The Cat’s Eye

The cat’s eye marble that Elaine has as a child is the central symbol in the novel. She considers it too precious for playing, preferring to keep it safe in her red purse. The marble is a blue flower at the centre of clear glass. She believes that the marble keeps her safe and also wants to be like the cat’s eye, only able to see with all other senses turned off, protected from the bullying of the world but still able to see it and explore it like her brother Stephen. The cat’s eye is a central motif that appears repeatedly in Elaine’s paintings, suspended between the religious and the scientific elements of her Unified Theory painting.

The Cat’s Eye quotes

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

I keep my cat’s eye in my pocket, where I can hold on to it. It rests in my hand, valuable as a jewel, looking out through bone and cloth with its impartial gaze. (Elaine) Chapter 29

Her bad heart floats in her body like an eye, an evil eye, it sees me. (Elaine about Mrs Smeath) Chapter 33

‘A marble!’ says my mother, with a child’s delight. ‘Remember all those marbles Stephen used to collect?’
‘Yes,’ I say. But this one was mine.
I look into it, and see my life entire. (Elaine) Chapter 69

The Bridge

The bridge represents several unanswered mysteries in the text and in doing so is symbolic of the unknown. The rumours that bad men are down there is both dispelled when Elaine goes down and is alone but also upheld when later a girl is murdered there. Stephen’s marbles are buried there. Death nearly claimed Elaine there. It is in this world of the imagination that the bridge becomes significant.

The bridge also represents time in its multidimensional view. It has a start and finish if you cross it like a linear or chronological approach to time. However Elaine’s attention is always drawn to the height of the bridge, the distance between the ground, the bridge and the sky evident in her painting Falling Women. This exists even when the old bridge is torn down and a new concrete one replaces it showing that the dimensions of time cannot be altered.

The Bridge 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

‘It fell over the bridge,’ I say. I need to get this lie over with as soon as possible. Telling the truth about Cordelia is still unthinkable for me. (Elaine) Chapter 36

Half a Face

Named after a comic book villain, Half a Face is the only picture featuring Cordelia, representing the idea of the two friends as they change places. The exact time and place of this shift is indefinable and Elaine admits she had trouble pinning down time and place, showing that although the tormenting can be isolated the actual impact cannot. Behind Cordelia’s face lurks another face covered with a white cloth which becomes an emblem of their fluctuating power dynamics.

The swirls in this painting exemplify Elaine as she shifts from victim to perpetrator. In a way, this reversal frightens Elaine more than Cordelia’s persecution. She is extremely fearful of being Cordelia. She experiences an acute sense of revulsion and flushes of ‘guilt and terror and cold disgust’ when acting in this way.

Half a Face Quotes

I think about becoming invisible. I think about eating the deadly nightshade berries from the bushes beside the path. I think about drinking the Javex out of the skull and crossbones bottle in the laundry room, about jumping off the bridge, smashing down there like a pumpkin, half of an eye, half of a grin. I would come apart like that, I would be dead, like the dead people.
I don’t want to do these things, I’m afraid of them. But I think about Cordelia telling me to do them, not in her scornful voice, in her kind one. I hear her kind voice inside my head. Do it. (Elaine) Chapter 29

This is the only picture I ever did of Cordelia, Cordelia by herself. Half a Face, it’s called: an odd title, because Cordelia’s entire face is visible. But behind her, hanging on the wall, like emblems in the Renaissance, or those heads of animals, moose or bear, you used to find in northern bars, is another face, covered with a white cloth. The effect is of a theatrical mask. Perhaps. I had trouble with this picture. It was hard for me to fix Cordelia in one time, at one age. (Elaine) Chapter 41

Cordelia is afraid of me, in this picture.
I am afraid of Cordelia.
I’m not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I’m afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I’ve forgotten when. (Elaine) Chapter 41

They’re like those characters in old comic books, the ones with two identities. These men have been caught halfway through their transformation: ordinary bodies but with powerful, supernatural heads, deformed in the direction of heroism, or villainy. I don’t know whether or not this is what my brother thought. But it’s what I think for him, now. (Elaine thinking for Stephen on the plane) Chapter 68