"Elaine's art is an outlet for her repressed memories." How far do you agree that this is how Margaret Atwood uses art in her novel?

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“Elaine’s art is an outlet for her repressed memories.” How far do you agree that this is how Margaret Atwood uses art in her novel?

Enigmatic and surreal, Elaine’s paintings seem to steadfastly resist categorisation, despite the art world clamouring to attach to them pretentious ideological connotations, and Elaine herself mystified as to their significance. However, as the reader – and the protagonist herself – delves into Elaine’s harrowing childhood, it becomes evident that the images are in truth pictorial manifestations of repressed traumas bubbling uncontrollably in her subconscious. Intensely personal and deeply allegorical, the images fuse actual memories with the psychological associations that these memories exert, creating a blend of the ‘real’ and the subjective that offers the reader a unique glimpse into the protagonist’s psyche, and demonstrates the true pathos of a character unable to exorcise her past.

Elaine herself fails to understand the origin of her creative impulses, replying jadedly ‘why does anyone do anything?’ when quizzed by a journalist as to why she is compelled to paint. She is also mystified as to the meaning of the objects that she depicts, claiming ‘I know that these things must be memories, but they do not have the quality of memories…they arrive detached from any context; they are simply there.’  Such self-incomprehension suggests that her art is primarily the cathartic expression of repressed emotions and memories that her conscious, rational self can in no way account for or explain.

        Even as a child, Elaine is marked by a keen appreciation for the sensory characteristics of her surroundings, for example recalling vividly and in minute detail the grotesque nature of Mrs Smeath’s physical appearance, from her ‘sprinkling of hairs around the corners of the mouth’ to her ‘single breast that goes all the way across her front and continues down until it joins her waist.’ However, such sensory vision is paradoxically linked with a determination to remain psychologically blind. Unable to confront the painful emotions caused by her torment at Cordelia’s hands, Elaine effectively encloses and represses her psychosomatic pain within the tangible objects around her that she appreciates so keenly, such as the cat’s eye marble. This process renders her tragically unable to understand the emotional essentials of her existence, and to unearth consciously the memories bubbling uncontrollably in her subconscious

These tangible entities are thus permeated with deep significance, and serve as corporeal representations of Elaine’s repressed anguish. With the sensory and psychological so deeply and inextricably bound in Elaine’s psyche, art is the natural expression and outlet for the protagonist’s inner pain. Indeed, Elaine’s paintings are best seen as her unconscious mind’s attempts to exorcise the repressed memories through the depiction of the corresponding emotive symbols. This makes Elaine’s art, as Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh describes, a ‘repository for the charged emblems of her trauma.’  It can also be claimed that Elaine is drawn to painting as it allows her to communicate non-verbally, her reticence regarding words stemming from the manner in which Cordelia censured her every articulation.

The notion that Elaine’s creative urge is kindled by a psychological need to somehow release and express the repressed memories simmering in her psyche corresponds with the Freudian view, which treats creativity as a privileged form of neurosis. In the theory of pathography, Freud claimed that art should be seen as a means of giving expression to various psychic pressures, and this idea is evidently applicable to Elaine’s paintings. Yet it could also be argued that Atwood distorts Freudian theory somewhat, as contrary to the traditional Freudian emphasis upon the repression of infantile sexual complexes, Elaine’s paintings express repressed memories formed during later childhood, and which are in no way connected to parental relationships. Atwood herself admits that she in many ways challenged the Freudian notion that female childhood was an unimportant formative factor, and wished to emphasise the complexity and influence of early friendships.

 Whilst Atwood highlights Elaine’s irrational compulsion to paint, a full analysis of the extent to which repressed memories permeate the protagonist’s art evidently necessitates an examination of the content of the paintings. The evident irony in this is that the reader can never witness them directly, and must view them through the descriptions of the narrator herself.  MacMurraugh-Kavanagh claims that ‘the paintings are, literally, ‘word-pictures’: words lead the reader to ‘see’ the paintings, to imagine what they look like.’ Atwood creates these ‘word-pictures’ very skilfully, describing exactly the subject, colours, and texture used, yet never explains their significance, leaving the reader instead to interpret them in the light of Elaine’s experience.

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Atwood makes Elaine’s paintings enigmatic, multifaceted and deeply allegorical, blurring lines between truth and fiction, between actual images and occurrences and the psychological associations that these exert.  The paintings are suffused in images corresponding to events recorded in the retrospective narrative, yet these events are distorted, combined, psychologically loaded. For example, the initial paintings in which Elaine begins to unearth the recesses of her subconscious are ostensibly still lives, depicting objects from the 1940s. Yet an examination reveals the significance of these works – in Toaster ‘one of the doors is partly open, revealing the red hot grill within,’ whilst Wringer is ...

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