Vodooism and Female Quest Patterns in m Atwood 2003 Vol 36 Issue 3 636-650

Voodooism and Female Quest Patterns in Margaret

Atwood’s Cat’s Eye

Liza Potvin

In Cat’s Eye, Atwood documents the way that young girlsare subject to the scrutiny of the male gaze in the novel, but weare given a new model for learned female oppression. Asreaders, we are watchers of girls and women who are themselveswatched and conditionedFboth prey and hunter at once, inaccordance with one of Atwood’s perennial themes. Ourdiscomfort stems from an acknowledgment that evil and crueltyreside within, that sisterhood may be a frail and unattainablegoal in a society that demands ‘‘winners,’’ and from anexploration of women’s pain and loss of personal power. Iwant to propose that Atwood is turning to other definitions ofpower to combat such patriarchal oppression, some of themfrom more primitive sources, like voodooism, which sheconnects to the cult of the Virgin Mary, both of which areoffered as alternative belief systems. Such ‘‘primitive’’ religionsas voodooism (or shamanism in Surfacing) would seem to haveappeal to feminists like Atwood because they are larelyritualistic, nonhierarchical structures of faith which are bothdemocratic (having no seminaries, but an oral transmission ofpower through mentoring) and populist. Their potency alsoappeals to women because they represent ‘‘forbidden’’ orsubversive beliefs which are opposed to officially sanctionedreligions; they are invoked because of their nonconformity.

I believe that there are striking parallels between thetheories of popular ethnobotanist Wade Davis, and thatAtwood uses voodoo possession as a metaphor for the culturaland sexual appropriation of femaleness that can be traced backto her earlier work as well. Similar social practices in Cat’s Eyestress the use of ‘‘zombification’’ as a model for the internalizingof oppression for women, for the creation of a pathological‘‘slave-mind’’ within the ideological framework of patriarchy.

636

Davis gives several accounts of vodoun practices in Haiti, andfocuses in particular on zombification procedures which stressthe power of the tribe; zombies are typically invoked because oftheir nonconformity. Davis’ first account involves the poison-ing, burial, and revival of victims. The actual zombificationprocess begins at the ‘‘resurrection’’ after the victim, renderedcomatose by gradual, low-level poisoning and terrified atbeing buried alive, is brought back to life as a social pariahwho is totally dependent on a new master. In Haiti, theperson responsible for these social deaths and rebirths is calledthe bokor. He orders the poison from a houngan (the manknowledgeable in folk medicines) or a mambo (the femaleequivalent), administers the poison, calls up the buried victim,administers the chosen antidote, and takes charge of his or hernew slave. Here is Davis’ account of the social death of onevictim named Clairvius Narcisse:

According to Narcisse, he had refused to sell off his part of the

inheritance, and his brother in a fit of anger had contracted out his

zombification. Immediately following Clairvius’s resurrection from the

grave he was beaten and bound, then led away by a team of men to the

north of the country, where for two years he worked as a slave with

other zombies. (Passage of Darkness 80)

Likewise in Cat’s Eye, Elaine is considered a heathen and asocial outcast by the pious Mrs. Smeath, who first tries toconvert her by taking her to church where Elaine is ‘‘trying tofeel pious’’ (112). She is then subjected by Mrs. Smeath’sdaughter Grace to a ‘‘game’’ whereby she must appear to bedead:

I’m supposed to be Mary, Queen of Scots, headless already. They pick

me up by the underarms and lower me into the hole. Then they arrange

the boards over the top. The daylight air disappears, and there is the

sound of dirt hitting the boards, shovelful after shovelful. Inside the

hole it’s cold and dim and damp and smells like toad burrows. Up

above, I can hear their voices then I can’t hear them, I lie there

wondering when it will be time to come out. Nothing happens. When I

was put into the hole I knew it was a game, now I know it is not oneyIt

was the point at which I lost power. (CE, 112-13)

Like the victims whose cases are documented in Wade’sbook, Elaine remembers her death scene; like Narcisse, who is

Voodooism and Female Quest Patterns � 637

resurrected for his grave to become the slave of his bokor, Elainefinds her master in Cordelia. She describes her interment as ‘‘ablack square filled with nothingyPerhaps the square is empty;perhaps it’s only a marker, a time marker that separates timebefore it and time after’’ (112-13).

