Cat's Eye

“I can feel my throat tightening, a pain along the jawline. I’ve started to chew my fingers again. There’s blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange Popsicles, penny gumboils, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.”

Elaine begins to remember the past via traditional nostalgic symbols of candy. However, these objects quickly give way to dissonant memories of “gnawed hair” and “dirty ice”—an uncomfortable sensory combination that casts a violent tone over the past. It becomes clear that the taste of orange popsicles, the symbol of childhood, is tied up somehow with the taste of blood.

“This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I’m supposed to have accumulated things by no possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I’m supposed to be a person of substance.

But since coming back here I don’t feel weightier.”

This quotation introduces the bridge as a symbol of the adult Elaine’s position halfway between her violent childhood and some unknown future. The bridge is suspended over a river, which evokes the ravine of Elaine’s childhood, a place of both imagined and actual violence. This implies that Elaine’s position is one of precarious stability over a potential descent into chaos.

“We like scabs. We pick them off—there isn’t room for a whole arm or leg under the microscope—and turn the magnification up as high as it will go. The scabs look like rocks, bumpy, with a sheen of silica […] we know without asking that such things would not be approved of. Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.”

Elaine and Stephen’s youthful interest in the violent realities of their bodies indicates how bodily violence will later pollute Elaine’s childhood. Foreshadowing Elaine’s later self-harm, the children secretly picking their scabs demonstrates not only their interest in scientific understanding but also a curiosity about their bodies that they sense is inappropriate. The juxtaposition of childlike curiosity and the adults’ repressive attitude towards their bodies is central to Elaine’s development.

“There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps, the next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. I focus on taking the cap off the toothpaste, getting the brush up to my mouth. I have difficulty lifting my arm to do even that. I feel I am without worth, that nothing I can do is of any value, least of all to myself. What do you have to say for yourself? Cordelia used to ask. Nothing, I would say. It was a word I came to connect with myself, as if I was nothing, as if there was nothing there at all. Last night I felt the approach of nothing.”

Elaine has not left the trauma of her childhood behind. As an adult, she continues to experience difficult mental health issues and depression. The “approach of nothing” evidences the long-term impact Cordelia’s belittling words have had on Elaine and also suggests the way that Elaine’s identity has for so long been minimized and even subsumed into Cordelia’s own. The two girls (and the women they become) are two sides of a coin, mirroring and illuminating each other.

“So I am left to the girls, real girls at last, in the flesh. But I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.”

As soon as Elaine encounters “real girls,” her instinct is to be cautious and uncertain. Elaine’s unconventional childhood provided her with remarkable freedom but has also made her particularly vulnerable to the kind of cruelty Cordelia later perpetrates. Elaine’s desperation for conformity and community is part of why she complies with Cordelia for such a long time.

“I find this game tiring—it’s the weight, the accumulation of all these objects, these possessions that would have to be taken care of, packed, stuffed into cars, unpacked. I know a lot about moving house.”

Although Elaine longs to be included in the girls’ childhood games, she feels exhausted and repulsed by the possessions the other girls hope to accumulate. This quotation demonstrates the lasting impact Elaine’s unconventional childhood has had upon her and prefigures her later artistic obsession with objects such as these. Elaine has a complex relationship with consumerism, modernity, and with objects themselves, which have the unique ability to contain and preserve the past.

“The cat’s eyes are my favorites. If I win a new one I wait until I’m by myself, then take it out and examine it, turning it over and over in the light. The cat’s eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats. They’re the eyes of something that isn’t known but exists anyway; like the green eye of the radio; like the eyes of aliens from a distant planet. My favorite one is blue. I put it into my red plastic purse to keep it safe. I risk my other cat’s eyes to be shot at, but not this one.”

Elaine first responds to cat’s eye marbles with reverence and awe. Their strangeness, like something from another world, imbues the objects with a unique power that will allow Elaine to resist Cordelia. The novel’s most important symbol, the cat’s eye marble, becomes a precious talisman of individuality and resistance.

“In the end, if he were a betting man, he says, he’d put his money on the insects. The insects are older than people, they have more experience at surviving and there are a lot more of them than there are of us. Anyway, we’ll probably blow ourselves sky-high before the end of the century, given the atom bomb and the way things are going. The future belongs to the insects.”

Elaine’s father is obsessed with the potential end of humanity. His imagined environmental catastrophes hang over the entire novel, inviting the reader to consider survival and endurance, and the way that these ideas motivate various characters. The certainty that the “future belongs to the insects” casts an ominous tone that influences Elaine’s inability to positively imagine her own future.

“‘Why do you paint?’ she says, and I can hear her again as clear as anything. I hear her exasperation, with me and my refusals.

‘Why does anyone do anything?’ I say.”

Elaine’s interview with Andrea demonstrates how Elaine’s childhood has impacted her personality as an adult. Her resistance to Andrea’s questioning shows her defensiveness and cautiousness around other women. The rhetorical question she answers Andrea with applies not only to her own motivations to paint but more widely to the behavior of all the novel’s characters—Cordelia in particular.

“We can’t ask our mothers. It’s hard to imagine them without clothes, to think of them as having bodies at all, under their dresses. There’s a great deal they don’t say. Between us and them is a gulf, an abyss, that goes down and down. It’s filled with wordlessness. They wrap up the garbage in several layers of newspaper and tie it with string, and even so it drips onto the freshly waxed floor […] The world is dirty, no matter how much they clean, and we know they will not welcome our grubby little questions.”

As children, Elaine and the other girls feel as if a gulf exists between them and the adult women around them. It feels perverse and wrong to imagine these women existing in bodies the same way as they do. This quotation introduces the theme of aging and the fear of bodily change that Elaine embodies as well as the idea that women are obligated to “clean” a world dirtied by others. Whether women are virtuous cleaners or themselves violent polluters is a question the novel explores in tandem with The Specter of Male Violence and the Reality of Female Violence.

