Margaret Atwood is widely regarded as an emblem of literary feminism, particularly surrounding her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, critiquing the marginalisation of women and exposing prevailing contemporary issues surrounding gender inequality. However, whilst Atwood’s dominant themes often centre around the exploration of female suffering in her novels, the following texts portray their traumas as primarily resulting from the actions of other women as opposed to men. In Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride, for example, despite the undeniable afflictions of male violence on the female characters who serve to instigate their torment, what damages them most is their abusive friendships they have cultivated with women. Indeed, the fact that both novels’ primary antagonists begin their character arc as a young girl who nevertheless inflicts extreme pain and trauma upon her female friends suggests an instinctual capacity for ruthlessness, directly contradicting the stereotypical portrayal of girls as “sugar and spice and everything nice.” This emotional abuse is portrayed as even more powerful when considering how neither Cordelia in Cat’s Eye nor Zenia in The Robber Bride physically harm their victims, who instead internalise this psychological violence as their own.
Whilst in Cat’s Eye, Elaine is driven to such emotional turmoil that she begins to “bite her fingers” in response to Cordelia’s bullying, later into adulthood in The Robber Bride, Tony becomes a recluse after Zenia seduces her husband West into leaving her, drastically impacting her physical and mental health. What is also interesting is that Tony places the blame of her abandonment not on her husband, who she depicts as “pitiful”, but instead pins her pain solely on Zenia for taking advantage of his weakness, therefore granting her ultimate control rather than the “natural” assumption that this authority would be attributed to a man. Through this focus on the extent of female cruelty, a topic rarely explored in literature, Atwood unconventionally emphasises the power of women by conveying female violence as a more impactful force than that of men. Rather than portraying women as the victims of male aggression, Atwood thus imbues her female characters with a nuanced complexity that enables them to inflict even greater emotional and physical turmoil on their victims, cultivating a subtler form of female empowerment by exploring how both men and women can use their power to subjugate others.
Book cover of Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood