Introduction intergenerational Debts, Guilt, and Shame in

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

An image that would probably warm any parent’s heart – two sisters holding hands to express solidarity, finding support in each other – becomes, in Lear’s eyes, an anomaly, since it symbolizes their union4 against Lear and implies a threat to his power and influence over them. In disbelief, he exclaims: ‘O, Regan, will you take her by the hand?’ (II. 2. 383). But what keeps the sisters together – their collusion against Lear – is too tenuous to maintain the previously undermined bonds of sisterhood. When they no longer seek or need Lear’s favours, they compete for Edmund’s, thus playing right into the hands of a man who endeavours to extend his sphere of influence. Antagonism and division is a fact. It is not certain that a Jacobean audience would immediately perceive Goneril’s and Regan’s speeches as being out of place; they might have expected such pledges to form part of a public court ceremony.5 In the theatre of the day, however, dissimulation was often associated with the deceptiveness of women. Cordelia quickly draws attention to her sisters’ double nature, but her unwillingness to use their ‘glib and oily art’ becomes her downfall (I. 1. 226). Before she departs for France, her last words are directed at her sisters. Even though she cannot at this point reveal their flaws, she is confident that Time will: ‘Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides,/Who covert faults at last with shame derides’ (I. 1. 282). As for now, positions have been reshuffled and Goneril and Regan have gained immunity. They have temporarily secured Lear’s grace and favour, a position 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 intervening on Cordelia’s behalf; instead, it encourages them to designate transgressive behaviour in the former favourite: ‘You have obedience scanted,/ And well are worth the want that you have wanted’ (I. 1. 280). Dissemblance – the ability to manipulate emotions, their own and others – is thus rewarded,6 and honesty – the ability to speak only what one feels – is punished.7 Cat’s Eye demonstrates how three daughters with Shakespearean names – the two elder girls are called Perdita and Miranda – are expected to conceal their feelings and speak what they ought to in order to earn their father’s favour. The two elder daughters succeed, gaining as comfortable positions as a dysfunctional family allows and avoiding the shame characteristically generated by failure to measure up to expectations. Cordelia, however, fails; she does not master the linguistic and behavioural code which her sisters command with seeming effortlessness, consequently falling into shame – not only before her father, but also in the eyes of her sisters. Disgraced by her family, Atwood’s Cordelia projects her shame onto her ‘best friend’ Elaine. Shame prevents the female characters from connecting; it works, as Sandra Lee Bartky says in another context, ‘against the emergence of a sense of solidarity’.8 The novel thus moves beyond King Lear in examining how the need to please the patriarch also affects the fragile bonds between female friends. Cat’s Eye illustrates how girls oppress other girls; but the novel also suggests a way out of oppression towards a kind of sisterhood that is built not on the shared experience of victimization and suffering,9 but on the shared experience of shame and a willingness to redeem the other person from that shame. As we will see below, the redemptive power exercised by the vision of the Virgin Mary creates the possibility of ultimate forgiveness and reconciliation and thus a kind of ‘sisterhood’ in Cat’s Eye.10 It is also through the novel’s engagement with redemption that Cat’s Eye establishes a deeper connection to King Lear. Through Elaine’s fall, both literal and metaphorical, in the middle of the narrative, the novel recalls Lear on the heath. Both these characters’ respective falls raise the question of redemption, and both the 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 Lear and Elaine. To cultural materialist Jonathan Dollimore and to most post-1960s critics, the idea of any redemption in King Lear is, in the words of Sean Benson, a ‘mere fiction’. According to Dollimore, the reason why the Christian and humanist view appear equally misguided is because such a view ‘mystifies suffering and invests man with a quasi-transcendent identity whereas the play does neither of these things’. Dollimore’s rejection of redemptive readings builds on a tradition of critics who have posed questions to King Lear which the play cannot answer. When critics have attempted 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.13 However, the question is not whether Lear is saved or redeemed at the end, and the answer is not that he redeems himself through suffering (the humanist view),14 or is redeemed through divine intervention because he suffered (the Christian view) or that redemption is a mere fiction (the nihilistic view). The question that King Lear leaves us with is the question that Cat’s Eye attempts to answer, a question that can be posed in both secular and religious terms: what do individuals do with the freedom that succeeds redemption – with time redeemed – when Lear and Elaine are given 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 The Edible Woman come across as responsible for the oppression that Marian and Anna are exposed to. In Bodily Harm (1981), Atwood investigates violence directed at women’s bodies and minds. According to Brooks J. Bouson: ‘In Bodily Harm […] the criminal – the man with the rope – is never specifically identified; instead, he assumes a variety of identities […] Thus, rather than representing a particular individual, the faceless stranger comes to represent the latent potential in all men to brutalize women’.

