Please post a response to Emily’s presentation and then feel free to take your critical comments in any direction.
13 thoughts on “The Blind Assassin”
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Please post a response to Emily’s presentation and then feel free to take your critical comments in any direction.
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Emily’s presentation was particularly useful for me because of the reviews she included. They were well chosen and definitely thought provoking. The claim that “men have political conviction, whereas women have nothing more to worry about than love” in the novel (I’m paraphrasing) struck me as a very incomplete reading on the part of the critic. If you were to read a basic plot summary of the novel, then maybe this is the sense you would get; in some ways it does seem like the major women’s trajectories are a result of male action, often in a very literal way: the mother dies after a miscarriage, Iris is carried off to marriage and then an affair and Laura’s repeated abuse seems like an explanation for her ethereal character and eventual suicide. But what about characters like Winifred? She is technically married but acts totally independently of her husband, and she forcefully influences Richard’s and the family’s actions. Although not exactly a positive representation of women, she certainly has “more to worry about than love”. So too is Reenie wise and largely apathetic to romance and Carrie vivacious, cunning and political. Then of course there’s the fact that Laura’s “love” worries are more like traumatized obsessions, and Iris never worries about Richard in a sentimental or romantic way.
The other review that Emily provided claimed that the ending diminished the novel by making the characters too black and white. I want to agree with this in some ways because I found the ending almost too easy after the delicious ambiguity of everything else (… I may have found it more ambiguous than it actually was…). On one level, it seems that Iris (or whoever we’re supposed to believe complied the book) wrapped everything up nicely for us. On another, I think Iris’s narration is incredibly aware of her role as a storyteller, and that she eventually concedes that she must provide some kind of answer for her readers amidst all the confusion and ambiguity. The very fact that there are so many voices and angles shows that there is anything but a fixed storyline to the event of the book: at one point she even says that she has said more in what she’s left out than in what she’s written. I don’t think Iris denies the possibility of other points of view at any stage, even when she eventually wraps things up at the end: one of the last images we see is the photograph of two people with the hand in the corner, a tangible reminder of another presence, another story. And some of the last lines stress to Sabrina that she is free to “reinvent herself” at will, never denying that the story we tell about ourselves, like her own, is always ambiguous.
Emily –
I thought your presentation was really interesting – you pointed out so many different things that were worth looking into. One thing you raised that really intrigued me was Atwood’s refusal to associate her work with sci-fi, labeling her works ‘speculative fiction’ instead. In some sense I get the distinction she makes because The Handmaid’s Tale is definitely different from what you would expect of normal sci-fi; on the other hand, I read her two most recent works (Oryx & Crake, The Year of the Flood) this summer and they feel much more in line with that kind of sci-fi – there are a lot of genetic distortions and other scientific experiments going on. I wonder if she’s still maintaining that distance.
I also thought your point about how many of the chapter titles are objects was really neat – I wonder if that’s something that’s worth exploring further?
And finally, I think your point about how Atwood is interested in sibling relationships and how this kind of duality informs the self provided one really useful way of looking at the novel. After I realized that Iris had written the novel, the sense I had that Iris neglected Laura, that she rewrote Laura, was so much stronger. As in, for instance, Laura’s observation about Iris’ tendency to ‘decide [Laura’s] sick and start nagging at [her]’ whenever she ‘just want[s] to think – to sort things out’ (379). But I think Emily (Scarisbrick)’s right – Iris never denies the possibility of other points of view – she calls Laura her collaborator and her take on absence is telling: ‘What isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light’ (395).
When we were talking about whether this book could be shorter, someone brought up the really long family history as something that could’ve been shortened. So I tried to think about why Atwood decided to spend so much space on that – I think it might be something more than just conveying that sense of legacy (juxtaposed with Alex’s forging his own destiny). I wonder if it could be a more specific legacy that keeps getting passed down – of women in the family suffering. You have Adelia, the idealized lady who dies a very painful death, Liliana, their ‘selfless’ mother who dies prematurely and has to deal with a very awkward marriage, and then, Iris and Laura, whose tragedies we know very well. It’s interesting, then, that Iris’ continues this legacy by passing these stories down, presumably to Myra (her possible half-sister) or Sabrina – one of whom probably arranges the documents. However, compared to the legacy of these women, Iris’ seems mediated with a greater agency – she tells Sabrina that she has Alex’s blood so that she’s ‘free to reinvent [her]self at will’ (513) – in this way, perhaps she breaks this lineage of suffering?
