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The Concept of Time as Expressed in the Novel Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood begins the novel Cat's Eye with words of wisdom from her main
character's brother, Stephen, who asserts: Time is not a line but a dimension, like the
dimensions of space (3). Elaine, Atwood's main character, develops her own variation on the
concept of time at a young age, stating ...I began to think of time as having a shape,
something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You
don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the
surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away (3). Much of the inner
turmoil Elaine faces in the novel is due to her concept of time. Elaine is a forty-something
artist who is revisiting Toronto, her childhood home, for a retrospective of her work. Her visit
provides a catalyst for recalling the vivid memories of growing up as a young girl in Toronto.
The novel relates Elaine's childhood and her adulthood in a manner that evokes the theories
of Stephen Hawking, suggesting that time is not quite so linear and that we must continuously
revisit the past in order to progress with our future.
As a child, Elaine's brother Stephen has a great deal of influence on how she perceives
the world around her. Much of what Stephen studies and theorizes about mirrors the work of
Stephen Hawking, and Martha Sharpe suggests that the influence Elaine's brother has on her
in the novel parallels the influence Stephen Hawking has had on author Margaret Atwood.
The novel, in fact, is prefaced with the words of Stephen Hawking, who poses the question
Why do we remember the past, and not the future?. Hawking's book A Brief
History of Time appears to have had a great deal of influence on how Atwood utilizes time in
the novel. One facet of Hawking's theory is the concept of space-time, which asserts that time

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and space exist separately on different dimensions. Hawking writes, A... feature that we
believe... is that the gravitational field is represented by curved space-time: particles try to
follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, but because space-time is not flat
their paths appear to be bent, as if by a gravitational field (134). Atwood structures the novel
in a peculiar way, as if to demonstrate the principle of curved space-time. Atwood begins the
novel with Elaine as a young child but frequently inserts chapters about her present adult life.
As Elaine is returning to her childhood home in Toronto, Atwood intends for the stories of
Elaine's past to be more than just mere flashbacks. As readers bounce from Elaine's
adulthood, to her childhood, her teenage years, and back, they are able to create a more
complete picture of Elaine as a person. In this manner, readers see Elaine being created, and
recreated, constantly and without adherence to traditional concepts of time.
As Elaine struggles with traditional notions of time, characters like Mrs. Smeath readily
adopt these notions, which appear to make her unhappy. Martha Sharpe asserts that Elaine is
confront[ing] the repercussions of such radical theories in a world that still adheres to linear
time, is controlled predominantly by men, and relegates women to cyclical and monumental
time. Mrs. Smeath is most exemplary of a woman being confined by cyclical and monumental
concepts of time. Atwood characterizes Mrs. Smeath as having a bad heart, a condition that
causes her to believe that she is near death at all times (63). Her house must be solemn and
quiet, because, as Elaine says ...there's always the possibility put into our heads by Grace,
in the same factual way that on any given day she may be dead (62). Mrs. Smeath adopts a
more linear concept of time, and believes that with her diagnoses she has reached the end of
her respective line. Mourning herself, she spends most of the day motionless, not sleeping, but
not awake. Young Elaine feels contempt for her, for Mrs. Smeath represents the timeobsessed culture that Elaine feels excluded from. An older Elaine reflects Day after day I

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press my nose against the glass of the French doors, trying to see if Mrs. Smeath is still alive.
This is how I will see her forever: lying unmoving, like something in a museum...Why do I
hate her so much? (64). Adult Elaine, although no longer physically pressing her nose to the
Smeaths' door, still feels repressed by the condescension she faced from Mrs. Smeath, and as
she revisits these feelings as an adult the reader is able to see how the feelings have shaped her
as a person. The hate she feels for Mrs. Smeath represents the anger she feels from being
excluded from that world, a world which consists of an unwavering belief in God, feminine
trivialities, and the concrete passage of time.
Young Elaine is keenly aware of the different dimensions of time and space that exist
around her. She sees her young girlfriends as living in a shared world separate from their
parents. She moves to Toronto after being home-schooled, and notes, as if she is reporting on
a pack of wild animals, Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a
whole world of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of it
without making any effort at all...partly this is a relief (59). While she is comforted by the fact
that there is a group she can include herself in, Elaine still feels isolated, separate from the
world of girls. Even from her own mother there "is a gulf, an abyss, that goes down and down.
It's filled with wordlessness" (98). These feelings of isolation indicate Elaine's unique concept
of time and space. To her, all of the people around her exist on different planes, and she
travels in between them on a daily basis.
Elaine's daily life seems to mimic the idea of time travel as expressed in Stephen
Hawking's work. Space and time, Hawking writes, ...can be warped, and it can be curved
the way necessary to allow time travel (160). Elaine seems to time travel not only
throughout the book as she revisits her childhood, but all the time, traveling into the
respective time concepts and worlds of the people she knows. Her travels begin to exhaust

