Cat's Eye

Cordelia is Elaine’s best friend and also her tormentor. Although she is the last girl to join Elaine’s group, Cordelia quickly becomes the leader. Her superior knowledge about many topics, coupled with her compelling personality and her family’s wealth, gives her status. However, the novel foreshadows early on that Cordelia is projecting her own insecurities onto Elaine, leaving her out of the group and demanding she improve herself in ways that reflect her older sisters’ judgment and her father’s violence. Cordelia’s passion for acting demonstrates her desire to escape her own reality and exist as someone else, and (as she later reveals) her habit of digging holes in the garden is a way of creating a space where she can hide from the world. Once again, Cordelia externalizes these insecurities and difficulties, burying Elaine alive in the hole she has dug.

As Cordelia and Elaine grow up, the power dynamic shifts and Elaine becomes dominant. Though she never suffers extreme violence from Elaine, Cordelia is the victim of cruel jokes and insults. She begins to reject convention and rules in her physical appearance and enjoyment of shoplifting. She does poorly at school and refuses to plan a career or a life. Though she briefly excels in an acting company, Elaine later finds her in a psychiatric hospital after an attempted suicide. While Elaine imagines she escapes, it seems likely that Cordelia will remain in this hospital for the rest of her life. Nevertheless, Cordelia remains a strong presence in Elaine’s mind, echoes of her manifesting in various people Elaine encounters. Cordelia’s ghostly presence suggests that she is as much a symbol as a person—a side of Elaine that never manages to move past the trauma that society visits upon women.

Carol Campbell is Elaine’s first childhood friend. When Elaine arrives in Toronto, Carol is eager to help her learn about “normal” life and modern commodities. She shows Elaine off to other girls like an exotic pet and takes great joy showing her things like the coat tree in her house and her mother’s twin set cardigans.

Carol is cautious and weak-willed and only avoids being the target of Cordelia’s cruelty because her quickness to cry ruins the game. Her role becomes that of spying on Elaine and reporting to Cordelia on her actions.

Grace is Elaine’s second friend. She is the leader of the group before Cordelia’s arrival and comes up with the games the girls will play—conventionally girlish activities like playing school and cutting images out of her family’s catalogs. Her mother has a bad heart, and Grace speaks realistically about the possibility of finding her dead on the sofa one day. Even before Cordelia’s arrival, Grace begins to exclude Carol from their games, demonstrating a cruel streak that later grows.

When Cordelia arrives, Grace participates in her persecution of Elaine and sometimes Carol; Grace herself is never a victim. Grace lives in an extremely religious household and invites Elaine to go to church on Sundays with her family. At Sunday school, she spies on Elaine’s actions and reports them back to Cordelia. Grace’s family are, like Elaine’s, less wealthy than Cordelia’s, and this class divide gives Cordelia power over Grace. Nevertheless, Grace’s religious conviction strengthens her and gives her some authority, such as when she explains that babies come from God, and she often advises Elaine on how she might ask for forgiveness. Memories of Grace haunt Elaine into adulthood, though not to the same extent as those of Cordelia. Elaine’s conflation of Grace with a woman angry about her paintings makes clear how Elaine’s childhood experience of patriarchal religion, as leveraged by Grace and her mother, has traumatized her.

Stephen is Elaine’s older brother. As young children, the two had a close relationship and Elaine participated in Stephen’s secret war games. When they move into the house in Toronto, Elaine and Stephen at first remain close, communicating through a homemade walkie-talkie system and notes in code. However, where Elaine struggles to form positive relationships with the girls at school, Stephen fits in easily and soon is speaking pig Latin to his friend and excluding Elaine. What’s more, as he grows older, he speaks in a language of science that Elaine struggles to understand. A virtuoso student, he eventually goes to a private school and then to study in California.

As a boy, Stephen likes to collect comics and marbles, which he buries in a large jar. This unconventional behavior is typical of Stephen’s character; later in life, he is arrested for trespassing on a military base while chasing butterflies—an episode that also highlights his slightly chaotic absentmindedness.

Elaine and Stephen’s adult relationship consists almost exclusively of postcards and letters. On a rare occasion when he and Elaine discuss their childhood, it is clear that he doesn’t remember much: His academic brilliance has set him apart from Elaine and from the rest of their family. Stephen is eventually killed on an airplane hijacked by terrorists.

Mrs. Smeath is Grace’s mother and the most religious character in the novel. She never laughs and has a bad heart that requires her to rest often. When Elaine begins to attend church with the Smeaths, Mrs. Smeath is initially pleased but soon becomes disappointed that Elaine doesn’t bring her brother or parents with her. She is extremely judgmental of Elaine’s unconventional family and unusual upbringing, and Elaine once overhears her admitting that she knows how the other girls treat her but believes that she deserves it; she says that the bullying is God’s punishment.

Mrs. Smeath causes Elaine to turn away from religion, and she becomes the object of Elaine’s hatred for a very long time. Mrs. Smeath is the first figure from her childhood whom Elaine begins to paint as an act of vengeance. Later in her life, however, Elaine looks at her paintings and realizes that Mrs. Smeath’s belief in a cruel and vengeful God made her existence a terrible one. This is the truth behind her symbolic “bad heart.” Elaine eventually lets go of her fury at Mrs. Smeath.

Elaine’s mother is a practical and individualistic woman who has little care for other people’s opinions. In Toronto, she does cooking and housework, although she does not particularly enjoy them; as Elaine’s artwork depicts her, she was far more alive and at home when the family lived their nomadic wilderness existence. She has friends of her own with whom she plays bridge but otherwise resists traditional ideas of femininity.

As a child, Elaine is often embarrassed of how different her mother is from those her of friends. Like Elaine’s father, she is also skeptical of Elaine’s enthusiasm for Christianity. This demonstrates her fierce protectiveness of her children, though she ultimately admits that she did not intervene to stop Elaine’s bullying because she was unsure how to do so. When she is old and dying, she asks Elaine to forgive her for this.

Elaine’s father is an entomologist who begins the novel as a field researcher and later gets a job at a university in Toronto. He is equal parts jovial and pessimistic, sure that humanity’s greed has doomed it to destruction but kind and friendly in his dealings with others. He is unlike all the other fathers in the novel, and when Elaine starts dating boys, they comment on his unusual behavior. After Stephen’s death, Elaine’s father quickly dies, too.

Jon is Elaine’s first husband; they meet in Josef Hrbik’s life drawing class. When they first begin their relationship, Jon is immature and thoughtless. He assumes that Elaine will take on the role of homemaker and mother, even if that means sacrificing her artistic career, while he continues the affairs he has always had. He is dismissive of Elaine’s art, which proves ironic: His painting never becomes successful like hers does, and in the novel’s present he works as a prop designer for slasher movies. In the present, Jon and Elaine meet again in Toronto and have an easy, playful relationship. She does not resent his behavior towards her in the past.