2. Sisterhood, Shame, and Redemption in Cat’s Eye and King Lear

2.Sisterhood, Shame, and Redemption in Cat’s Eye and King Lear.
An image that would probably warm any parent’s heart – two sisters holdinghands to express solidarity, finding support in each other – becomes,in Lear’s eyes, an anomaly, since it symbolizes their union4 against Learand implies a threat to his power and influence over them. In disbelief, heexclaims: ‘O, Regan, will you take her by the hand?’ (II. 2. 383). But whatkeeps the sisters together – their collusion against Lear – is too tenuous tomaintain the previously undermined bonds of sisterhood. When they nolonger seek or need Lear’s favours, they compete for Edmund’s, thus playingright into the hands of a man who endeavours to extend his sphere ofinfluence. Antagonism and division is a fact.It is not certain that a Jacobean audience would immediately perceiveGoneril’s and Regan’s speeches as being out of place; they might have expectedsuch pledges to form part of a public court ceremony.5 In the theatreof the day, however, dissimulation was often associated with the deceptivenessof women. Cordelia quickly draws attention to her sisters’ doublenature, but her unwillingness to use their ‘glib and oily art’ becomes herdownfall (I. 1. 226). Before she departs for France, her last words are directedat her sisters. Even though she cannot at this point reveal theirflaws, she is confident that Time will: ‘Time shall unfold what plightedcunning hides,/Who covert faults at last with shame derides’ (I. 1. 282).As for now, positions have been reshuffled and Goneril and Regan havegained immunity. They have temporarily secured Lear’s grace and favour, aposition which does not, in turn, encourage any compassion on their part;instead, it promotes condescension and indifference to Cordelia’s affliction.The demand for obedience prevents the elder sisters from interveningon Cordelia’s behalf; instead, it encourages them to designate transgressivebehaviour in the former favourite: ‘You have obedience scanted,/ And wellare worth the want that you have wanted’ (I. 1. 280). Dissemblance – theability to manipulate emotions, their own and others – is thus rewarded,6and honesty – the ability to speak only what one feels – is punished.7Cat’s Eye demonstrates how three daughters with Shakespearean names– the two elder girls are called Perdita and Miranda – are expected toconceal their feelings and speak what they ought to in order to earn theirfather’s favour. The two elder daughters succeed, gaining as comfortablepositions as a dysfunctional family allows and avoiding the shame characteristicallygenerated by failure to measure up to expectations. Cordelia,however, fails; she does not master the linguistic and behavioural codewhich her sisters command with seeming effortlessness, consequently fallinginto shame – not only before her father, but also in the eyes of her sisters.Disgraced by her family, Atwood’s Cordelia projects her shame ontoher ‘best friend’ Elaine. Shame prevents the female characters from connecting;it works, as Sandra Lee Bartky says in another context, ‘againstthe emergence of a sense of solidarity’.8 The novel thus moves beyond KingLear in examining how the need to please the patriarch also affects thefragile bonds between female friends. Cat’s Eye illustrates how girls oppressother girls; but the novel also suggests a way out of oppression towards akind of sisterhood that is built not on the shared experience of victimizationand suffering,9 but on the shared experience of shame and a willingnessto redeem the other person from that shame.As we will see below, the redemptive power exercised by the vision ofthe Virgin Mary creates the possibility of ultimate forgiveness and reconciliationand thus a kind of ‘sisterhood’ in Cat’s Eye.10 It is also throughthe novel’s engagement with redemption that Cat’s Eye establishes a deeperconnection to King Lear. Through Elaine’s fall, both literal and metaphorical,in the middle of the narrative, the novel recalls Lear on the heath. Boththese characters’ respective falls raise the question of redemption, and boththe play and the novel invoke the idea of a female redeemer or an icon –Cordelia in King Lear and the Virgin Mary in Cat’s Eye – who can save Learand Elaine.To cultural materialist Jonathan Dollimore and to most post-1960scritics, the idea of any redemption in King Lear is, in the words of SeanBenson, a ‘mere fiction’. According to Dollimore, the reason why theChristian and humanist view appear equally misguided is because such aview ‘mystifies suffering and invests man with a quasi-transcendent identitywhereas the play does neither of these things’. Dollimore’s rejectionof redemptive readings builds on a tradition of critics who have posedquestions to King Lear which the play cannot answer. When critics haveattempted to determine whether King Lear endorses Christian (or humanist)values, they have focused on Lear’s last words: ‘look there, look there’,debating whether this is a promise of an afterlife or not.13However, the question is not whether Lear is saved or redeemed at theend, and the answer is not that he redeems himself through suffering (thehumanist view),14 or is redeemed through divine intervention because hesuffered (the Christian view) or that redemption is a mere fiction (thenihilistic view). The question that King Lear leaves us with is the questionthat Cat’s Eye attempts to answer, a question that can be posed in bothsecular and religious terms: what do individuals do with the freedom thatsucceeds redemption – with time redeemed – when Lear and Elaine aregiven a second chance at life by Cordelia and the Virgin Mary? It is theanswer to this question that is the real tragedy of King Lear; in Cat’s Eye,the answer implies that attaining sisterhood is difficult but not impossible.her early novels, especially The Edible Woman (1969) and Surfacing (1972),certainly invite feminist readings. Both David in Surfacing and Peter in TheEdible Woman come across as responsible for the oppression that Marianand Anna are exposed to. In Bodily Harm (1981), Atwood investigatesviolence directed at women’s bodies and minds. According to Brooks J.Bouson: ‘In Bodily Harm […] the criminal – the man with the rope – isnever specifically identified; instead, he assumes a variety of identities […]Thus, rather than representing a particular individual, the faceless strangercomes to represent the latent potential in all men to brutalize women’.
