Cat's Eye Atwood Analysis

Surfacing (1972) reveals the complex question of identity for an English speaking Canadian female. The major theme of the novel 'Search for identity ', like national identity, identity of selfhood and identity of womanhood, for the protagonist has become difficult because of her role as a victim of colonial forces. She has been colonized by men in the patriarchal society in which she grew up. Initially, the narrator of the story returns to the undeveloped island that she grew up on to search for her missing father in that process she unmasks the inconsistencies in both her personal life and her patriarchal society. The unnamed narrator of Surfacing comes back to her home in Northern Quebec after a gap of nine years in search of her father,

In the same way, Atwood examines how, in Cat 's Eye, the urban and the wilderness are employed as symbolic sites for inscribing her portrayal of feminine self in postcolonial perspective. For instance, In Cat 's Eye Atwood depicts pockets of wilderness and indeterminacy which serve as a space for inscribing feminine difference, and functions as an excess term which challenges human attempts to force a particular sequence, rationality, and predictability on their surroundings, by making the wilderness `safe '. Besides, the representations of Elaine as a misfit, a victim of her girlfriends tyranny, especially that of Cordelia, and ultimately as a stranger and an outsider can be connected with the novel’s postcolonial implications. Furthermore, the position of Elaine occupies with respect to Cordelia and the other girlfriends who bully her unmercifully, seeing her as on the margin and not quite measuring up, has obvious colonial analogies in the text. She is, for example, impressed by how much the difficulties of Mr. Banerji, her father’s postgraduate student from India, are similar to her own. Likewise, she is attracted to Mrs. Finestein, for whom she works as a baby sitter, because this Jewish woman can happily ignore the prevailing Christian conception of what a wife and a mother should be. Elaine’s resistance to Cordelia is associated with blackness, while Cordelia and her friends are associated with white images. The usual symbolism of black and white is thereby reversed and