The object of this paper is to examine resistance against the ruling ideology as a means of true survival in the novel Cat’s Eye by the iconic Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. Canada was a British colony and has long been an economically weak country relative to its southern neighbor, the USA. For the Canadian people who have suffered traumas due to various kinds of suppressive elements, bare living has been survival. Cat’s Eye focuses on all kinds of power relationships between people: parents and children, man and woman and, especially, same-sex friends. Those power relationships are often unfair and potentially violent. Focusing on Elaine Risley, the heroine in Cat’s Eye, this paper examines her as a victim of the contemporary power system and analyzes the process of her overcoming the system and achieving a new i dentity in Canada. Elaine is exposed to the gaze of her age group and bound to their rules, but she learns to expose herself to the world to cure her traumas from power relationships through her paintings and as a result, she restores a feminine subjectivity. Moreover, Elaine refuses to be stuck within Canada’s social and historical boundaries, as she attempts to recognize and estimate her limitations. This attempt leads her to positive situations in which she create arts. In addition, Elaine’s paintings show that various views and interpretations are possible. In this way, Atwood revises the pessimistic features of Canadian literature that she has criticized toward new, more positive features.