted by a local gallery,
SubVersion, and promoted by ardent feminists. Elaine bridles at the
cklassification, wanting her work to be acknowledged on its own merits without
the political overtones or patronization.

Return to Toronto
revives memories and conflicts of childhood as Elaine stays in Jon's studio
apartment for convenience as she avers hotels and their squeaky clean bathrooms
as impersonal. Jon was her husband in
the old days when she was extricating herself from college and the
complications of having a student-professor affair in her search for love,
acceptance and reasurrance in a world overshadowed and dominated by peer
pressure.

Atwood skillfully uses the images presented in the
retrospective exhibition to explore the ghosts of Risley's past. Characters
emerge from the pastiche compositions and frames to relive three-dimensional childhood
nightmares. The paintings include cariacatures of old acquantances, bugasboos
of when she arrived as a guiless child in Toronto
without the benefit of normal socialization.
A newcomer, Elaine seeks acceptance with childhood playmates through
docile submission. Arriving late to social life and city habits, Elaine enters
school belatedly at eight unaware of the brutal social games that children
play. Until then her only companion has been her older brother, Stephen who
takes interest in the distant stars and theories of the universe's origins. He
serves as her foil as they diverge on separate paths through life: Stephen, the brainy intellectual achiever and
Elaine the artistic drop-out from academic society.

Elaine's father gains a professorship at the University
of Toronto after spending the war years
doing field research, tracking caterpillar infestations across the Canadian
northern woods. Unsophisticated and
home-tutored by her well-educated, but pragmatic mother, Elaine faces the bitterness and agony of being a social
misfit when the family finally settles into an unfinished bungalow on a mudflat
in Toronto. She acquires her first friends through
neighborhood acquaintances. Acutely conscious of her lack of sophistry, she
learns to mimic their interests: likes and dislikes into her own life. Elaine acquiesces to peer pressure from
Cordelia, Carol and Grace Smeath whom she secretly loathes, but publicly
mimics.

Atwood carefully crafts the opposition between internal and
external realities through the emotional and psychological conflicts of her
characters. Houses represent the
restrictions of society replete with symbolism of achievement and failure with
social status dependent on their structure and internal decoration. Elaine is impressed by the sophistry and superficiality of her friends'
homes, noting details of domestic civilization by the quality of clothing
fabrics and curtains and the sumptiousness of furniture. Social status is dependent on possessions
and ostentation. Yielding to pressure, she gets dragged along
to church for a proper puritanical Christian education by Grace Smeath and
victimized by Cordelia for her lack of sophistication. Carol presents the picture of the suffering
female saint, dressed in the mediocre while achieving the mundane. Pressure builds for her unresistant conformity
to the conflicting demands of the three girls until one wintry day taunts
result in near catastrophe upon a rickety footbridge that spans the ravine.
Elaine's hat is tossed into the snow below. To keep face, Elaine endures the
test of childish courage, afraid to rebel against her abusive friends.

Complex riddles and hidden memories aer reopened as Elaine
rediscovers a cat's eye marble within a small red purse which gives the book
its title. Jarring and emotionally explosive, Atwood explores the phenomena of
peer bullying and secret tortures that occur in childhood.

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