a period of losing touch. Cordelia appears to have regained her former slyness and tells Elaine that instead of attending university, Cordelia has undertaken acting. She subtly brags about her roles in the Shakespearean Festival and invites Elaine to attend one of her performances. After a couple of years, Elaine again meets with Cordelia who has completely fallen off the tracks and has been committed to a mental facility by her parents. Overmedicated and desperate, she begs Elaine to help her escape from the hospital. Despite her guilt and latent anger, Elaine refuses to help Cordelia. A few weeks after their meeting, Elaine receives a return-to-sender letter she sent Cordelia in the hospital. It appears Cordelia found a way to escape without Elaine. Not knowing it, this would be Elaine's last time seeing Cordelia. The narrative describes Elaine through early adulthood as an art student and a burgeoning feminist artist, although Elaine's feminist label is media engineered, not self-proclaimed. She begins to find herself and develop her artistic identity, fumbling her way through her art and personal relationships. However, throughout this time, she continues to be haunted by her childhood and has difficulties forming relationships with other women. Although she increasingly becomes a known and influential artist, Elaine is berefted by anger, guilt, confusion and bewilderment of the lasting effects of Cordelia's behavior and her eventual disappearance from Elaine's life. Towards the end of the novel, owing to her retrospective exhibition and her return to Toronto, she eventually faces her past and gets closure. Themes Cat's Eye explores the construction of identity; it is written mostly as flashbacks, as Elaine reflects on the forgotten events of her childhood that shaped her personality and struggles to integrate lost aspects of her self. In Elaine's self-portrait, a pier glass reflects three little girls who are not in the painting, demonstrating their simultaneous absence from Elaine's past and their presence in who she has become. Elaine's story is detailed in rich visualizations and descriptions of her art reflecting her childhood influences, not only by the trio of girls, but also by her rootless untraditional upbringing, and relationships with her parents who remain nameless and unidentified throughout the story; her genius brother and his strange ways and fate; her comforting secret alliances with the male gender; kind and stern female teachers; art instructors; peer artists; the media; motherhood and mid-life confrontation of self. The