Cat’s Eye

These two passages, one from a prose poem questioning the reliability of modes of visual perception and the other from a book of popular physics describing how we see back through the present to the distant past, might together serve as preface to Cat’s Eye, for this is a novel which combines the discourses of fiction and autobiography, science and painting in its attempt to represent the female subject in the text. Arguably Cat’s Eye could be read as Atwood’s own retrospective glance back at the imaginative territory of her earlier fictions. There is a female artist here who is more successful than the nameless woman in Surfacing and the same parent and brother figures as in that novel; the same childhood tormentors and traumatic experiences in the Toronto ravine have appeared in Lady Oracle and in some of the poems in The Circle Game; ‘the eyes of cats, fixed for the pounce’ have been referred to in The Handmaid’s Tale, to name but a few of the intertextual references here. There are figures and events and modes of imagery which chime with resonances from Atwood’s earlier works, but I do not want to pursue those explorations here, fascinating as they are.3