Wade Davis identifies several sources for the toxins capableof inducing a comatose state, andFin reduced dosagesFthezombie condition; it can also be produced by victims’psychological states of fright, aided by continual whipping ofthe victims. In Cat’s Eye, the toad associated with Elaine’sburial may be a reference to the Bufa toad, one source of suchpoisons. If this similarity can be overlooked, the repeatedreferences to nightshade by both Davis and Atwood cannot be.In Haiti, the datura plant (nightshade) is commonly known asthe ‘‘zombie’s cucumber’’Fwhich induces a state of disorienta-tion and amnesia; it was used in Dahomey both to sociallyisolate deviants, and to pacify large crowds awaiting deporta-tion as slaves to the West Indies. During the course ofintoxication, the zombie is socialized into a new existence (PD196). The natural history writer Gary Nabhan has shown thatthe blossom of the datura plant is so intoxicating that the hawkmoth which pollinates the night-blooming cirreus actuallystaggers and has exotic dreams; he speculates that such mothsmay seek the plant in order to induce visionary experiences. Andin fact, a variety of this plant does grow in Ontario: solanumdelcamara, or European bittersweet. The ill-smelling commongypsum weed, or stramonium, native to Ontario, belongs to thedatura family. Also known as belladonna, the plant was alsoassociated with medieval witchcraft because witches were said torub it on their bodies, and its poison was absorbed through themembrane of the skin, inducing hallucinogenic ‘‘orgies’’; suchaltered states were frequently said to be evidence of devilworship which resulted in the burning of millions of European‘‘witches’’ at the stake. Again, even the word for the plant,belladonnaF‘‘beautiful mother’’Fsuggests that the cult of theVirgin Mary (a vestige of earlier goddess-worshipping cults)may not only be powerful but potentially dangerous, that theworship of the mother can produce toxicity. One of the mainsymptoms in absorbing the drug is a dilation of the pupils; inlarge doses, it can actually produce blindness. Such metaphorsof increased clarity and vision are clearly associated with thecat’s eye itself in the novel: seeing too much can be dangerous.

638 � Journal of Popular Culture

Elaine remembers the nightshade. Cordelia tells her to ruboff its juice or she will become a zombie (80). Elaine claims toremember certain incidents associated with her resurrection:

I know the others came and got me out after a whileyAt first there’s

nothing; just a receding darkness, like a tunnel. But after a while

something begins to form: a thicket of dark green leaves with purple

blossomsyclusters of red berriesythe vines are intergrownyA smell

of loam and another, pungent scent arisesya smell of old things, dense

and heavy, forgotten. There’s no wind but the leaves are in

motionyNightshade, I think. It’s a dark word. There is no nightshade

in November. (CE, 112-13)

Elaine has difficulty recalling the event of burial, but doesremember ‘‘pink candles burning in the pale November after-noon light, and there is a sense of shame and failure’’ (113). Thenightshade, which grows under the wooden bridge whichElaine crosses over every day, induces a state of forgetfulnesswhich makes her subservient to Cordelia; Elaine knows that‘‘the flowers, the smell, the movement of the leaves persist, rich,mesmerizing, desolating, infused with grief ’’ (CE 114). Everyday, Elaine crosses the wooden bridge under which thenightshade grows, as if to reinforce her psychological terrorand to remind her of the link between two worlds. In effect, shebecomes a zombie, a slave to Cordelia, who is herself enslavedby patriarchal demands, although as an adult she rebels againstthem (Cordelia appears to be drugged in the restaurant scenewhere she meets Elaine and begs for her assistance). It isinteresting that the notion of poisoning is introduced in thechildhood section of the book; poison is a source of fascinationfor children because it is associated with assuming magicalpowers. I am reminded of the scene in Murder in the Dark,where the attraction to making poison is stressed. Elaine’slearned unconsciousness is not just girls’ play, but carries overinto adulthood, but even as a child, she learns to be a littlepriestess in attending the rituals developed by Cordelia, and isasked to sing as part of her performance ritual; repeatedly thesocial conditioning of little girls into compliant ‘‘zombies’’ isdocumented in the novel.