I’m pretty stuck on the idea that siblings—or friends, or people in any kind of relationship, I suppose, but in this case siblings—can from their identities through their interdependent relationship. The book in general obviously mirrors this, in that until Iris tells us, we do not know who writes the story, or whom it is written for. It matters a great deal who writes, but it does not come through clearly. The two characters–Iris and Laura–have distinctive personalities, but at the same time we conflate them for a large majority of the novel. They create their lives around each other; they create their stories around each other, and since Iris is the story-teller, Laura’s story, Laura’s personality, and our perception of Laura are all dependent upon Iris, just as Laura appears to be dependent on Iris.
The two women trade roles constantly throughout the novel. When I thought about it originally, I thought of Laura as the simple, helpless daughter and Iris as the older, practical daughter—the caretaker. Really, though Reenie is the caretaker and neither Iris nor Laura is prepared to take care of themselves or anyone else. They share this trait. This comes across in all the italicized maxims that Iris goes back to when she needs direction on a situation. It is Reenie’s voice that shines through all the time as a guide for Iris. Also, at the end of the novel, Iris admits, “The conversation was taking a turn I hadn’t expected. I’d assumed I’d be consoling Laura, commiserating with her, hearing a sad tale, but instead she was lecturing me. How easily we slid back into our old roles” (485). Laura, then, in the end, is the one with a handle on things. Practical, understanding Iris was the one who was duped, and her flighty, simple sister saw the situations clearly, except, of course, the situation with Alex.
Both sisters miss all the key aspects of their own relationships, and yet end up living the other sister’s relationship. Laura loves Alex. She becomes pregnant with Richard’s baby. She sees Richard as a rapist and pervert. Iris marries Richard. Iris sees Richard as a necessary evil—someone who will save the family. Then Iris has an affair with Alex and has his baby, pretending it is Richard’s. The women, in some sense, have each other’s children (or, in Laura’s case, abort them). In all the convolution, we realize they are living each other’s lives. Their experiences are entirely based on one another. Without Laura, Iris would never meet Alex. Without Iris, Laura would never have ended up in the same house as Richard, but with each other they created an identity. Their identities somehow both directly oppose and directly mirror each other’s. When Iris describes Laura in her final moments she explains, “She looked right through me. Lord knows what she saw. A sinking ship, a city in lames, a knife in the back” (488). She sees herself through Laura’s eyes.
I do not know if this answers the question of whom the novel was written for. Was it Laura or Alex? In a sense, I think both of them have their own piece of the authorship. All the characters and their personalities get so intertwined in the construction of the various stories, but also in the telling of the stories and what comes through. I like the line “Alex belonged, for Laura, in another dimension of space.” But doesn’t he belong in a different dimension of space for both characters? His personality only comes through in the sections with the telling of The Blind Assassin, which exists on a parallel plane, but also a totally different one. The novel, then, is maybe Iris’s ode to Alex, but it is also about how inextricable the two sisters are, and so it is in some way written by both of them for Alex and for the optimism of creating your own future, which they both struggle to do successfully.
Emily,
I really liked your presentation, thank you for including Atwood’s anecdote about the husband who would have saved his marriage had he read The Blind Assassin earlier – Atwood says she actually received many of these letters. I did some research on marriage (okay, Wikipedia) to try and find some connections between Atwood’s depiction of women in Iris’s “Blind Assassin” and her depiction of marriage in the larger text – also between the modern day description of marriage in the text and any interesting details from the historical framework. Basically, in Biblical/Old Testament times – during the original formulation of the idea of marriage – women were “regarded as chattel, belonging to her husband; the description in the Bible suggest that she would be expected to perform tasks such as spinning, sewing, weaving, manufacture of clothing, fetching of water, baking of bread.” Hmm…
Some of these tasks sound awfully familiar. I get the sense that Atwood is playing around with the idea of decay, twisting it around; no longer the decay of something grand into something faded, which has lost its original “beauty” (though, interestingly, there are plenty of people who would argue that marriage has undergone this sort of decay) but instead the decay of something quite terrible into something differently terrible – equally silencing. After all, Iris assumes authorship of the “Blind Assassin,” so Alex’s storytelling about the sacrificial girls, the Peach Women, would be imbued with her own sense of patriarchal restraint.
