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2.1. The Shakespearean Family Pattern in Toronto
Like many other appropriations of King Lear, Cat’s Eye is a tale of ‘survival and traumatic memory’.48 To be able to cope with certain horrifying memories from her early years, Elaine conjures up images of a suffering Cordelia, ostensibly to gratify her wish for revenge. She imagines that ‘some man chases Cordelia along the sidewalk below me, catches up with her, punches her in the ribs – I can’t handle the face – throws her down’.
She sees herself in situations in which she is powerful and Cordelia is immovable, on the brink of death or in an iron lung, the worst punishment that Elaine could imagine as a child: ‘Cordelia in an iron lung, then, being breathed, as an accordion is played. […] She is fully conscious, but unable to move or speak. I come into the room, moving, speaking. Our eyes meet’ (8, ch. 2). Elaine’s return to Toronto becomes a voyage into the past,a painful descent into hell which will, for all her suffering, have a redemptive dimension.
The reader soon comes to understand that Elaine’s preoccupation with her girlhood ‘friend’ originates in the relentless and gratuitous acts of cruelty to which Cordelia and her loyal followers and accomplices, Grace and Carol, exposed Elaine as a child. In a sense, Cat’s Eye calls forth one of the most virtuous female characters in the literary imagination and turns her into a bully, a ‘bad’ girl, a ‘bitch’;50 but such images are gradually replaced by Elaine’s interspersed memories of a Cordelia who is pained and aggrieved. The middle-aged Elaine is able to distinguish a pattern which her younger self was unable to see. An image emerges of an afflicted Cordelia who is tied to a tragic pattern in which she assumes the role of scapegoat, a victim of her father’s unrelenting derision and her elder sisters’ taunting.
Like Shakespeare’s Cordelia, she is shamed for not being able to live up to her father’s expectations. At one point in the narrative, Elaine wonders whether Cordelia’s fate is written in her fictional name: Why did they name her that? Hang that weight around her neck. Heart of the moon, jewel of the sea, depending on which foreign language you’re using. The third sister, the only honest one. The stubborn one, the rejected one, the one who was not heard. If she’d been called Jane, would things have been different? (263, ch. 47)
The family pattern in which Cordelia is the youngest daughter is modelled on the Shakespearean family of three daughters and a dominant father, with the addition of a present but powerless mother. As Sarah Appleton Aguiar observes, ‘Cordelia’s father, as a revised King Lear, is a tyrannical and implacable ruler/father’.51 Most fathers in Cat’s Eye are portrayed as enigmatic intimidating, and dangerous. They ‘come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power’ (164, ch. 31).
There is something impenetrable, nebulous, almost God-like about several of them. In King Lear, the majestic authority of Lear may have passed its peak, but the principles associated with kingship – power and obedience – secure the superior role of the father and the inferior roles of daughters and mothers. Similarly feudal impulses are visible in the Shakespearean family in Toronto; the family members are strenuously manoeuvred by absolute loyalty towards the father who ‘sits at the head of the table, with his craggy eyebrows, his wolvish look’ (249, ch. 44). Exuding power, he dictates the way the mother should conduct and display herself and their home.
When he is not there ‘things are slapdash’, but when he is there it is a different story altogether: ‘There are flowers on the table, and candles. Mummie has on her pearls, the napkins are neatly rolled in the napkinrings instead of crumpled in under the edges of the plates’ (248, ch. 44).
The ‘tiny, fragile, absent-minded’ mother (73, ch. 14) reinforces her husband’s authority and comes across, as one critic puts it, as ‘so shadowy as hardly to exist at all’.53 In A Thousand Acres and Ladder of Years, the mother’s absence means that the daughters are unprotected against their father’s influence; in Cat’s Eye, the Shakespearean daughter is similarly unprotected despite the mother’s presence. ‘Mummie’ protects the father’s interests and guarantees that her daughters do too. She does not move her daughters towards independence, but leaves them in his sphere of influence where two of them secure a comparatively comfortable position thanks to their ability to please him.
The two elder daughters, Perdita and Miranda, resemble Goneril and Regan in their manner towards their father. Elaine notes that they ‘have an extravagant, mocking way of talking, which seems like an imitation of something, only it’s unclear what they’re imitating’ (72, ch. 14). In King Lear, the two elder sisters’ similar ability to follow the script places them in a favourable position vis-à-vis their father. Goneril and Regan’s adeptness at dissembling, playing along in the father’s game, initially empowers them and rewards them with material wealth. It is an exchange of power, not love; and whereas the father secures his elder daughters’ gratitude, or so he thinks, they receive his power, or so they think. In Cat’s Eye, the two elder daughters’ ability to play up to the father is also part of an exchange of power, though for very much lower stakes. In order to escape the scapegoat position that is Cordelia’s and command a reasonably assured social and familial role, they must learn to perform and calculate the effect words will have on their father. They speak on demand, but also halt the impulse to speak their minds. By disguising themselves and their true feelings, they receive a measure of power and agency. Perdita and Miranda have mastered strategies for remaining in his good grace:
‘I’m hag-ridden,’ he says, pretending to be mournful. ‘The only man in a houseful
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