Elaine Risley In Cats's Eye

Margaret Atwood’s Cats Eye explores the unconventional life of Elaine Risley displaying how she has been negatively affected by her past and the ways in which she reconstructs her past to create her present and plan her future. The traumatic experiences that Elaine confronts throughout the novel with her family, ‘friends’ and boyfriends, shapes her personality and the outlook she has on life. Reconstructing her past enables Elaine to discover the person she has become as a result of the childhood she was a part of. This reconstruction gives Elaine clear ideas of who she is and what she wants, allowing her to embrace the present and plan the future.
Elaine Risley’s childhood is an intriguing insight of her conscious memories. The development
of her personality is based upon how she was brought up knowing nothing about the social norms of being a girl, until she is dropped into a group of girls her own age, leaving her ambiguous of the criteria. Elaine’s past has been suppressed. She wishes to forget it, although it surfaces every so often during her present life; ‘there is that glimpse during which I can see: And then not’. Through Elaine’s retrospective she confronts her past as she returns to the place where she lived as a child and from here the horrific layers of her life start to surface, revealing painful memories and scars that have not healed. What Elaine uncovers is that in her attempt to gain control in a cruel and complicated world, she has been left emotionally stained. An unorthodox and modern woman, Elaine’s mother is confident and grounded.
She likes to wear casual or even men’s clothes for comfort. She does not work outside the home and she prepares the food and does the housework in the Risley household, although in her own way. Elaine’s older brother is a brilliant scholar who is a close ally to Elaine in the years during and prior to World War II. As a child, he is bright and well adjusted; however, he becomes increasingly unreadable to Elaine as he gets older and becomes more and more successful as a scholar, and later, as a scientist. Elaine’s father is an entomologist, which means he studies insects. He works in the field, travelling around northern Ontario and studying bugs in their natural environment until later he transitions to working as a professor at the University of Toronto. Elaine has a more open relationship with her father than most girls in her generation; he treats her more or less as an equal, talking to her about scientific and environmental concerns. He is concerned with people’s abilities, not their gender or race. However, he assumes that other people think the same way he does and is surprised and disappointed on occasions when he realises that other people hold irrational
prejudices.
The dysfunctional that is lived by the Risley’s dramatically impacts on Elaine’s social status and personality development. She has grown up knowing nothing but ‘boys things’ which leaves her dumbfounded when she is thrown into school and forced to interact with girls as boys were known to have ‘cooties’.