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    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye"
    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye"
    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye"
    Ebook41 pages26 minutes

    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535820554
    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye" - Gale

      1

      Cat's Eye

      Margaret Atwood

      1988

      Introduction

      Cat's Eye was published in Toronto in 1988 and was the ninth novel by Margaret Atwood, one of Canada's most acclaimed writers of fiction and poetry. It is about a successful painter, Elaine Risley, who returns to Toronto, the city where she grew up, for a retrospective of her work at a gallery named Sub-Versions. Risley is trying to come to terms with being fifty. She must also grapple with disturbing memories from her childhood, and much of the novel consists of Risley's narration of this period in her life. At the core of Risley's story is the cruelty she suffered as a young girl at the hands of her three best friends, particularly a girl named Cordelia. This teasing shatters Risley's self-esteem and leads her to adopt neurotic habits, such as peeling her skin, biting her nails, and chewing her hair. She also develops fainting fits and has suicidal impulses.

      In exploring the world of childhood female friendships, Atwood broke new ground. Never before had the world of eight-to twelve-year-old girls been examined so thoroughly and with such unflinching insight.

      The novel also explores the nature of memory and identity, since Risley is aware of how unreliable memory can be, and how our experience of the present is colored by past events. The nature of artistic creativity is another theme, as Risley discovers her vocation as a painter. Finally, the novel provides a vivid picture of Toronto in the 1940s and 1950s, and shows how dramatically the city had changed by the 1980s.

      Author Biography

      Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Canada. Her father, Carl Edmund Atwood, was a forest entomologist; her mother, Margaret Dorothy (Killam) was a graduate in home economics from the University of Toronto.

      Atwood spent her earliest years in Ottawa during the winters and the rest of the year in northern Quebec and Ontario. In 1946, her father took up a position as professor at the University of Toronto, and the family moved to Toronto.

      In 1957, Atwood became a student of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto. In 1961, after graduation, she studied English at Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and was awarded a master's degree in 1962. She then went on to doctoral studies at Harvard until 1963. The following year she taught English literature at the University of British Columbia. Her first collection of poetry, The Circle Game (1966), won the Governor General's Award.

      Since then, Atwood has published poetry, novels, short stories, children's literature, and nonfiction and has taught

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