From the first lines of the novel it is clear that the narrator, Elaine, is concerned with the properties of time. She tells the reader, “Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once” (3). This sets the tone, the framework for the novel. The plot revolves around Elaine’s desire to exist in two places at once: not only to know her future when she is a child but to perhaps return to the past to make things different when she is an adult. The way she can do this is by encountering Cordelia in the present: Cordelia would then be the future version of the memory Elaine has of her. Elaine would like to see those two existences as one.
As a child, Elaine is fascinated with the older women she is surrounded with. She examines their dress, their mannerisms, their tone. In the early part of her life, Elaine’s mother is the only woman she knows. She has nothing to compare her to. Once the family moves to Toronto, Elaine makes friends and notes what she finds odd about them, and while she is fascinated by this new girl world she has been sucked into, she can’t help but notice her friends’ mothers and how different they are. She thinks, “it’s strange to think of Mr. and Mrs. Campbell lying in [the twin beds] at night,” when Carol shows Elaine her parents’ sleeping arrangement (56). She is told that “Grace’s mother has a bad heart” and she notes that “Mrs. Smeath is not like Mrs. Campbell [. . .] She doesn’t wear lipstick or face powder [. . .] She has big bones, square teeth [. . .] skin that looks rubbed raw” (63). She notes her clothes, her hands, every detail of her physical character. Mrs. Smeath clearly had a large impact on Elaine because Elaine painted, “many of her” as an adult (443). There are differences between Cordelia’s mother and her own: “Cordelia’s mother arranges the flowers herself, wearing gardening gloves. My own mother doesn’t arrange flowers” (78). Even her teacher, Miss Lumley, is subject to Elaine’s examination. This culminates in her imagining Miss Lumley’s underwear. That is all Elaine can think of: “The ominous navy-blue background of Miss Lumley’s invisible bloomers” (87). Elaine is “afraid of these bloomers” (87). Deep down, Elaine is really afraid of what she is going to become when she gets older. She does not particularly like the variety of older women she is surrounded with. She does not like or understand the world of girls she is now a part of, but she is trapped: she does not see a positive future for herself because that vision is a reflection of the women she is surrounded with.
It is not until her teenage years that Elaine begins to truly imagine what she will be like when she becomes an old woman. She and Cordelia watch the old ladies on the streetcars. Elaine admits that the crazy ones are “the kind we like best. They have a certain gaiety to them, a power of invention, they don’t care what people think” (5). Elaine, back in the present, thinks, “What if they just couldn’t see what they looked like? [. . .] I’m having that trouble myself now” (6). She wonders what Cordelia looks like now: “I think of Cordelia examining the growing pouches under her eyes [. . .] Perhaps in a worn coat and a knitted hat like a tea cosy, sitting on a curb, with two plastic bags filled with her only possessions, muttering to herself” (7). She has not seen Cordelia since their teenage years, thus an encounter such as this would be the only way for past and future to collide. Elaine is her future self: the self she cannot deny was shaped primarily by Cordelia, yet she does not know what Cordelia’s future self is like.
She cannot escape her past as she walks the streets of Toronto, a grown woman. She begs, “Get me out of this, Cordelia. I’m locked in. I don’t want to be nine years old forever” because it is Cordelia who left the greatest impression on her, especially during that year (437). The mystery of time is confusing to Elaine in this respect because she desperately wants to meet the future Cordelia. She is a memory, stuck in the past, perpetually young, yet Elaine tells the reader, “Really it’s Cordelia I expect, Cordelia I want to see” at her retrospective, but she never does (450). Elaine decides, “I’m headed for a future in which I sprawl propped in a wheelchair, shedding hair and drooling [. . .] While Cordelia vanishes and vanishes” (451-452). She wants her future to involve Cordelia just as her past had. Elaine calls herself “A reflection” of Cordelia: “We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key” (450). She believes she will find closure through meeting the future Cordelia because otherwise Cordelia will simply fade into the past, just the way her brother Stephen did after his death. When she accepts the fact that she will never see Cordelia again, she says, “This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea” (462). No matter how hard Elaine tries, she cannot remember the future the way she does the past. There is no way of knowing the future Cordelia.
The past plays a definitive role in the future; Elaine clearly experiences that. But it is the role of the future with which Elaine is most concerned. Her fixation on it continues to shape her even into adulthood. The cliché, “Hindsight is twenty-twenty” seems not to fit for Elaine. She does not look into the past to see clear answers, only more questions. Foresight is what she is after through meeting Cordelia: a collision of past, present, and future. In Elaine’s world, Hawking’s question then makes sense. Why shouldn’t we look into the future as we do the past?
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. New York: Random House, 1988.
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