Part 1: Iron Lung
Chapters 1 – 2

It is fitting that Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood begins with an observation about time. Stephen, the brother of protagonist Elaine Risley, contends that ‘time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimension of space’ and this distortion is a common thread throughout the novel. Elaine herself is in the present but still connected to the past and narrates from multiple points in time during her coming of age story.

The chapter opens with thirteen year old Elaine and her friend Cordelia riding in a tram car and casting critical and judgmental eyes over the fashion and appearance of the other passengers. Time transitions to the present where an adult Elaine is walking around Toronto feeling that perhaps she has become one of the women she sees on the street and whom she and Cordelia would have mocked. This evokes some sympathy from Elaine to these fellow ladies. She wonders about her friend Cordelia and what has happened to her. They have lost touch and Elaine pictures her as a bag lady or in an iron lung, the latter thought a further extension of time as it connects to an early childhood memory. The changes in the city give her cause for anxiety. Development and change are explored in these ways throughout the text, the evolution of the city not as positive progress but as inevitable.

Part 1 Quotes

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once. (Stephen to Elaine) Chapter 1

You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away. (Elaine) Chapter 1

There is no one I would ever tell this to, except Cordelia. But which Cordelia? The one I have conjured up, the one with the rolltop boots and the turned-up collar, or the one before, or the one after? There is never only one, of anyone. (Elaine) Chapter 2

I’ve started to chew my fingers again. There’s blood, a taste I remember. (Elaine) Chapter 2

Part 2: Silver Paper
Chapters 3 – 7

It is revealed that Elaine was dearly connected to the city of Toronto at one stage of her life. She is an artist, although she refers to herself as a painter, who has returned to attend a gallery opening of her retrospective artwork. On the way to the gallery she sees a poster of herself announcing the show. Someone has drawn a moustache on the poster, ironically something she would have done as a teen – life’s cycle and time’s distortion continue. Her immediate connection to Cordelia, wondering if she would see the poster and remember her, demonstrates how close the friend lives in her memory even though they have not seen each other for some time. She sees herself as a character, reflecting that ‘everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise’.

Young Elaine remembers the time before she came to Toronto when she was a happy child living nomadically with her parents and brother Stephen. Her father, an entomologist, travels for work throughout the states, national parks and forests and takes the family with him. This nomadic lifestyle and home-schooling seems to have deprived Elaine of a friendship with girls. The rugged nature of life with brother Stephen, climbing, playing with sticks and collecting insects has given her an insight into the male psyche but left her vulnerable for when she will eventually meet girls.

On her eighth birthday, Elaine receives a camera and takes a photo of herself. This photo reappears later but with little memory attached to it, showing that the nature of time and memory as events can be frozen by the camera then reappear later with the subject changed.

Part 2 Quotes

This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I’m supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I’m supposed to be a person of substance. But since coming back here I don’t feel weightier. I feel lighter, as if I’m shedding matter, losing molecules, calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I’m shrinking, as if I’m filling with cold air, or gently falling snow. (Elaine) Chapter 3

Alongside my real life I have a career, which may not qualify as exactly real. I am a painter. (Elaine) Chapter 3

Then, suddenly, I feel wonder. I have achieved, finally, a face that a moustache can be drawn on, a face that attracts moustaches. A public face, a face worth defacing. This is an accomplishment. I have made something of myself, something or other, after all. I wonder if Cordelia will see this poster. (Elaine) Chapter 3

‘You can’t fly on one wing.’ So in fact the prayer in the song is useless. (Elaine) Chapter 4

I want some friends, friends who will be girls. Girl friends. I know that these exist, having read about them in books, but I’ve never had any girl friends because I’ve never been in one place long enough. (Elaine) Chapter 5

Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly. (Elaine) Chapter 7

Part 3: Empire Bloomers
Chapters 8 – 15

Elaine shops for a new dress, she struggles with her emotions feeling old and worthless. While she is trying on dresses, a hand reaches under the dressing room partition and grabs her wallet. She steps on the hand and it drops the wallet. Elaine hears the sound of school girls giggling. She curses Cordelia. A sign that this sort of trouble is the type of thing Cordelia would do and also that Cordelia and trouble are synonymous in her mind.

