Secret Allies: Reconsidering Science and Gender in Cat’s Eye

Abstract

WHEN MARGARET ATWOOD PUBLISHED CAT'S EYE, readers intuited that Atwood was portraying delicate negotiation between and art. balances mythic imagination wrote Eleanor Cook in review, in two epigraphs, one from Hawking and one from mythical Genesis But when critical interpretations of in novel began to appear, that readerly intuition was challenged as some critics concluded that was negative force in novel--an extension of an empiricist and racist patriarchy. Molly Hire, for example, calls physicist character Stephen a representative of white, Western, oppressor class who suffers simultaneously from an unawareness of disciplinary and of his own visibility within that system (133, 147). June Deery writes, 'Atwood concludes that what links science, imperialism, and patriarchy is control of body.... Western ... have traditionally been depicted as subduing nature as female.... They share some of same attitude as colonists: conquer, map, know, and sell (235). Susan Strehle suggests that patriarchy is active in Cat's Eye in strictest sense, attributing all forms of Elaine's suffering to the fathers in novel who enact hierarchies of value that place women at bottom and girls below She identifies authorities as home, church, school, and state (170). She associates with these paternal authorities, constructing classical science as scientific method of detached objectivity that denies women subjectivity (162). As feminist and teacher of this text in women's literature and and literature courses for over ten years, I have both felt myself, and noted in other readers, an emotional disconnect between readings that view as oppressive and portrayal of and in novel. The three characters in Cat's Eye--Stephen, Elaine's father Dr Risley, and his student-colleague Dr Banerji--all appear to be classical scientists who subscribe to principles of empiricism, objectivity, and method. Yet they are not negative characters. In fact, these three are muses for artist-protagonist Elaine (Dr Banerji is called so explicitly), and itself is source of inspiration, for her as for them. The are aesthetically driven in their work, and objects and ideas in text (insects, stars, light, mirrors, and dimensions) become aesthetic objects in Elaine's paintings. Critics who read and as patriarchal and racist reference critics like Michel Foucault, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway, who demonstrate how sexist and racist beliefs can be embedded in intellectual and methodological traditions, reinforcing Eurocentric and patriarchal agendas. These theories are immensely complex constructions of interplay between and culture, but they are vulnerable to oversimplification. When such ideas are reduced to interpretations that leave reader thinking that (in words of Deery's editor, Harold Bloom) scientific notions ... are masks for supposedly ideology (vii), subtlety of critiques from social constructionists is lost. Leaving aside question of what is male ideology;' these interpretations make mistake of failing to distinguish between science and cultural science as defined by literary critic Daniel Cordle. (1) He defines professional as the set of practices and expertise that mal(e up life of working scientist and as the relationship between and public (51). Atwood herself has repeatedly denied attributing social oppression to qua science. She is careful to distinguish between and what society does with or to science: Science is way of knowing, and tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses . …