"Who Knows What Kind of Art I'm Drawing onto Myself": The Representation of the Artist in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle and Cat's Eye

Abstract

This work analyzes the novels Lady Oracle and Cat's Eye by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood in order to investigate the critical discussion about representation and self-representation. Focusing on the artistic development of the two protagonists, writer Joan and painter Elaine, respectively, both novels similarly draw our attention to the processes of artistic and literary production, which becomes, in the narratives, a powerful medium to voice and contest aesthetical and political issues of representation and self-representation. But means of parady, Atwood's narratives and the protagonists' texts and paintings revisit traditional literature and visual art, revealing that contemporary cultural poduction often subverts literay and artistic conventions of mainstream culture. Furthermore, as Atwood concentrates on how these two fictional artists represent their selves into literatures and art, her novels also question the construction of subjectivities that is seen as an achievable product. When Lad Oracle and Cat´s Eye address the issues of subjetivity in the perspective of women artists, both novels challenge the representation of women' subjectivities and their bodies in both literature and art that have endorsed, for a long time, the patriarchal view of femininity. Bearing this mind, this thesis attempts to show the critical reflection which the representations of these two women artists' subjetivities emphasize and the aesthetical and political analysis which their literay and artistic works reveal in the novels.