Trauma and the Fictional Self-Portrait in Margaret Atwood’s 'Cat’s Eye' and Ana Teresa Pereira’s 'As Rosas Mortas'

Abstract

Found at the crossroads between aesthetics and referentiality, portraiture is a hybrid form of painting conflating inner and outer references. Although the perceived connection and ‘likeness’ between work of art and the subject being depicted seems to differentiate portraiture from other kinds of paintings, this relationship to a perceived reality is far from linear, particularly so when portraits or other works of art are represented in literature – a longstanding literary device known as ekphrasis. The present article will demonstrate how literary representations of portraiture (more specifically, of self-portraiture) can be used to symbolise a narrative’s underlying themes and motifs, namely, in Margaret Atwood’s 'Cat’s Eye' (1988) and Ana Teresa Pereira’s 'As Rosas Mortas' (1998). Elaine and Marisa, Atwood and Pereira’s first-person narrators, are both painters creating and describing a variety of self-portraits inspired by childhood trauma, fragmented memories, and the subconscious mind. Artistic self-expression becomes, in these novels, the distorted and indirect medium through which Elaine and Marisa question, integrate, and accept the traumatic and, at times, the monstrous within. This article will compare Atwood and Pereira’s use of ekphrasis and examine how fictional self-portraits can be used to explore the relationship between subject and self-representation – an essentially fragmented and unstable relationship, especially so for survivors of trauma.

Keywords

• ekphrasis
• portraiture
• trauma studies
• comparative literature
• comparative arts