Oppression ends in zombification, from which Elaine andCordelia never quite recover; certainly not Cordelia, even ifElaine perceives her power as enviable. While they may not fully


recover, they do both remember, a word which etymologicallysuggests that the body re-members after a period of dismember-ment. Indeed the epigraph itself speaks to the importance ofmemory in the novel. Yet if the nightshade is the poison whichinduces blind submission, the cat’s eye may provide an antidote.In Haitian vodoun, the houngan traditionally makes an antidotewhen concocting the poison; this involves exhuming the deadbody, grinding up the bones with other ingredients, placingthem in a glass jar, and reburying them with the victim. Theritual is completed while candles are placed around the coffin,and three days later the body is again exhumed and the jarremoved (SR 100). Davis claims that no toxic antidote could befound among the remaining ingredients. This is remarkably likethe description given by Maya Deren, whose early anthro-pological work on vodoun influenced Davis:

The ceremony of reclamation is as the third and final birthythis soul

which, with death and the perishing of the flesh, was lost to the visible

world is brought back into it once more. The clay jar, or govi, in which it

is placed at this ceremony is a substitute for the vessel of flesh which

once contained it. Out of the mouth of that jar issue the counsels and

wisdoms by which the deceased continues to aid and advance his

descendants. (28)

It seems to me that Atwood is suggesting that it is only the adultElaine herself who, by sacrificing her status as honorary male,can provide the antidote to the poison that is patriarchy; bysubmitting to Cordelia’s lifelong dominance over her,Elaine is reborn as a ‘‘new woman.’’ She also accepts Cordeliaas her guide, and frequently describes her as her lost twin.This resembles Deren’s account of rebirth, which involves theconnection between ‘‘Divine Twins.’’

Steven, Elaine’s brother, has power, synonymous with bothpatriarchy and science or order, whereas women’s lives aremessy, filled with the chaos and flux of bodily processes likeabortion, weight gain, and all the other functions whichthe young girls in the novel are taught to control. Women arealso associated with the wild, the religious, the mysteriousoccultFthe opposite of science. Steven urinates in the sand tomark his territory, his place in the world. ‘‘You’re dead,’’ hetells Elaine; he teaches her to see in the dark and to submit, andhe says he knows the enemy. He wins many of the coveted cat’seye marbles, which he places in a jar and buries in a secret place


under the wooden bridge where the nightshade grows, the samebridge under which lost souls from the cemetery live (79). WadeDavis describes such lost souls as divided into two parts, one ofwhich is the ti bon (soul), captured by the bokor and placed in ajar until it is ready to re-enter the world in a different form (SR185-7). Elaine recognizes Steven’s power when she announcesthat ‘‘[m]y brother is deadly’’ (CE 67). This otherworldly poweris also ascribed to the cat’s eye marbles:

cat’s eyes are really like eyes, but not the eyes of cats. They are 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. (67)