The ‘faceless stranger’ may also capture the difficulties in identifying the source of oppression. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which constitutes a departure from Atwood’s previous novels, halts the reader’s desire to assign blame to any one particular person, man or woman. Instead, it directs the reader towards a system that turns everybody into a collaborator in an enterprise that enslaves women. To some extent, feminist readings that attribute blame to male characters are frustrated by Cat’s Eye and by the novel that followed, The Robber Bride (1993). For the female main protagonists 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 is wrong with the main characters’ lives; but a feminist angle is opened by Cat’s Eye in that this novel encourages the reader to suspend judgment of Cordelia and direct his or her attention to the co-responsible party in Cordelia’s ‘evil’: her father. This emphasis on re-distributing responsibilities and complicities is also at the heart of Atwood’s latest novels, Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), both of which explore the debt that humanity owes to the planet and what happens when that debt is exacted.

If Atwood has expressed reluctance to be designated as a feminist writer, her identity as a Canadian writer is obviously essential to her, something that her book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) gave early evidence of.19 In Margaret Atwood: A Biography, Nathalie Cooke suggests that ‘[f ]or Atwood, Survival was more than a book of criticism: it was a statement of belonging. She very firmly believed that her role was not to be just a writer; it was to be a Canadian writer’.20 Canadian themes and motifs, such as survival and the victim motif, run through her novels; but in most of them, her female characters ‘surface’ instead of staying or going under. It is worth observing that Canada is rarely allowed to represent innocence and goodness, or to assume victim status.21 Atwood’s picture of colonialism and imperialism thus does not evince any overt bias; but she is and has always been explicitly concerned with Canada’s post-colonial status – its problematic relation to the United States and its ambivalent relation to Britain.

Many Canadian thinkers and writers have turned to Shakespeare to explore the country’s ‘colonial legacy’. According to Daniel Fischlin, ‘[t]he problem of Shakespeare’s iconic centrality to critical thinking generally has particular relevance in a national entity like Canada, still dealing with a colonial legacy and the effects of a less-than-complete decolonization’.

A number of English-Canadian rewritings in the 1960s and 1970s turned to The Tempest to explore the contradictory position of Canada vis-à-vis Britain; in these rewritings, Miranda, as the dutiful ‘daughter of empire’, came to epitomize Canada’s colonial predicament.24 It is therefore noteworthy that Atwood turns to Cordelia, the not-so-dutiful daughter.

Cordelia’s initial refusal in King Lear to acknowledge her debt to her father may well be seen in relation to Canada’s problematic post-colonial status, its conflicting loyalties, and the economic and cultural debts that go with decolonization. Julie Sanders maintains that Shakespeare is ‘diffuse, debunked and subverted’ in this novel.25 But the idea of subversion is not consistent with the subtle evocation of Shakespeare in Cat’s Eye.

Atwood’s novel summons Shakespeare not in order to subvert his iconic status, but to explore another icon: Cordelia. The voices of the past, historical and literary, are never ignored in Atwood’s literary work; on the contrary, they constitute an essential part of her aesthetics. Her use of Shakespeare thus also needs to be understood against the backdrop of her overall turn to myths, fairy-tales, legends, and literature to bring the past to life and listen to the voices of the dead, thereby setting them free.27 In Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), it is the hanged maids in The Odyssey who are redeemed. The maids come back from the dead, not to exert revenge but to be remembered and draw attention to an