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2.2. Before, During, and After Elaine’s Fall
The survival skills necessary for a life on the road and in the natural world are replaced by other skills as Elaine moves permanently to Toronto. Although the games girls play are unfamiliar to her, she masters these games with ease and a measure of astonishment, but also with a sense of urgency. She sacrifices honesty in order to get along and play along, handing herself over to the other girls and consequently giving them power over her. Elaine’s difference has an exotic appeal to Grace and Carol; but all that changes when Cordelia arrives, changing the group dynamics radically.
Grace and Carol become Cordelia’s followers, protecting her power by helping to impose her rule on Elaine. Before Elaine comes to know Cordelia, ‘[she doesn’t] think about falling. [She is] not yet afraid of heights’ (62, ch. 12). Before Cordelia is the time before the fall into shame: the time of innocence (33, ch. 6). The first time they meet, Elaine becomes conscious of her lack of sophistication and of her ‘atypical’ family. She suddenly sees herself from the outside, through the eyes of another, Cordelia: I feel shy with Cordelia. […] I’m conscious of my grubbiness, my unbrushed hair. […] Her eyes are measuring, amused. I can see, without turning around, my father’s old felt hat, his boots, the stubble on his face, […] my mother’s grey slacks, her manlike plaid shirt, her face blank of makeup. (70, ch. 14)
At this point, Cordelia provokes embarrassment rather than shame in Elaine.55 Shame follows later, but the girls’ first encounter provides the reader with a clue to what is to come: ‘Grace and Carol are standing among the apple trees, just where I left them […] A third girl is with them. I look at her, empty of premonition’ (69, ch. 13). Like a snake in the garden of Eden, Cordelia has entered Elaine’s innocent childhood world, ready to subjugate and humiliate her:
Cordelia’s remark is of a kind that could have embarrassed Elaine, but she does not yet play along in the game of pretence. At this early stage, Elaine does not internalize the shame that Cordelia tries to project on her. Cordelia therefore tries another tactic by playing on Elaine’s desire to fit in and belong.
The kind of shame that Cordelia induces in Elaine will gradually have less to do with embarrassment and more with a profound sense of shame manifested, in Bartky’s words, through ‘a pervasive sense of personal inadequacy’ – a feeling that the self is in some important way flawed, inferior, and unworthy.57 Cordelia projects shame onto Elaine by diminishing and denigrating her to the point of making her totally disempowered and helpless: ‘I worry about what I’ve said today, the expression on my face, how I walk, what I wear, because all of these things need improvement. I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me’ (118, ch. 22).58 Cordelia provokes and sustains shame in Elaine, and once Elaine has internalized it, the only way for Elaine to free herself from it is by striving to improve herself and to please Cordelia. The young Elaine does not realize that Cordelia is responsible for her imprisonment in shame, for inducing those feelings that Cordelia makes a show of liberating her from. To Elaine, Cordelia holds the key to her liberation from disgrace. Redemption is in the power of Cordelia, who is thus both her persecutor and her saviour: The contradictory urge to stay within Cordelia’s control despite her cruelty cannot be sought in Elaine’s early childhood59 or explained with reference to the ‘female gaze’ or ‘controlling gaze’,60 because what keeps her there is a warped form of gratitude. Elaine is tied to Cordelia by the necessity of placating her, winning her approval: ‘Cordelia is my friend. She likes me, she wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends, my girlfriends, my best friends. I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please’ (120, ch. 22). Elaine’s temporary sense of empowerment which comes with the reward of intermittent and grudging acceptance and belonging is an illusion, because it is sustained by the continuing empowerment of Cordelia, which thus keeps the power balance intact. Elaine looks to her ‘friends’ to avert the risk of guilt and shame that may attend erroneous behaviour, but the power structures in the quartet only heaps more of both on her.
Cordelia, who has never managed to be acceptable in her family, now attempts to keep Elaine from violating proper codes of conduct by way of mock-parental discipline and authority. Expressions such as: ‘You should have your mouth washed out with soap’ and ‘Wipe that smirk off your face’ (see, for example, 252, ch. 52) are copied verbatim from her father’s disciplinary repertoire. Cordelia thus uses her father’s very words to place Elaine in a position of dependence. She ‘saves’ Elaine from her greatest fear: that she might find herself ‘cast out for ever’ (120, ch. 22). Elaine’s sense of gratitude and her fear of expulsion subdue any stirring of rebellion against Cordelia’s rule. It is, however, in response to Cordelia’s demand for more than what Elaine feels able to give back to Cordelia that her hold over Elaine is finally threatened.
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