As a young schoolgirl, Elaine carries her favorite cat’s eye in herred purse, later replacing it with a nickel for the collection box inan attempt to placate Grace and Mrs. Smeath, leaving the cat’seye in her bureau drawer (101); this symbolizes Elaine’s loss ofwill and results in a weakening of personal energy, resulting indepression. By Christmas, she admits ‘‘I am eating lost flight’’(140), a reference to the inefficacious prayer sung by herbrother. Returning in spring, however, like Lazarus from thedead, to play with marbles, she does not risk losing her cat’s eye,even though she carries it to school: ‘‘I hold on to it, rolling itbetween my fingers’’ (151). Feeling guilty after submitting toCordelia’s and Mrs. Smeath’s oppression, Elaine’s bildungsro-man-like quest is to regain her own power. She avoids Cordelia,who ‘‘doesn’t know what power this cat’s eye has, to protectmeySometimes when I have it with me, I can see the way itseesyI am alive in my eyes only’’ (151). During the summer,Elaine continues to recover; she describes her renewed state asone in which she leaves an old world behind, ‘‘as if I’ve beengiven permission to dream’’ (155). In one such dream, she seesherself walking about Toronto in a zombie-like state, where‘‘parts of my body are sticking out through the dress, parts ofmy bare skin. I am ashamed’’ (155). In another dream, the cat’seye marble falling through the sky ‘‘hits me, passes right intome’’ (155); and in yet another, the wooden bridge, site ofCordelia’s cruelty to Elaine, collapses. Simultaneously shedreams of picking ‘‘the deadly nightshade berries, translucent,brilliantly red. They’re filled with blood, like the bodies ofblackflies. As I touch them, they burst, and the blood runs overmy hands’’ (155). After the spell is broken, Elaine says that‘‘[n]one of my dreams is about Cordelia’’ (155), and the arrival


of the next winter signals the final break in their friendship.When Cordelia orders Elaine back into the forbidden ravinebottom, Elaine hesitates at first, then retrieves her fallen hat ofher own volition, nearly drowning in a reverse baptism, notingthat the nightshade is not there anymore, nor does she have hercat’s eye in her possession. Atwood does not reintroduce thenightshade or the cat’s eye until Elaine reaches maturity;then both are associated with her depression and withrecovering her memory. It is as if Elaine gives up her powerto Cordelia, who has spoken out against male oppression;paradoxically, she regains it (re-members it) as she repossessesthe cat’s eye, symbolizing her new vision, and incorporates itinto her paintings (the viewer of the paintings is also given thisnew vision).

The metaphor of zombification in Cat’s Eye is an importantone, and can be linked with earlier metaphors of headlessness,bodilessness, and dividedness found in Atwood’s earlier novels.Losing one’s head is a theme introduced in the epigraph, wherethe old woman’s head is cut off by the Tukanas. The idea thatwomen remain unconscious in their servitude to patriarchy untilsome violent awakening restores them is a recurring motif invirtually every one of Atwood’s novels: in The Edible Woman,Marian must consume herself in a symbolic act of cannibalismby devouring the cake baked in her image she has prepared forher lover; in Surfacing, the unnamed narrator is detached anduncommunicative until her descent into the world of nature, aquest provoked by her extreme reaction to the violence doneagainst that very nature. Joan Foster appears to be the speakerin Lady Oracle, but the voice is really that of a ghost writerwhose lack of identity is masked by her assumption of the masksof her Gothic characters, and she indulges in automatic writingwhile in a trance; as Robert Lecker points out, the caterpillarand butterfly imagery in the novel suggest that women ‘‘mustsuffer the darkness ofylife on earth as a preparation for therevelations offered by an after-life in heaven, and Joan mustbelieve that she will be released from the cocoon of her life,metamorphosed and free’’ (199).

Similarly, Life Before Man provides a main character who isdead: the suicide of Chris has a major impact upon the entirenovel as Lesje tries to negate his dying by living in the past, andElizabeth is haunted by her dead aunt. Unlike the narrator inSurfacing, Lesje does not look forward to the birth of her child


who will be a ‘‘throwback, a reptile, a mutant with some kind ofscales and a little horn on the snout’’ (293). The museummetaphors in the novel anticipate the mummification process,whereby the wild is tamed and domesticated. These aredeveloped in Cat’s Eye and again suggest the passivity andunconscious behavior of unawakened women. The pun in‘‘mummification’’ (mommy) again connects with the belladonna(‘‘beautiful mother’’) in Cat’s Eye.