I think this line of questioning is in conversation with both Emily and Siau Rui’s posts – the legacy of the “suffering women” and the role of Iris as a self-conscious storyteller of a narrative history, both of which I think were excellent readings which I did not see as clearly on my own. I think Iris sees herself as a blind assassin. She asks at the story’s end: “How could I have been so ignornant?… so stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? … You’d be as ruined as God. You’d be a stone.” (517). Society had blinded her, cut out her throat (her story was always seen as Laura’s voice), and in this reading, Laura’s suicide becomes a subtle assassination. I agree that Iris accepts this formulation of her life narrative – and perhaps as the only narrative available to women like her – until the very end, when she seems to see in Sabrina hope of “spinning a new yarn” … or maybe giving up spinning altogether.
Emily,
I thought you did a great job providing the context for the book, and I really appreciated hearing a little bit more about the breadth of Atwood’s interests, both in the number and type of books she’s written as well as her hobbies as a bird lover and inventor. Having a copy of her sketches was great, too—it drove home the quote from Atwood that we’re not always hugely talented at what we enjoy doing, and I’m glad she’s stuck with writing instead of illustrating.
Until our discussion I hadn’t considered the possibility of The Blind Assassin being a feminist novel, and after thinking about it more, I’m still not certain whether it could be considered one. Iris pays attention to the lessons of both Mr. Erskine and Winifred and learns how to wait patiently for the right moment to take advantage of a situation. Despite living at a time when women conformed to traditional gender roles and had a significantly lower amount of agency relative to men, she succeeded in having an influence on at least some of the outcomes in her life. Iris’s relationship with Richard provides an example of this cunning. Iris manages to carry on a long-term affair with Alex Thomas and even pass off Alex’s child as Richard’s own, yet her most significant win over her husband is when she takes her daughter Aimee away from the family and demands financial support from Richard. Iris has also always recognized Laura’s vulnerability, her tendency to take everything quite literally, but toys with her sister by telling her, quite casually, about Alex’s death and the affair the two had been having. Iris ends up being a strong female character, but does a strong female character automatically make for a feminist novel?
The characters over which Iris exerts her strengths, Richard and Laura, came off as flat and simplistic by the end of the novel. Iris is morally superior to a child molesting, emotionally vacant industrial capitalist and has more wits to her than a perpetually lost young woman who bears the effects of a life of victimization. Iris wins over two characters that ended up being cast as relatively easy targets. If this is supposed to represent a victory for women and a move for female equality, then the bar for feminism has been set pretty low.
Cecily’s question of rape and rapture got me thinking about the allusions to God and gods in this novel. Alex’s stories directly establish the associations of power and violence with romance. Iris, after Laura’s death, flips through their old notebooks and remembers their discussion of a quote from Madame Bovary: don’t interfere with false gods, you’ll get the gold paint all over your hands. I looked this up online. Bloggers said this means that people should admire romantic legends but not live them. In previous discussions, we brought up the idea that there is a disconnect between what is allowed in literature and what is acceptable in daily life. Laura and Iris however, subscribe to Miss Violet/ Violence’s tragic-romantic view of life and at the end, fight over who gets to represent Dido. Right before recalling this quote from Madame Bovary, Iris thinks back on their discussion of the death of Dido. Dido stabbed herself on her a pyre made up of all the objects she connected with Aeneas, who has now sailed away to fulfill his destiny. Similarly, Iris brings together all her associations with Alex and makes it into a book. She wants to be the grieving lover that he’s left behind on his quest for destiny. However, Laura associates Iris with the goddess Iris who kills/ euthanizes Dido and cuts off a lock her hair. Laura had previously been unwilling to become a nun because she was vain of her hair. Somehow, Laura’s leaving her message to Iris next to this translation suggests that Laura has now mind an object worthy of her being an offering to; she becomes a tribute to tragedy or ill-fated love or some such romantic concept.
In class, someone brought up the point that Iris doesn’t seem to understand men. Both sisters perceive men as threatening, perhaps because of the power differential between genders. It fascinated me that their father, dressed up as santa claus, was perceived as the devil, red and with his head of fire.
Someone mentioned the importance of family history in this novel. I find it interesting that Iris tells Myra she might be Iris’ half-sister, that Captain Norval might be her father. Also, Alex lists Iris as next-of-kin. It seems that all the central characters are then blood-related somehow.
Emily, as most other people in class, I found your inclusion of reviews about The Blind Assassin particularly insightful. While I didn’t agree with all of them, they gave an opportunity to see what the masses thought of a Booker winner that was considered almost “too readable.” Atwood’s more personal opinions were also helpful, and humorous, for understanding her as a person makes her writing make more sense. I fear my thoughts about the novel itself are rather scattered (much like the multiple plot lines!), so forgive me for the further ramblings.
