Iris Chase in her old age wants to let her alienated granddaughter know that the latter’s grandmother was actually Iris’s sister Laura. She tells the story of her unhappy marriage to Richard Griffen and his affair with Laura, who submitted to the man only to save Alex Thomas, a communist running from the authorities.
Iris publishes the novel The Blind Assassin, the affair between her and Alex, in Laura’s name, perhaps to compensate for Laura killing herself after learning of the affair. When we learn of Laura’s death in the beginning of the novel, we know it wasn’t an accident and suspect suicide. Midway through the novel, we may have suspected she killed herself because Richard had raped her, but the real reason was more powerful. Laura realized Iris and Alex had betrayed her.
The Blind Assassin is about the plight of women in an age when they were considered men’s possessions and their only goal was to satisfy them. There are plenty of novels and movies that tell of the suffering and dehumanization, but such a theme is worth telling and retelling.
When I read of how Iris married Richard Griffen hoping the businessman would save her father’s business and how she continued to submit to him even after she found out he had cheated her father and caused him to commit suicide, I wished she had the courage and strength to free herself from his grasp. I wished she Laura rebelling against the forces that repressed her. But she is Iris and not Laura. And she rebelled in the only way she knew, by having a secret affair with Alex Thomas and living a double life.
Margaret Atwood (Source: Vanwaffle at Wikimedia)
The Blind Assassin is a tragic tale and the greatest tragedy is Laura committing suicide after learning of the affair between Iris and Alex.
The tale-within-a-tale that Iris wrote and attributed to Laura misleads the readers to believe that Laura had the affair with Alex. What strikes me is the quality of writing between the main narrative and Iris’s novel, the former demonstrating Atwood’s skills and the latter Iris’s lack of. Perhaps Margaret Atwood wants to show Iris’s hollow life through the writing. The lovers in Iris’s novel come across as aloof and flat and they seemed out of the reader’s reach.
Though both Iris and Laura suffered and sacrificed, I like the latter more perhaps because she fought harder against overwhelming odds.
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