In Bodily Harm, Atwood portrays Rennie as imprisoned,this time literally, unable to break the myth of herself as theinnocent middle-class bystander until she is made brutally awareof her complicity and decides to take a stance by writing aboutCaribbean politics.

To become ‘‘captured,’’ or to be in servitude to patriarchy,Atwood suggests, is to become seduced by power as defined inmale terms, complete with privileges of honorary male status:position, recognition, fame, and the usual attractions, althoughthese are ultimately the things which poison women. Socializa-tion for this process of zombification begins early for women,which is why Cat’s Eye focuses on the cruelties of childhood; thegirls are confronted with the need to conform at every possiblesite: home, church, school, and popular media.

The theme of the unawakened woman recurs in Atwood’sreferences to Shakespearean motifs. While Cordelia, Elaine’salter ego, is obviously the daughter of King Lear, Elaine regardsherself as a kind of Lady Macbeth (120) whose rise to power hasbeen through men, at the cost of sacrificing women and ofbetraying her own soul. She internalizes her powerlessness,self-destructively ripping the skin off her feet, chewing herhair and fingers in a self-mutilation that reveals how numbedand unconscious Elaine is. This theme of cannibalism isdeveloped to suggest a gradual self-integration, similar toMarian’s consumption of her body/cake in The EdibleWomanFboth women literally take themselves back. Thereare also her self-comparisons to witches and vampires (76, 91,263), and Stephen’s girlfriend is said to ‘‘bewitch’’ him.Atwood’s piece, ‘‘My Life as a Bat’’ from Good Bones, focuseson the issue of the soul and reincarnation, and concludes withthe following thoughts about being reborn as a bat:

Perhaps it isn’t my life as a bat that was the interlude. Perhaps it is this

life. Perhaps I have been sent into human form as if on a dangerous


mission, to save and redeem my own folky More and more, I think of

this event [rebirth] with longingy And in the evening, the supersonic

hymn of praise to our Creator, the Creator of bats, who appears to us in

the form of a bat and who gave us all thingsy What do we pray for?

We pray for food as all do, and for health and for the increase of our

kind; and for deliverance from evil, which cannot be explained by us,

which is hair-headed and walks in the night with a single white unseeing

eye, and stinks of half-digested meat, and has two legs. Goddess of

caves and grottoes: bless your children.

Elaine says ‘‘This is religion. Voodoo and spells. I want tobelieve in it’’ (119); she is ostensibly referring to cosmetics,but the statement nonetheless expresses a desire to seektransformation through art, something which Elaine is even-tually able to accomplish. When Stephen sings ‘‘Coming in ona wing and a prayer,’’ Elaine’s father claims that you cannotfly on one wing, and Elaine concludes that prayer is uselessForat least the kind espoused by her family or the Smeaths.She seeks something else. It is almost as if, like MargaretLaurence, Atwood has grown weary of an Old TestamentGod and looks to the ‘‘primitive’’ world of Africa forinspiration. In her relationship with John, Elaine again findsherself giving up her power, this time as an artist trappedin domesticity. At this point, something possesses her andshe begins painting from memoryFtoasters, coffee percolators,washing machinesFall objects of domestication that beginto take on a weird life of their own. Then she is once moretaken over:

I paint a glass jar, with a bouquet of nightshade rising out of it like

smoke, like the darkness from a genie’s bottle. The stems twist and

intertwine, the branches cluster with red berries, purple flowers. Scarcely

visible, far back from the dense tangle of the glossy leaves, are the eyes

of cats. (357-58)

Throughout this manic painting phase, Elaine acts as if undersome compulsion, as if she were a zombie, unconscious anddetached from her body. Again Elaine feels strangled andentangled and ‘‘[m]y body [becomes] a separate thingyIt hasbetrayed me and I am disgusted with it’’ (358). In a trance, shecan paint only the eyes of cats, knowing that ‘‘[w]hatever hashappened to me is my own fault, the fault of what is wrongwith me’’ (358)Fthat unnamable depression named by Betty


Friedan and other feminists. When we meet Elaine exhibitingher paintings, she notes her estrangement from other women:

They all seem to have more friends than I do, more close women friends.