Like Georgia mentioned in her post, I’m quite fond of the view Atwood takes on sibling dynamics. Being an only child myself, I find these bond between sisters mysterious and Atwood did a seemingly excellent job at writing the co-dependence of Iris and Laura, with Alex as the unlikely meeting point between their two vastly different personalities. I think their relationship is certainly worth exploring further, where they make up for each other and the question of how much more powerful Iris actually is.
On a completely different note, during our discussion in class we talked about reading The Blind Assassin as a feminist novel. It’s funny, when I was in my suite reading the book, my friend (uber feminist) saw it and was all sorts of excited that I was reading Atwood. Yet I fail to see the novel as overtly feminist in tone. Yes, the male characters are all creeps and Alex barely redeems them, but I didn’t feel hit over the head with any sort of battle cry for woman’s liberation or the like. Despite her marriage, Iris is very much in control of her life, having an affair, writing the novel, and thus doesn’t carry the oppressed female vein of the story too far.
Finally, on a rather frivolous note, I think this has been my favorite book so far, and whether or not that is for it’s readability, I don’t know, but I certainly appreciate it.
Emily, I really enjoyed your presentation and it introduced me to see the novel in a different perspective. It was also revealing to see the sketches by Atwood and hear about the writing process—especially about choosing the narrator.
It was especially helpful to hear different reviews about the novel: Going off of whether it can be viewed a feminist novel, I agree with Amy that the novel does not quite portray women as striving for equality. However, I would like to give credit to the Blind Assassin in that it underscores the gender relationship and the manifestations of women in a subtle manner. I think it’s especially brilliant for Atwood to incorporate the popular style of the time setting and having the story told from a female perspective. This, along with the unreliability of the narrative, got me to deconstruct the characters beyond what’s presented and also to see the gender relationship in play in the narrative itself. I especially liked the part where Iris contemplates that the perception of her grandmother and her mother were in fact fabricated images within their marriages. (110 or so?)
Like Emily, I agree with the the other review that the characters turn out to be too black and white in the end. I found it interesting to see the patterns from myths replayed in Iris’ narrative as she reconstructs her memory (Laura’s raped by her sister’s brother, and Iris, like the virgins in Alex’s story is sacrificed to Richard in silence). This results in diminishing the individuality of characters and the uniqueness of the experience, but I think it also allows Iris to stand out as a character with agency as she willfully participates in this.
Emily-
I really enjoyed your presentation, especially the part about Atwood’s authorship and process. I thought it was particularly interesting to think about the question of authorship and creation in the context of a novel that is itself concerned with multiplicities of authors and texts. I found it funny that Atwood takes such great pains to distance her characters from her own experience and from the non-fictional landscapes that they inhabit (Checking phone books? Really??).
This idea got me thinking about Iris as an author. If we choose to believe Iris, then she has authored two books. Both books are intensely, painfully, scandalously personal—memorial reconstructions of her non-fiction life. Because of the closeness of her fiction to her own experience and the social life that the books have, Iris comes to the conclusion that she can only attribute them to someone dead—first to the recently deceased Laura, and ultimately to her dead self. There are obvious social forces at work behind this decision, but what’s interesting to me is how the decision reveals Iris’s thoughts about life and death. Life for Iris is so tightly controlled by society that it can hardly be lived in truth. Affairs, suicides, and abortions all become part of a secret untellable story.
Death is entirely different. Iris claims that Laura, in death, was “A tabula rasa not waiting to write, but to be written on” (46). It’s a strange assertion—that a dead person’s life can be rewritten by the living. Iris seems to use this as her justification for publishing the first Blind Assassin in her sister’s name. But by this logic, writing the second Blind Assassin is Iris’s attempt to write on her own tabula rasa. I haven’t worked out the implications of this fully in my head, but it’s an interesting thought that gives some dimension to Iris’s character. Her refusal to claim ownership of her own life until after she is dead (and after she has tested the public reaction to her life by attributing its most scandalous episode to her dead sister) certainly does not speak well of Iris’s character, but it speaks even less highly of the society that necessitated the decision.
Emily-
Your presentation was terribly informative. One detail that I liked a lot, and found rather telling, was when you said that the story originally started out as Atwood envisioning a lady with a hatbox. Then a lady with a steamer-trunk. It was striking, to me, that she began the novel three times, first with Iris dead, second with Iris dead and other people telling the story, before settling on the version we ended up reading–it made me search for echos of those past forms in the book, looking for where the hatboxes and trunks grew significant. One thing I enjoyed about your presentation, and the research presentations in general, is how they sometimes feel like an excavation going on behind the text–the politics and personal quirks, the bickering edits and the areas of obsessive interest. It humanizes the novels we read, in this weird way–to know a bit more about circumstances behind the writing.
