Optics and Autobiography in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye

Abstract

childhood,2 Cat's Eye plays with the implications of autobiography: advancing and withdrawing it as a mode of authorization; thematizing it as a strategy for simplistic interpretation or, conversely, as the hidden, damaged heart of a work of art; insisting with the fervor of its adolescent girls telling each other scary stories that this is true, this really happened, while at the same time demanding on both aesthetic and metaphysical grounds, What do you mean, true? What do you mean, real? As a Kiinstlerroman, the novel seems to license a double substitution: for painter, read writer; for writer, read writer of this novel. Like Atwood's groundbreaking 1972 novel Surfacing, it takes the form of a first-person narration by a female artist, and in both works visual

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