I’ve never really considered it before, this absence; I’ve assumed other

women were like me. They were once, and now they are not. (371)

This sense of detachment is altered when Elaine includes thecat’s eye in her painting, when the pain of her personal past is‘‘remembered’’ and reintegrated into her work. The painting ofthe cat’s eye is appreciated by one viewer because it features thenightshade plant and might ‘‘look good over a sofa’’; thispotential client, who questions the appearance of the cat’s eye inthe painting, does not connect it with her own repression. ‘‘She’sconvinced of her own legitimacy, her right to pronounce,’’Elaine thinks sardonically to herself (371). Of course it is onlyrecently in Elaine’s own life that she has learned to see clearly,having taken responsibility and refusing to remain ‘‘zombified,’’and the cat’s eye now symbolizes a talisman to other women.

It is interesting to note that the return of Elaine’s power isassociated with the appearance of the Virgin Mary, whom shesees under the bridge. The Virgin is both a site of primitive andcultured mystery, and one that first appeared in Atwood’sSurfacing, when the narrator asks ‘‘What are Catholics?’’Atwood presents Catholicism as a voodooesque religion, exoticand ritualistic in a way that the predominant Protestantism ofOntario is not. All of the characters in Cat’s Eye seem toembody a metaphoric quality, similar to the fashion in whichthe Virgin Mary has, historically, represented whatever localcultures have projected onto her (witness the many differentnames under which she appears in the Catholic church,including, in the Polish church, the ‘‘Black Madonna’’). A largepart of the popular success of New Orleans voodooism in thepast century, under the leadership of Marie Laveau, herself adevout Roman Catholic and devotee of Mary, was due to hersynthesizing aspects of the voodoo queen with worship of theVirgin Mary (Tallant 55). Numerous stories circulated ofLaveau using as her talisman the statue of a virgin, includingan infamous court case over its ownership, whereby the courtdecided that ‘‘the holder of the virgin’’ (in actuality, a ‘‘badlooking rag baby’’) ‘‘had a right to retain it’’ (Tallant 67-68).

The Virgin embodies the typical female attributes of womenunder the thrall of patriarchy. The paintings which free Elaine


are those in which the three female muses are depicted, and themost important one features the Virgin of Lost Things. Assomeone holding the cat’s eye in Elaine’s painting, the virginrepresents not just captured womankind, but the ways in whichone can use transformations to one’s own advantageFindeed,that we can transform ourselves as well as use others’ view of usin ways that suit us (the power, to misquote Cassius, is not inour stars, but in ourselves). Atwood’s strategy of employing theimage of the ultimate passive female carrying the ultimate objectof empowerment (the cat’s eye) in this text brings together thetwo notions of womanhoodFone patriarchal, one feminist-Fand the Virgin of Lost Things represents the power Elainehas lost and now has found, a power she first realizes in thevisions that allow her to get up and walk (no longer a passive,reclining zombie), thereby saving herself.

Other references to Roman Catholicism abound in Cat’sEye. There are repeated references to angelsFthe angels whichthe girls make in the snow, and the souls of the lost and dead,described as souls which are respected and paid tribute to inMexico: ‘‘Everyone goes away happy, including the dead.’’ Theemphasis on Halloween recalls depressed women who wander aslost souls in a zombified state. This reminds me of theconscience, which is described in vodoun as the ‘‘ti bon ange’’or ‘‘little good angel’’ (Deren 26), the soul which cannot lie,which is purified of the human ego. And the fall of Cordelia issaid to feed the souls of the dead; this descent motif isemphasized repeatedly by Atwood’s contrast between ‘‘falling’’and ‘‘fallen’’ women in the novel. The descent and rise structureof the novel is not the typical Christian resurrection pattern, buthas numerous parallels with zombies being resurrected fromtheir passive state.