On a separate note, it wasn’t until reading Emily’s comment way up in the thread that I realized I had completely forgotten about the other characters aside from Iris, Laura, Richard, and Alex. It seems strange that we didn’t, for whatever reason, bring them up in class–dependable Reenie, mothering Myra, monstrous Winifred. They provide so much of the support structure of the story, I think, that it’s hard to “talk” about them–and I wonder if that might be a bias of Iris’ as well, that she doesn’t focus much on them. One odd side-effect of her narrating the book is that many of the characters don’t truly feel real–like Richard, they become archetypes for what they represent. They never surprise us, like real people do–no one, I think, but Iris herself (and Laura by extension) towards the end of the book. She turns most of the characters into ideas, like her Grandmother, like Reenie. Perhaps it’s a comment on the idea that she is always writing down her life, even while she lives it–that, like the lovers in the Blind Assassin, what is true can only be expressed in nearly-fictional stories.
Emily: Your presentation was great. My one question: does Atwood have siblings? A sister? You said she has a proclivity for writing about sibling relationships, but do you have any insight as to from where this proclivity stems?
I suppose since there was no critical presentation this week I can just blather for a bit about the book. In terms of assessing Iris’ agency, there is something I would like to add to what was already discussed in class. As a class, we tended to side with Iris, and I generally agree with this conclusion. However, I think Atwood makes this point a bit more ambiguous than our discussion made it seem. Did Iris have any choice in marrying Richard? Yes and no. True, neither of the sisters had any skills. They grew up in a world that left them few options for self-sufficiency and thus a world that limited their agency. However, time and time again throughout the book, Iris mentions her own hypocrisy in judging Winifred’s consumerism, mentioning that at the time her reaction to Winifred was not judgment but jealousy. This is further illustrated by the lavish descriptions of the clothes that she and Winifred wore. There is a certain fondness to Iris’ retrospective consideration of her time with Richard. At one point she even mentions that she would be lying if she said she hadn’t become accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Although the world had been unfair to Iris and Laura in leaving them without practical skills, it is not as if Iris was very keen to explore other, less glamorous modes of living. We hear that there are a fair mix of men and women working in the button factory. Perhaps there were some manual jobs available to women at the time. It is also mentioned that men replaced many of these women when the war ended. But I am not convinced the sisters had no recourse. It seems to me that Atwood illustrates a world that didn’t cut off all opportunities to women, maybe just the good ones.
I think Atwood wants us to feel a frustration with both the world and with Iris. The book is largely about stagnation; Iris, after all, ends her life back in Port Ticonderoga. We are supposed to feel uncomfortable with this stagnation, and this discomfort should stem from anger with the circumstances of the world in which Iris and Laura grew up, but also a frustration with Iris’ choice not to do anything about it. In this way I think Iris’ narrative sides with Laura, demonstrating Iris’ envy of Laura’s rebellious and free nature. Perhaps this narrative and not ‘The Blind Assassin’ as supposedly written by Laura is Iris’ true dedication to her sister.
Works Consulted:
Barkhorn, Eleanor. “Margaret Attwood Live Chat: The Highlights” The Atlantic Entertainment 22, June 2011. 31, October 2011 http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/06/margaret-atwood-live-chat-the-highlights
Clark, Alex. “Vanishing Act” The Guardian 30, September 2000. 31, October 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/sep/30/fiction.bookerprize2000
Mars- Jones, Adam. “Where Women Grow on Trees” The Observer 17, September 2000. 31, October 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/sep/17/fiction.bookerprize2000
Scott- Coe, Jo. “Margaret Attwood: An Interview” Narrative Magazine Fall 2010. 30, October 2011 http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2010
Viner, Katherine. “Double Bluff” The Guardian 15, September 2000. 31, October 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/sep/16/fiction.bookerprize2000
“An Interview with Margaret Attwood” Charlie Rose 24, January 2001. 30, October 2011 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/3293
“Attwood on Science, Fiction, and the Flood” NPR 20, August 2010. 31, October 2001. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129324791&ft=1&f=1129
“Biography: Margaret Attwood” Margaret Attwood Online. 30,October 2011. http://www.margaretatwood.ca/bio.php
“Interview with Margaret Attwood” Big Think 23, September 2010. 31, October 2011 http://bigthink.com/users/margaretatwood
“Prize Archive 2000” The Man Booker Prize. 30, October 2001. http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/archive/33