Her memories trace the moments when she first attended school. The significant sign was the lettering above the doors where she is made to line up: ‘boys’ and ‘girls’. This sudden gender division is new to her and she puzzles over the reasons and implications of separating into two lines that simply go into the same building. Stephen is happy to be among raucous boys, but Elaine is unprepared to be around the girls. Carol Campbell immediately makes friends with her, seeing her as an intrigue, and they start walking home together. Carol’s fascination with their lack of furniture and her disgust at insects are the first signs of gender difference for Elaine to navigate.

Carol introduces Elaine to her friend Grace Smeath, a manipulative older girl who, whilst kind and friendly, will feign headaches if she does not like the game they are playing and threatens that they will have to go home if they do not play the one she wants. At school various games become popular and when marbles are in vogue, Elaine collects a blue cat’s eye marble which she never risks in a game and keeps in her purse. The marble with its eye inside hardened glass comes at a time when Elaine needs to retreat into herself wishing she could be a protected observer. This is a trait she will need to develop when she eventually meets Cordelia, who joins Carol and Grace while Elaine is away with her family.

Part 3 Quotes

There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps, the next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. (Elaine) Chapter 8

I bring my shoeless foot down hard on the wrist. There’s a shriek, some loud plural giggling: youth on the fast track, schoolgirls on the prowl. My wallet is dropped, the hand shoots back like a tentacle. I jerk open the door. Damn you, Cordelia! I think.
But Cordelia is long gone. (Elaine) Chapter 8

I am very curious about the BOYS door. How is going in through a door different if you’re a boy? (Elaine) Chapter 9

I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder. (Elaine) Chapter 9

Carol asks me what church I go to, and I say I don’t know. In fact we never go to church. (Elaine) Chapter 9

‘Ew,’ says Carol, screwing up her face and wriggling all over. I can’t pretend to be shocked and disgusted too: my brother wouldn’t be convinced. (Elaine) Chapter 10

I see that there’s a whole world of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of it without making any effort at all. (Elaine) Chapter 10

The cat’s eyes are my favorites. If I win a new one I wait until I’m by myself, then take it out and examine it, turning it over and over in the light. The cat’s eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats. They’re 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. My favorite one is blue. I put it into my red plastic purse to keep it safe. I risk my other cat’s eyes to be shot at, but not this one. (Elaine) Chapter 10

She smiles a lot, with her lips closed over her large teeth; but, like Grace, she does not laugh. (Elaine about Mrs Smeath) Chapter 11

‘Remember this,’ our father says. ‘This is a classic infestation. You won’t see an infestation like this again for a long time.’ It’s the way I’ve heard people talk about forest fires, or the war: respect and wonderment mixed in with the sense of catastrophe. (Elaine) Chapter 13

Grace and Carol are standing among the apple trees, just where I left them. But they don’t look the same. They don’t look at all like the pictures of them I’ve carried around in my head for the past four months, shifting pictures in which only a few features stand out… A third girl is with them. (Elaine) Chapter 13

This is what Mummie says when she’s angry: ‘I am disappointed in you.’ If she gets very disappointed, Cordelia’s father will be called into it, and that is serious. None of the girls jokes or drawls when mentioning him. (About Cordelia’s family) Chapter 14

Part 4: Deadly Nightshade
Chapters 16 – 20

Elaine meets Charna, the gallery organiser and generations collide. First, Charna makes innocent references to Elaine not looking like her picture and reorders the artwork tonally rather than chronologically as Elaine had preferred. Second, Charna introduces interviewer Andrea and Elaine is surprised to learn that an interview has been arranged without her consultation. She answers questions in the interview defensively, believing that Andrea is thinking negative thoughts about her. When quizzed on the generational difference Elaine answers: ‘We have long attention spans. We eat everything on our plates. We save string. We make do.’ Elaine dismisses the question about feminist influences, not seeing herself as such, much like Atwood has declined calls that she publicly define her feminist stand.

In her reflection on school days, Elaine describes how Stephen changes and becomes interested in a girl, then is interested in chemistry and after that, astronomy. This transient curiosity with the world defines Stephen’s character. Elaine recalls being invited to church with the Smeaths and how difficult it was to negotiate a new set of social procedures: failing to wear a hat and pausing for grace at the meal afterwards.

