Elaine's Field Theory of Femininity: A Study of Gravity and Shame in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye
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2020
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Award
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
The Edenic trope of the fallen woman structures the original Fall as Eve's punishment for her embodied desire, for breaking the rules, and has thus permeated literature with feminine characters who are met with repeated punishment when they break social rules: death, sickness, social exclusion, and the like. Through the concept of falling women, Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye confronts the Edenic structure of the fallen woman. Atwood's falling women are punished because the reality of feminine embodiment necessarily breaks the rules of Western social order. I argue that this principle of falling emerges as a result of the shame-incurring social landscape in which Western femininity is experienced. Cat's Eye's protagonist, Elaine, marks herself in relation to femininity by a feeling of "wrongness," a feeling of shame that permeates her relationships with other women, as well as with her own body. In approaching Western femininity, the essay turns to Denise Riley's deconstruction of the concept of "woman." Elaine both literally and figuratively falls from girlhood into womanhood, a fall that marks the beginning of her disillusioned relationship with her body that is reinforced by her social landscape. The novel's structural analepsis flashes between Elaine's girlhood and her womanhood, recounting the formative experiences that structure her sense of gendered embodiment around the guiding principle of shame. This thesis identifies feminine shame as a symptom of a shaming society, thus reconceptualizing the Edenic trope that locates shame as the punishment for feminine desire. In Cat's Eye, embodied femininity itself is the original sin.