Descent is common to many works on female identity.Feminist critics have noted the chthonic quality of women as thesinglemost significant factor which determines men’s perceptionof them as different, as Sherry Ortner has suggested in ‘‘IsFemale to Male as Nature is to Culture.’’ The biological andcultural fact of woman’s special relationship to nature isfrequently expressed in fiction by heroines who are connectedto the earth not just through their fecundity and fertility, butalso by their capacity to find in nature a haven from patriarchalcontrol. Francine du Plessex Gray notes: ‘‘From Emily Bronte’smoors to Doris Lessing’s veld, women authors have turned to


nature not only in search of heightened perception but also as arefuge from the patriarchal orderyUntil all forms of sexualdominance are abolished, nature may be the only form ofnunnery left to us, the only shelter in a desacralized world’’ (29).

But Annis Pratt, in Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction,observes that nature is perceived not only as a retreat frompatriarchy, but one which, because its signals an escape fromand rebellion against that patriarchy, engenders rape as theprice of initiation into the natural world (16). Nature thusbecomes a place of involuntary exile and, after a woman’s fallfrom grace, ‘‘indifferent nature simply reclaims her. Once castinto solitude, the fallen woman is irretrievably metamorphosed’’(Auerbach 160). One can see this pattern most overtly displayedin Atwood’s novel Surfacing, where the narrator literallyattempts to metamorphose herself into an element of nature.Pratt uses the same word to describe women’s experience in thegreen world: ‘‘As in many examples of ‘green world fiction,’ thehero not only appreciates and likes nature but, through aprocess of metamorphosis, becomes an element in it’’ (19). NinaAuerbach finds that ‘‘apotheosis’’ is the last element of thecareer of the fallen woman, as if ‘‘a woman’s fall is imagined asthe only avenue through which she is allowed to grow’’ (165-66).Yet if she succeeds in transforming herself and growing, thatapotheosis is likely to be punishment or death. Similarly, Prattclaims that ‘‘[w]omen’s rebirth journeysy create transformed,androgynous, and powerful human personalities out of sociallydevalued beings and are therefore more likely to involvedenouements punishing the quester for succeeding in herperilous, revolutionary journey’’ (142).

Time is emphasized repeatedly in the novel as archae-ological, as the epigraph makes clear: ‘‘Why do we rememberthe past, and not the future?’’ It is as if women have to digthrough the palimpsest of the past in order to recover memory.This operates both in terms of personal delving into the past,and on the level of women’s collective archetypal searchFwhatAdrienne Rich referred to as ‘‘Diving into the Wreck.’’ Withoutthis descent, this falling, there would be no remembering.

Certainly it is the fallen woman who inhabits the terrainof Cat’s Eye. The sense of betrayal is greater when womensacrifice each other to God, a theme Atwood developed inThe Handmaid’s Tale. The descent motif again representswomen’s escape from patriarchal control, yet it is not usually


