Emotional Transformation In Cat's Eye

In the story “Cat's Eye”, Elaine's emotional transformation is reflected in the change of seasons from a cold and dark place to a warm surge of confidence when spring comes.

Elaine, like the frozen setting, is depressed and feels that she is trapped and when she tries to get out of the friendship. Setting reflects Elaine’s mood. Elaine describes, “It is March and the Easter tulips are starting to bloom. The sky is gray and bulging with dampness, winter is losing its hardness and glitter, yet it is a dirty filigree” (Atwood 143). The sad ambience that Elaine describes displays that she is depressed and that the world is a fine work of art but it is dirty and polluted. Elaine is with her friends feeling that she has to act happy or else she will be punished by Cordelia who is making a snow angel. Elaine explains “She blinks, closing her eyes against the snow. For a moment she looks like someone I …show more content…
Spring has truly come and with it, a feeling of power and change. After Elaine is left by her friends in the freezing ice, she is found by her mother, close to having frostbite. Her mother calls the parents of Elaine’s friends and explains what the children did to Elaine. When Elaine is back in school, Cordelia and the other girls are angry about how they were punished by their parents. The girls go and buy licorice where Cordelia proposes that Elaine should be punished. This sparks Elaine to take a stand against Cordelia and she finally tells Cordelia that she does not want to be friends and walks away. Elaine explains, “I no longer walk home over the bridge, but the long way around, past the cemetery” (149). Walking past the cemetery is putting to rest a friendship that could never last and a change in walking home means a change in direction for Elaine’s life. She wants her friendship with the girls to melt away like the snow melting into the ground, never to be seen

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