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her, as she feels like she needs to alter herself based on whom she is around. Eventually she
finds a means of escape in fainting. She confesses, I'm beginning to feel that i've discovered
something worth knowing. There's a way out of places you want to leave, but can't. Fainting is
like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you
wake up it's later. Time has gone on without you" (189). Sharpe argues that that Elaine
explores space-time as a means of escape... and a way to explore the freedom of her
imagination beyond the constraints of real time. Fainting for Elaine is a pure form of escape,
and it provides her a way of existing in between the worlds that have been created by her
friends, her parents, and her brother.
Elaine's concept of time further evokes the teachings of Hawking in describing a near
death experience, when her friends bury her alive. After being forced into a ditch and covered
with dirt as part of a game, Elaine recalls, I have no image of myself in the hole, only a black
square filled with nothing, a square like a door. Perhaps the square is empty; perhaps it's only
a marker, a time marker that separates the time before it from the time after (116). The idea
that one can transcend time is a concept that originated in Hawking, who in lieu of the
discovery of the speed of light, asserts that one ha[s] to abandon the idea that there [is] a
unique absolute time. Instead, each observer [has] his own measure of time as recorded by a
clock that he carrie[s]: clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree. Thus
time [becomes] a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measure[s] it (113).
Elaine's near death experience forces time as she knows it to come to a screeching halt. The
fact that she identifies her time as a black square filled with nothing (116), displays that she
does not adhere to the concept of absolute time or space. Rather, for Elaine, time and
space are more personal she is able to recall these lapses in memory, but not quite grasp
them, very much as if, near death, she entered a new dimension.

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As a child, Elaine deals with her problems by detaching: fainting, dissociating herself
from time and space. As she grows older, she begins to pursue art as a means of creating a
new reality of time and space while simultaneously dealing with her past. Life drawing is
Elaine's favorite class in University, and she refers to it as "[her] lifeline, [her] real life" (294).
In life drawing class, Elaine merely has to recreate what she sees right in front of her at that
instant, providing her a goal that is separate from the passage of time. She enjoys that there is
no fashionable way to conduct a lifelike drawing, it merely is (294). When Elaine creates her
own art, she prefers to use egg tempera, a method that has fallen out of favor long before her
time. Sharpe connects Elaine's usage of egg tempera to a defiance of the linear conventions
of contemporary art that her first husband, Jon, studiously follows. Elaine describes herself
in relation to him: "I am off to the side somewhere, fiddling with egg tempera and flat
surfaces, as if the twentieth century has never happened" (366). Even in art, Elaine pursues
her own concepts of time, dipping between the present with life drawings, and the past with
her egg tempera paintings. As a child, Elaine had difficulty connecting and transitioning
between the different worlds of her friends, their parents, and her parents. As a young adult,
she found a safe way to transition along the planes of time with her art.
Some of her most notable works are paintings of Mrs. Smeath and her childhood friend
Cordelia, in which she asserts aesthetic control over...the people in her life, such as Mrs.
Smeath and Cordelia, who have asserted control over her (Sharpe). This proves to be a
cathartic experience for Elaine, as she is able to revisit the past and rewrite it to create a new
reality. In this new reality, she paints Mrs. Smeath many times, sitting, standing, lying down
with her holy rubber plant, flying, with Mr. Smeath stuck to her back, being screwed like a
beetle. (443). But in this new reality she develops a certain sad connection to Mrs. Smeath,
who is a displaced person; as [Elaine is] (443). While Elaine feels as though she spent much

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of her childhood uprooted into other people's realities, Mrs. Smeath too was displaced into
what she felt was the end of her life. Elaine connects to Mrs. Smeath, knowing that both
women have been unhappy with their lives at points in time. At these points, Elaine chose to
try and escape her reality, while Mrs. Smeath chose to wallow. Eventually Elaine was able to
manipulate her art to be able to understand the people in her past, while also trying to better
her current situation.
People have taken away different things from Margaret Atwood's treatment of time,
Gordon Johnston writes Atwood...has a large sense of time; the past for her is historical,
geological and mythic as well as personal. This large view of the past gives her a sense of the
patterns, the repetitions and traps in human experience. In Cat's Eye, viewing the concept of
time through the lens of Stephen Hawking and his work provides for deeper insight into the
psyche of Atwood's character Elaine. Margaret Atwood, with the help of Stephen Hawking,
lends us the framework to understand that time is not merely a straight line, but something
much more complex. To understand the multi-dimensional nature of time, Atwood gently
suggests, is to better understand yourself. Both are crucial to survival, because as young
Elaine espoused, nothing goes away.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Cat's Eye. 1988. Toronto: McClelland-Bantam-Seal, 1989.

Hawking, Stephen W. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Toronto:

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Bantam, 1988.
Johnston, Gordon. ""The Ruthless Story and the Future Tense" in Margaret Atwood's

"Circe/Mud

Poems"." Studies in Canadian Literature / tudes en littrature canadienne [Online], 5.1

(1980): n. pag. Web. 10 Dec. 2012

Sharpe, Martha. "Margaret Atwood And Julia Kristeva: Space-Time, The Dissident Woman
Artist, And The Pursuit Of Female Solidarity In Cat's Eye." Essays On Canadian
Writing 50 (1993): 174-189. OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson). Web. 10 Dec.
2012.