“When we bend our heads to pray I feel suffused with goodness, I feel included, taken in. God loves me, whoever he is.”

Elaine’s experience of religion is based almost entirely on emotion and sensation rather than doctrine. Where Cordelia’s influence teaches her every day that she is bad and wrong, the certainty of God’s love assuages Elaine’s feelings of guilt and destructiveness. However, her clear uncertainty about who God even is evidences her naivety, which allows the Smeaths to exploit her.

“Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence, but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.”

The idea that to small girls, other small girls are “life-sized” relates most obviously to the harm that those girls can inflect on one another, but it is also linked to the theme of Vision and Visual Art. As an adult, Elaine retains the sense that children see the world through entirely different lenses than their parents and other adults do. As she herself becomes a mother, Elaine can see through these varied lenses and so fears (for) children in a way most do not.

“But Cordelia is my friend. She likes me, she wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends, my girl friends, my best friends. I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please. Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”

This quotation is central to the theme of female violence. Although Elaine is certain that the other girls are her friends, it is from them that she suffers the most violence. This quotation makes clear the extent to which Elaine has internalized Cordelia’s own narrative, truly believing she deserves to be in the position she has been made to occupy.

“My father has eaten everything on his plate and is digging for more stuffing in the cavity of the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless baby. It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I’m eating a wing. It’s the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can’t even fly any more. I am eating lost flight.”

For Elaine, the motif of wings and flight often represents freedom and opportunity. As she likens the Thanksgiving turkey to a child, it becomes less a meal and more a victim of cruelty. The symbolic “lost flight” represents the bird’s inability to escape its fate as well as Elaine’s own lack of freedom.

“Sometimes when I have it with me I can see the way it sees. I can see people moving like bright animated dolls, their mouths opening and closing but no real words coming out. I can look at their shapes and sizes and colors, without feeling anything else about them. I am alive in my eyes only.”

This quotation explains how the cat’s eye marble imbues Elaine with the power to resist Cordelia: It gives her a unique perspective. Elaine can see through the marble, abstracting people into faceless and voiceless shapes and colors. The cat’s eye is Elaine’s first real introduction to vision that escapes the bounds of convention and allows her to do the same.

“I begin to spend time outside my body without falling over. At these times I feel blurred, as if there are two of me, one superimposed on the other, but imperfectly. There’s an edge of transparency, and beside it a rim of solid flesh that’s without feeling, like a scar. I can see what’s happening, I can hear what’s being said to me, but I don’t have to pay any attention. My eyes are open but I’m not there. I’m off to the side.”

Elaine’s self-inflicted fainting episodes are described in visceral, somatic terms. The “body” that she begins to spend time outside of is “solid flesh” like a “scar,” in contrast to the elusive transparency of her being. The desire she feels to escape her body demonstrates the blame she (at Cordelia’s behest) places on her physical form for the treatment she receives.

“But I turn and walk away from her. It’s like stepping off a cliff, believing the air will hold you up. And it does. I see that I don’t have to do what she says, and, worse and better, I’ve never had to do what she says. I can do what I like.”

Elaine’s resistance to Cordelia is imagined in terms of wings and flight. The short, harsh sentences have the clanging tone of realization, as Elaine discovers this power of flight was always within her.

“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”

This quotation is central to Elaine’s character and how she forms her relationships with others. She is protective of herself but also cautious of allowing herself too much knowledge of others. Elaine’s treatment by Cordelia has made her treat others poorly in turn, but this quotation demonstrates that Elaine is unwilling to accept explanations for cruel behavior; she is unwilling to sympathize with others.

“He says that time can be stretched or shrunk, and that it runs faster in some places than in others. He says that if you put one identical twin in a high-speed rocket for a week, he’d come back to find his brother ten years older than he is himself. I say I think act would be sad.”

Stephen explains the novel’s conception of space-time. Here he explores the way that time can be experienced as something other than linear and consistent. The image of two twins who progress at different rates reflects Elaine and Stephen’s relationship after Stephen’s death freezes him at one age, but it also reflects Elaine and Cordelia’s relationship and divergent paths.

“I am not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I’m afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I’ve forgotten when.”

In this quotation, the idea of twins occurs again. The comparison drawn between Cordelia and Elaine suggests that Elaine has become subsumed into Cordelia’s identity. It asks the reader to contemplate Elaine’s own cruelty, but also perhaps to question her conception of reality—specifically, to what extent Cordelia is a projection of her own character.

“When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”

As a teenager, Elaine begins to explore relationships with men for the first time. She is, however, relatively uninterested in them as people, appreciating them instead for their physical appearance. The way Elaine thinks about men echoes the way men are expected to think about women—as objects of visual desire—inverting gendered power dynamics.

“With a slight push, a slip over some ill-defined edge, I could turn into a bag lady. it’s the same instinct: rummaging in junk heaps, pawing through discards. Looking for something that’s been thrown away as useless, but could still be dredged up and reclaimed. The collection of shreds, of space in her case, time in mine.”

Elaine remains literally weighed down by elements of her past. Like the “bag lady” she imagines, she surrounds herself with fragmented memories. And while she imagines her “shreds” are temporal rather than material, the novel has demonstrated that these parts of time are often made manifest in physical objects.

“I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came out of me. I’m what’s left over.”

Elaine paints to regain control over the narrative of her past, but once the paintings are finished she realizes that their meaning proliferates beyond what she originally intended. The quotation also alludes to the way that pouring out her memories and identity into these paintings has left Elaine drained of energy and vitality. Elaine herself is an empty remnant of her own past.