Reader Response Blogs: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Blog #1 Parts 1+2
Who are we when we are hiding from ourselves? What do we do when we try to throw society out the window? We hide, and we listen to stories. At least, that is what the characters of The Blind Assassin do. The structure of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood is sort of like a frame story, but also quite different. The novel opens with Laura Chase driving off a bridge, and her sister Iris going to the police station. Did Laura commit suicide, or was there foul play involved? Before this story can continue, Atwood introduces another storyline, that of The Blind Assassin, a book written by Laura before her death. This novel within a novel introduces yet another mystery. The two, as-yet-unnamed characters seem to be sneaking around, and hiding from the girl’s friends and family. Why? We don’t yet know.
The two mysteries seem unconnected at this point, but there are surely threads we cannot see. Iris has not yet spoken about her situation, and has not reacted to her circumstances. We can only guess at how she reacts. All of her family members, all of the people close to her are dying, one by one in completely unconnected incidents. Iris must be facing a strong sense of mortality. She must be upset, must be terrified of the world taking her too. How does a person surrounded by death survive? How does someone surrounded by tragedy get up every day and survive? I don’t pretend to know the answer to these questions.
The two lovers in Chase’s The Blind Assassin face struggles as well. They feel the need to keep their relationship secret, for whatever reason. They are, together, examining relationships, and the stresses secrecy places on relationships. Neither of them can be fully open with each other because she is hiding from something, and the class divide that is implied. The two lovers hide in every conceivable spot, from the park to the riverbank, paranoid about being spotted, and hoping to be alone together.
The man is telling the woman a story, a story of an imaginary people on a faraway planet and their mysterious customs. At times dark and murderous, at others light and happy, the tale weaves in social commentary from this man’s beliefs, and his disdain for the upper class. He makes the aristocracy of Zycron into brutes and the lower class into savages, painting both sides of the coin as ugly, and leaving no uncertainty as to his view of the world, or of humanity.
Thus far, The Blind Assassin has introduced mysteries, exposed threads, and provided a stage upon which future events and characters will move. Atwood starts the novel with very little exposition, jumping right into the middle of the action, leaving the reader intrigued and a bit bewildered.
Blog #2 Parts 3-5
In the second portion of The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood begins weaving many threads together. Iris speaks for the first time. She is at the end of her life, reflecting on her experiences, and how her whole life fell apart. There is an unreality about all of Iris’s writings, like she is reciting something she knows is true, but doesn’t exactly remember it. Everything feels a bit fuzzy, somewhat bewildered, and a tad nostalgic, for the good and the bad, but mostly for the certainty that her life used to hold. Iris feels that growing up caused her to lose control, so she looks back on those controlled days of her childhood with longing. She doesn’t know what to do anymore.
While Iris’s memories are faded and nostalgic, her present is washed out, with an uncertain expiration date. She is past her prime, and she knows it. Iris resents needing help, but she desperately wants someone to coddle her. Iris is a study in contradictions. She wants to return to her youth, but also doesn’t want to remember it, let alone relive it.
Atwood has also revealed what we can assume to be the characters on whom Laura Chase’s The Blind Assassin was based. Laura and Iris met Alex Thomas, a fugitive Communist whom they harbor in their attic. Laura seems to fall in love with the older Alex, and it seems she took this idyllic flirtation and turned it into an out and out romance. This has not been confirmed, but it has been strongly hinted by Atwood.
In terms of Chase’s The Blind Assassin, not much has happened in this section. The prose is breathless, and a little bit vapid. The story, while compelling, is clearly pulp. The man who we assume to be Alex is telling this story to get a reaction out of the girl. He wants her to react, in shock or in horror. He wants her to feel something towards him, which he is not sure she does.
Laura had, since the beginning of her life, been an odd child. This oddity increased with the death of her mother, and through the Chase family’s long, slow fall from grace. With the Depression, everything slides downhill, something the girls fail to recognize until it is too late. Looking through the perfect vision of hindsight, Iris bemoans how ignorant she was as a child. She is ashamed of how woefully inadequate she seems in reflection. Especially when it comes to her marriage.
The marriage of Iris Chase and Richard Griffen was doomed from the start. The two had nothing in common, he was much older, and she had only ever had significant interactions with three men: her father, Alex Thomas, and the tutor that molested Laura during lessons. Iris is in no way ready to step into high society, and it shows. The writings on this time reflect more helplessness and bewilderment than before. Iris is really and truly out of her league in every way. She is swamped by her husband and his society. This seems to be setting up the tragedies of the novel’s closing.
Blog #3 Parts 6-15
In the last part of The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood ties up many of the threads from the earlier portion of the book, but in a completely unexpected way. Earlier, I theorized that Laura Chase’s The Blind Assassin was about a relationship between Laura and Alex Thomas. However, Atwood’s surprise ending is that Iris wrote the book, and Chase’s The Blind Assassin is about Iris and Alex Thomas. Laura ends up being a vehicle that Iris uses to hide her own sins. Laura is the curtain that Iris hides behind, the armor that Iris uses to deny her culpability for what her life turned out to be. Iris uses her sister as a veil, a veil to herself.
There are many points at which Iris, when writing her reflections of her life, regrets things she said or didn’t say about what was really happening in her life. Her sister, her daughter, her husband, her friend, everyone who ever read Laura’s book: they all ask her for the truth, a truth she is unable to give. Iris used her dead sister to conceal her own sins, and then never had the courage to tell anyone until her dying days. Even in the first part of the book, she is not desperate enough to tell the reader. Iris intends this book to be read only by her granddaughter, and only after her death. She is protecting herself from others’ judgements.
Laura is not innocent, but she is innocent of the sins foisted on her. She has her own issues and her own complexities, but no one gives her the chance to explore these. Laura is mistreated more than anyone else in the story. She is raped by her brother-in-law, manipulated by her brother-in-law’s sister, ignored by her father, and only tolerated by her sister. She never grows out of her little girl stage of mind because no one every teaches her how to become an adult, at least not in a way that mattered to her. She is innocence and naivety personified, and other people deflower her.
Winifred, Iris’s sister-in-law, on the other hand, is manipulative. She never lets go of her control of the situation, allowing her brother to do many things that would not be accepted in society. She takes Iris’s life away from her because she feels that that is what Iris did to her. Winifred takes away Aimee, Iris’s daughter, and it is at this point that Iris lets her life truly spiral out of control.
I think Atwood had many prominent themes throughout this novel, the primary one being the affects that marriage and motherhood have on a person. The Blind Assassin is full of mothers who are unable to take care of their children, and wives who are unable to cope with their husbands. Iris is both of these things, as is her grandmother, mother, and daughter. The whole family has been fractured for a long time, but Iris is the only person who has the courage to write this out, to explain it, to set it down for all the world and all her descendants. Because, out of this whole crazy, dysfunctional family came her granddaughter, Sabrina, who deserves to know who she is and how to avoid what her predecessors did.