male-identified women (the handmaids of men), who force theheroine into exile. Cordelia is the extroverted vampire whodrains Elaine’s energy, while Elaine represents the introvertedmelancholic made glamorous, as described by Susan Sontag:‘‘Sadness made one ‘interesting’. It was a mark of refinement, ofsensibility...to be powerlessyThe melancholy character [likeKeats] was a superior one’’ (31). Elaine clearly feels that she iswinning, whereas Cordelia is a loser, a ‘‘nothing.’’ Elaine’sillness can be viewed, according to this Romantic myth, asspiritually refining: the aesthete wasting away in her garret,intense then exhausted, the artistic frenzy of painting followedby calm. Sontag writes that consumption was regarded as adisease of repressionFusually a repression of the passions, thatresulted in a kind of resignation, similar to the zombie state inwhich Elaine represses her feelings and her memories.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, after Gloucester has beenblinded, he claims he sees things ‘‘feelingly,’’ to which Learreplies: ‘‘What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes,with no eyes. Look with thine eares.’’ So too, in Jean-LucGodard’s King Lear, Lear wants to silence the silence, whileCordelia, in not speaking, is not nothing, but her very presence,her exactitude, and the film demonstrates the extolment ofimages (pictures, paintings) over words. And in Cat’s Eye,Cordelia’s absence at the end of the novel marks her presence inpainting, a kind of continuity of unspoken power. The modelfor Josef’s painting has a head that is a ‘‘sphere of bluish glass’’(388), the cat’s eye marble is rescued by Elaine’s mother (420),and the last painting, called ‘‘Unified Field Theory,’’ portraysthe ‘‘Virgin of Lost Things’’ who ‘‘holdsyan oversized cat’s eyemarble’’ (430). While the nightshade itself is no longer neededby ElaineFindeed, its absence near the old footbridge is notedby ‘‘the weeds and random debris...everything is now prunedand civic’’ (441)Fher having been the willing victim of itspoison has given her rare insight and the capacity to achieve herown power in a way that Cordelia never could.

Achieving her own power is associated with the arrival ofthe female museFthe goddess, rather than a god. And it is aprimitive archetype. Could Atwood have consciously borrowedthe metaphor of zombification from Wade Davis? Certainly weknow that she did intensive research on shamanism beforecompleting Surfacing, so it is possible that her research for Cat’sEye led her to Davis’ work.


The relationship between Wade’s text and Atwood’s textdemands a transformation or translation from what I read as akind of heroic cowboy-anthropologist’s quest for exoticism toone woman’s quest to escape patriarchy and divine analternative source of power and healing. Yet Wade is as mucha Harvard-trained Indiana Jones as Atwood is. Both writersthrive on creating mystery and Gothic fascination in the mind ofthe reader, while being equally elusive about defining their ownstatus as heroic discoverers and cultural commentators. WhatAtwood has proposed in this novel is a provocative theory ofzombification which serves as a metaphor for understanding thecultural conditioning of women, and the need to ‘‘wake up’’from a state of internalized oppression.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. Toronto: McClelland-Bantam, 1988.

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang,

1975.

Davis, Wade. The Serpent and the Rainbow. New York: Warner, 1985.

Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. London:

McPherson, 1953.

Du Plessex Grey, Francine. ‘‘Nature as a Nunnery.’’ New York Times

Book Review 17 July 1977: 29.

Gennette, Gerard. Palimpsestes. Paris: Seuil, 1982.

Jenny, Laurent. ‘‘La Strategie de la forme.’’ Poetique 17 (1976):

240-59.

Kristeva, Julia. Semeiotike. Paris: Seuil, 1969.

Lecker, Robert. ‘‘Janus Through the Looking Glass: Atwood’s First

Three Novels.’’ The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism.

Ed. Arnold Davidson and Cathy Davidson. Toronto: Anansi, 1981.

177-203.

Riffaterre, Michael. ‘‘Syllepsis.’’ Critical Inquiry 6.4 (Summer 1980):

618-25.

Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana UP,

1978.

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Tallant, Robert. Voodoo in New Orleans. Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1994.


Lisa Potvin teaches at Malaspina University in Nanaimo, British

Columbia. Her bookWhite Lies (written for her mother) won the Edna

Staebler prize for creative nonfiction. A short story collection called

Flights of Gravity will be published by Raincoast in March 2003.


Documents

Vodooism and Female Quest Patterns in m Atwood 2003 Vol 36 Issue 3 636-650