67 pages • 2 hours read
Cat's Eye
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Cat’s Eye Marble
Content Warning: This section references bullying and suicidal ideation.
Elaine’s blue cat’s eye marble is a central symbol representing her troubled childhood, her relationship with Cordelia, and her development as an artist.
As a child, Elaine learns she can see the world through the marble in a detached manner, creating distance from her own emotions. The marble gains talismanic power: she keeps it in her pocket, where she can hold onto it and see through it, but it simultaneously looks out of her pocket “through bone and cloth with its impartial gaze” (166). This is the origin of Elaine’s artistic gaze, linking the symbol to the theme of Vision and Visual Art.
As Elaine ages, she forgets about the marble but, where Stephen buries and therefore loses his own multitude of cat’s eye marbles, Elaine’s marble keeps reappearing throughout her life, reflecting the persistence of the traumatic memories of her childhood. When she rediscovers it while going through her parents’ possessions, she looks into it and “see[s] [her] life entire” (420), finally reconnecting with the haunting repressed memories of her past. It is therefore through the marble (and through artistic representations of the marble) that Elaine begins to reclaim her own memories. In one of her paintings, Josef Hrbik and Jon paint a female model, possibly Elaine, who has a blue marble instead of a head. In another picture, the Virgin Mary holds an oversized marble in her hands. The cat’s eye marble represents the mutability of meaning as well as Elaine’s inner self: As a child, she was cradled like this by her imagined Virgin Mary and used the marble to shut out the evils of the world beyond.
The Bridge
The bridge recurs throughout the novel, both as a literal landmark from Elaine’s childhood and as symbol of connection and dislocation. As a child, Elaine walks over a broken wooden footbridge that represents uncertainty and potential danger; it traverses the dangerous ravine where evil men are said to reside and where the water is (the girls say) made out of the bones of the dead. This bridge is the location of Elaine’s near-death experience, as she almost drowns in the icy water. At times, Elaine imagines jumping off the bridge but envisions the feeling of flight—associated with freedom—rather than of falling. The bridge is linked to both threat and safety because, at least in her darkest moments, death itself seems like a refuge to Elaine.
The bridge also evokes the connection between Elaine and Cordelia, which is fragile and changes as the novel progresses, just as the old wooden footbridge is replaced by a new concrete one. Most importantly, the bridge symbolizes the connection between the past and the future, transition, and the persistence of memories, making it key to the novel’s exploration of Memory and the Passage of Time. As an adult, Elaine imagines herself “in the middle” of her life, “halfway across, halfway over” (13), demonstrating her connection both to the repressed memories of her past and the potentiality of her future. Only by revisiting the bridge both in her art and in reality can Elaine resolve her internal bridges between past and future, innocence and experience, and reliance on Cordelia versus independence.
Shakespeare
References to the works of William Shakespeare are woven throughout the novel, and they are often key to Elaine’s development and revelatory of characters’ motivations.
Cordelia and her sisters have all been given names from Shakespeare. Perdita is the daughter of King Leontes and Queen Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; she begins the play abandoned and ends it reunited with her parents. Miranda is the daughter of the sorcerer Prospero in The Tempest and is loved and sheltered by her father. By contrast, Cordelia is the youngest daughter of King Lear. For refusing to flatter him, she is disowned at the play’s opening. Each daughter is virtuous and dutiful and suffers because of her father’s actions, but Cordelia is executed before she can reunite with her father. This echoes Cordelia’s difficult relationship with her own father, and the tragedy of the Shakespearean Cordelia’s death haunts Elaine’s memories of her friendship with Cordelia.
Cordelia herself pursues a career as a Shakespearean actor from her early years, and her desire to inhabit other roles demonstrates her difficulty with her identity. The play Macbeth, in which she replaces the rotten cabbage with a new one, is significant as a sinister backdrop of murder and torment. Carol, Grace, and Cordelia evoke the play’s three witches, Macbeth’s severed head haunts Elaine’s dreams, and later in life Elaine wonders why people dress their daughters in tartan, which calls to mind Scotland and the “Scottish play.” Perhaps Cordelia’s accidental invocation of the play’s true name, said to bring bad luck to actors, is the harbinger of her own downfall. When Cordelia hopes for the role of the witch in Macbeth—she seeks to reinhabit the mystical feminine power she had as a child—Elaine suggests that Cordelia’s fate is tied to that of her namesake.
Unlock all 67 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Margaret Atwood
