Realism in Canadian Literature

Realism in Canadian Literature
By Aaron Schwartz

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, grew up in Ontario, Quebec and Toronto. Her father was a forest entomologist and she spent a lot of time in the Canadian wilderness when being a child. When she was six she started to write poems, morality plays and comic books. In ten years she realized the writing was the only thing she wanted to do. During her career she received a number of awards and honorary degrees, like Canadian Governor General’s Award, Le Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Letters in France and the National Arts Club Medal of Honour for Literature. She wrote more than thirty volumes of poetry, books for children and short stories. Her works were published in more than twenty-five countries all over the world.

“Cat’s eye” is her autobiographical work about a middle –aged Canadian painter – Elaine Risley, who is also by the way a daughter of a forest entomologist, who is under the influence of her past, when she goes to a retrospective show of her work in Toronto. She left Toronto years ago to flee from painful memories. The story is told in flashbacks – her current life as a painter, her second marriage, at last in-between the story of her childhood. There are actually two parallel plot lines, running until they lead to the end of the story, two line of her present and her past.