Part 4 Quotes

I don’t look at this painting for very long, or at any of them. If I do I’ll start finding things wrong with them. I’ll want to take an Exacto knife to them… (Elaine) Chapter 16

‘The war. There are people who remember the war and people who don’t. There’s a cut-off point, there’s a difference.’ (Elaine) Chapter 16

‘So you don’t feel it’s sort of demeaning to be propped up by a man?’ she says.
‘Women prop up men all the time,’ I say. ‘What’s wrong with a little reverse propping?’
(Andrea to Elaine – interview) Chapter 16

‘Every educated person should know the Bible,’ he says. (Mr Risley) Chapter 18

God is not an entirely new idea for me: they have him at school in the morning prayers, and even in ‘God Save the King’. But it seems there is more to it… (Elaine) Chapter 18

Each cluster of girls excludes some other girls, but all boys. (Elaine) Chapter 19

When I was put into the hole I knew it was a game; now I know it is not one. I feel sadness, a sense of betrayal. Then I feel the darkness pressing down on me; then terror. (Elaine) Chapter 20

Part 5: Wringer
Chapters 21 – 27

Elaine meanders through Toronto and visits Simpsons department store. The changes to the store leave her perplexed. The narrative returns to the childhood days and outlines a dark time when Cordelia’s bullying becomes extreme. Enlisting the help of Grace and Carol, Cordelia implements various punishments for Elaine every time she has been deemed to do something wrong. Elaine complies out of fear of losing her friends but her inward turmoil manifests in nervous habits like peeling the skin off her feet. She has some reprieve when her family leaves Toronto for her father’s work.

Cordelia, Grace and Carol are invited to watch a Christmas parade from the building where Mr Risley works, but Elaine has to watch from a separate window as punishment from the girls for something she has supposedly said. Cordelia appears to cover up this torment when Mr Risley appears and he leaves not knowing of the internal turmoil his daughter is experiencing.

Part 5 Quotes

Your elbows, especially your elbows: aging begins at the elbows and metastasizes. This is religion. Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top glue. (Elaine) Chapter 21

In the endless time when Cordelia had such power over me, I peeled the skin off my feet. I did it at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping. (Elaine) Chapter 21

With sons I would have known what to do: frog catching, fishing, war strategies, running around in the mud. … But the world of sons has changed; it’s more likely to be the boys now with that baffled look, like a night dweller gone blind in sunlight. ‘Stand up for yourself like a man,’ I would have said. I would have been on shifty ground.
As for the girls, my girls at any rate, they seem to have been born with some kind of protective coating, some immunity I lacked. (Elaine) Chapter 21

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence, but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized. (Elaine) Chapter 22

They are my friends, my girl friends, my best friends. I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please. Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love. (Elaine) Chapter 22

I want to believe you should love your neighbors as yourself and the Kingdom of God is within you. But all of this seems less and less possible. (Elaine) Chapter 23

He’s polite and ill at ease and he giggles frequently, looking with what I sense is terror at the array of food spread out before him, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the lurid green and red Jell-O salad, the enormous turkey: my mother has said that the food is different there. I know he’s miserable, underneath his smiles and politeness. I’m developing a knack for this, I can sniff out hidden misery in others now with hardly any effort at all. (About Mr Banerji) Chapter 24

‘There are no limits to human greed,’ says my father. (Elaine) Chapter 24

‘Fooling with Nature, sir,’ says Mr Banerji. I know already that this is the right response. Investigating Nature is one thing and so is defending yourself against it, within limits, but fooling with it is quite another. (Elaine) Chapter 24

She’s not like any mother I’ve ever seen. (Elaine about Mrs Finestein) Chapter 25

‘Jews are kikes,’ says Carol, glancing at Cordelia for approval. (Carol) Chapter 25

‘Honey, that’s all right,’ she says, looking into my raw, watery eyes. She puts her arm around me and gives me a hug and an extra nickel. No one has ever called me honey before this. I go home, knowing I have failed her, and also myself. (Elaine with Mrs Finestein) Chapter 25

I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning. (Elaine reflecting on women in magazines) Chapter 26