Abstract. In Cat’s eye (1988), Margaret Atwood (1939–) approaches the idea of game at a literal and a literary level. The three girls in the book literally play, imitating their mothers who are still under the influence of the formal Victorian age, although their game is unusual. This literal game presupposes the little girls’ interactions that the mature painter Elaine Risley shows us with the help of young Elaine who inhabited a disagreeable space that the former feels the necessity of revisiting in order to heal. This is a space of the faltering relationships between herself and the unbalanced children in her group of friends, relationships that shape her personality during the time of her early childhood. Elaine and Cordelia play a convoluted zero-sum game (Bruss 1977), because neither of them gives up on her aim, and, as expected, they cannot get along. In her own way, the older narrator also plays a game, by switching from a past world when she grappled with problems of a psychological nature, to the present, when she still has to deal with their consequences. The literary game that the narrator plays highlights an experimental perspective which mixes the early and the later time frames and has the adult Elaine and her younger version face each other as if in a mirror. It also involves the subtle creativity inspired by William Shakespeare, whose Cordelia is parodied into a character who knows little about morality. The girl’s parental statements, which she makes to subdue her friends, betray Atwood’s irony and hides the former’s psychological problems determined by the way her abusive father treated her. The writer selected the names of Elaine’s friends on purpose. They direct us towards the heroine’s needs as she grasps the essence of their character. She starts with the necessity of celebrating friendship (Carol) and ends with the necessity of finding affection (Cordelia). Intertextuality, viewed as “strategic equivalence” (de Ley 1988), is part of the experimental game which the author gives the finishing touches to by expanding the scope of her work through implied literary collages.
Key words: Cat’s eye; conviviality; feminism; game; girls; Margaret Atwood; neurosis; narrative; psychology

Pârlog A-C (2024) Neurosis and conviviality in Margaret Atwood: the game of little girls. Creativity 7(2): 191–209. doi:10.22381/C7220243