The ‘faceless stranger’ may also capture the difficulties in identifyingthe source of oppression. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which constitutesa departure from Atwood’s previous novels, halts the reader’s desire to assignblame to any one particular person, man or woman. Instead, it directsthe reader towards a system that turns everybody into a collaboratorin an enterprise that enslaves women. To some extent, feminist readingsthat attribute blame to male characters are frustrated by Cat’s Eye and bythe novel that followed, The Robber Bride (1993). For the female mainprotagonists in these novels, the source of evil is found in the behavior of women. Zenia and Cordelia are held up as responsible for most that iswrong with the main characters’ lives; but a feminist angle is opened byCat’s Eye in that this novel encourages the reader to suspend judgmentof Cordelia and direct his or her attention to the co-responsible party inCordelia’s ‘evil’: her father. This emphasis on re-distributing responsibilitiesand complicities is also at the heart of Atwood’s latest novels, Oryx andCrake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), both of which explore thedebt that humanity owes to the planet and what happens when that debtis exacted.
If Atwood has expressed reluctance to be designated as a feminist writer,her identity as a Canadian writer is obviously essential to her, somethingthat her book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)gave early evidence of.19 In Margaret Atwood: A Biography, Nathalie Cookesuggests that ‘[f ]or Atwood, Survival was more than a book of criticism: itwas a statement of belonging. She very firmly believed that her role was notto be just a writer; it was to be a Canadian writer’.20 Canadian themes andmotifs, such as survival and the victim motif, run through her novels; butin most of them, her female characters ‘surface’ instead of staying or goingunder. It is worth observing that Canada is rarely allowed to representinnocence and goodness, or to assume victim status.21 Atwood’s picture ofcolonialism and imperialism thus does not evince any overt bias; but sheis and has always been explicitly concerned with Canada’s post-colonialstatus – its problematic relation to the United States and its ambivalentrelation to Britain.
Many Canadian thinkers and writers have turned to Shakespeare toexplore the country’s ‘colonial legacy’. According to Daniel Fischlin, ‘[t]heproblem of Shakespeare’s iconic centrality to critical thinking generallyhas particular relevance in a national entity like Canada, still dealing witha colonial legacy and the effects of a less-than-complete decolonization’.
A number of English-Canadian rewritings in the 1960s and 1970s turnedto The Tempest to explore the contradictory position of Canada vis-à-visBritain; in these rewritings, Miranda, as the dutiful ‘daughter of empire’,came to epitomize Canada’s colonial predicament.24 It is thereforenoteworthy that Atwood turns to Cordelia, the not-so-dutiful daughter.
Cordelia’s initial refusal in King Lear to acknowledge her debt to her fathermay well be seen in relation to Canada’s problematic post-colonialstatus, its conflicting loyalties, and the economic and cultural debts thatgo with decolonization. Julie Sanders maintains that Shakespeare is ‘diffuse,debunked and subverted’ in this novel.25 But the idea of subversionis not consistent with the subtle evocation of Shakespeare in Cat’s Eye.
Atwood’s novel summons Shakespeare not in order to subvert his iconicstatus, but to explore another icon: Cordelia.The voices of the past, historical and literary, are never ignored inAtwood’s literary work; on the contrary, they constitute an essential partof her aesthetics. Her use of Shakespeare thus also needs to be understoodagainst the backdrop of her overall turn to myths, fairy-tales, legends, andliterature to bring the past to life and listen to the voices of the dead, therebysetting them free.27 In Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), it is the hangedmaids in The Odyssey who are redeemed. The maids come back from thedead, not to exert revenge but to be remembered and draw attention to an
act of injustice:
we had no voice
we had no name
we had no choice
we had one face
one face the same
we took the blame
it was not fair
but now we’re here.
The interest in science that is so patently conveyed through characters and themes in Cat’s Eye has led to several examinations of the novel from a scientifically oriented perspective, most recently by Janine Rogers who argues that ‘Atwood is clearly constructing science as redemptive’. The spiritually redemptive dimension of Cat’s Eye is, however, most vividly expressed through the appearance of the Virgin Mary. Many critics associate the Virgin Mary with forgiveness, emphasizing her divine status. According to Helen Charisse Benet-Goodman, it is via Elaine’s experience of the Virgin Mary that the novel ‘grounds forgiveness in a
religious vision’. Whether she should be seen as a projection of Elaine’s mind or as a genuine apparition is a point of contention amongst critics, and even Benet-Goodman argues that the novel ‘resists this religious vision and remains uncertain of the vision’s ontological status’. Whereas Benet-Goodman examines female friendship and forgiveness, Rebecca M. Painter explores the novel’s portrayal of evil. In her reading, evil manifests itself not only in Cordelia, but also in Elaine’s subsequent indifference to Cordelia’s suffering.