From an Obscured Gaze to a Seeing Eye? Iris as Victim,Villain,and Avenger in the Role of Writer-as-Assassin in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin

Mixing Truth and Fiction, or Truth Is Fiction

Via The Blind Assassin’s innovative form, Atwood plays with the audience’s reader-based expectations for the novel genre’s conclusion, according to which members expect certain narratorial secrets to be unfolded. In writing her nonfictional memoir and autobiography, Iris is supposed to be sharing “truths” and imparting “realities.” Moreover, the newspaper articles, photos, and novella that she presents as context for her work should render complexity to the book to enact a “whole” or more complete picture for audience members, with their purchasing power and, thus, clout involving a successful reader/writer transaction. However, in a postmodern schema, every new insight that Iris poses in the book is one that is subject to change, as she creates, considers, and advances contradictory claims about herself, family, and community members. In the novel’s present tense, Iris, a writer of advanced age possessing Romantic compositional notions, draws herself as a conduit for artistic impulses. Inspired by her form, Iris moves her pen across the page and lets her imagination take hold. Yet, simultaneously, Iris privileges memory’s place in (re)constructing the past. Art may be inspired by the muse, and emotion-imbued memories draw supposedly from the heart. Nonetheless, Iris’s “insightfully” wrought memoir; clandestinely presented novella; fable-like, science-fiction inserts; documentary-style news clippings, and true-as-life photos represent fictional texts, even though Iris keeps promising readers that she is conveying accuracy in her events’ rendition. For example, to show gratitude to Laura and Alex for the guidance they have provided in her coming-of-age story by acting as bridges, according to Chapter One’s title, across which she walks, Iris hides the novella’s authorship until the end.

Iris’s advances of so-called facts are followed by their retractions, and Iris doctors the narrative in the same manner that Laura cuts herself out of Iris’s picnic photo with Alex to meet both girls’ desired vision of events. Readers, trying to unlock the book’s revelation, discover history, like Iris’s memoir, to be produced retrospectively and mediated as such, while one is blinded to the current events’ significance as well. The Blind Assassin’s plot elements, whirling in a state of flux, never add up to some culminating point and corresponding moment of Joycean epiphany for audience members seeking this transactional, Modernistic experience. Instead, Cherene Sherrard (1999) describes the “biomythography” as a fictional “reenvisioning of a life experience which reveals multilayered histories and collective memory” (p. 130), and The Blind Assassin builds upon this genre.

At Avilion: Iris as a Youth, Sister, and Cultural Casualty

At the novel’s outset, Iris posits herself, like Laura, as a casualty of social strictures to gain readers’ sympathy and present herself as a likeable narrator-protagonist poised to fulfill the book’s heroic role, which traditional readers expect in Chambers’s reader/writer contract’s terms. As a victim of others’ wrongdoings and failures, Iris grows up at Avilion, named according to Adelia’s Modernist, fairytale-founded, Arcadian notions. In having Avilion constructed, Adelia may have envisioned King Arthur’s island from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, a narrative the girls read. As a protected location, Tennyson’s fantastical retreat does not suffer from Nature’s ravages, but the Chase estate, and Iris, as its inhabitant, is less fortunate. When Iris is nine, Liliana, her mother, dies, and when Iris reaches 18, her father, Norval, faces bankruptcy in the 1930s depression. In the end, the Chase factories are disbanded. Reenie seeks another job and marries after setting, like Iris’s other female forbearers, a patriarchally inspired, if rebellious, example of women’s suffering and compliance in maintaining antiquated standards and playing a wife to Norval and a mother to the girls. When Norval dies, Iris and Laura must fend for themselves, and Laura translates the maxim, “there’s no place like home,” to mean that home cannot exist as a location for them (Atwood, 2000, p. 447). In the same passage, at a later time, Iris tells herself that “[h]ome is where the heart is,” but because, as an aging woman, she has become “heartless,” she is hence “homeless” (p. 447). The novel offers the sisters no comforting place and no secure point-of-view in any known, masculinist realm, whether earthly, heavenly, or mythical. Nevertheless, the premise that Iris, being heartless and homeless like Sakiel-Norn’s blind assassins, possesses no residence at Avilion, can allow her female descendants to picture themselves elsewhere and anywhere.

Although Iris loses the Chase house representing her inheritance, she does not feel comfortable there, especially once Richard, its new owner via marriage, begins to revamp it. Eventually, Avilion serves as an assisted-living facility called “Valhalla,” signifying a place of eternal feasting for male warriors, such as Norval, an alcoholic wounded in an overseas conflict pursued to defend the home front. This home represents one that Iris, a veteran’s daughter and not a war hero herself, must leave. Nevertheless, Iris assumes that smokers will burn down the house and destroy its history associated with male-dominated, Victorian purposes. Meanwhile, the button factory, of which Iris is dispossessed similarly after it did catch fire, is salvaged and becomes a tourist attraction, allowing onlookers to gaze upon the past without experiencing it. Inside, Myra owns a souvenir shop called the Gingerbread House, like that depicted in Hansel and Gretel, where instead of hungry children, old ladies, including Iris, feast upon art and history generated for consumptive purposes, as if to memorialize themselves through reminiscent fabrications of some ideal form. Like Iris evaluating the yesteryear via simulations of its bric-a-brac, Derrida (1976) presents a deconstruction-based theory posing a gap between the signifier and signified, according to which, he explains, a thing cannot resemble its name. Even the town itself, named after a defeated battle hero, represents an emblematic loss. Iris’s masculinist-constructed, childhood home was never hers in the first place. Shelley Boyd (2013) compares The Blind Assassin and Shakespeare’s King Lear, and in both works, the daughters face their estates’ destruction. King Lear represents a genre tragedy, with Goneril killing Regan and ending her own life, but Laura’s end and Iris’s subsequent disappearance invite a reading of the scenario in which Iris’s heirs write open futures because of their kingdom’s forfeiture.

Analyzing her early years, Iris invokes herself as a pawn moved around the board by characters embroiled in a masculinist society, including her parents, even if this version of herself, in postmodern terms, represents as much of a construction as do the other characters’ recordings. Still, Iris’s grandfather, Benjamin, who depicts the button factory’s history in his gold-embossed book, and Adelia, who fashions scrapbooks memorializing girls’ debuts in elegant dresses, imprint their identities upon Iris, regarding their texts as quaint but curiously forceful. In the “Avilion” chapter, Iris lists the miscellaneous objects that Laura finds in collecting tokens on Avilion’s uninhabited premises later on, as if Laura is trying to locate pieces of a story concerning how the sisters became victims of their male-invoked fate and how they might save some treasure representing their “true” essence with which to describe and value themselves. However, many trifles that Laura recovers are associated with traditional female roles, and these items’ displacement from their locations within the Chase home is positive for Iris’s descendants’ futures, which may place heirs beyond the household’s confines. In an interview, Atwood likens the novel genre’s form to a “capacious container” (Gussow, 2000, p. B7), and here, it represents one that Iris attempts to fill with a past as vast and random in matter as the memorabilia littering Avilion’s rooms. Amid The Blind Assassin’s narrative’s clutter, readers wanting answers about Iris may pan for clues that never surface, and despite her ruminations, Iris discovers that “[i]t is no longer possible to know” the nature of her story’s elements, such as the terms of her parents’ relationship specific to World War I (Atwood, 2000, p. 72). Although this lack of knowledge on readers’ parts could lead to a failure of Iris’s narrative in Chambers’s transactional terms, Atwood implies that leaving women’s questions unresolved provides them with the benefit of their retaining no permanent, inviable answers.

At Richard’s Palace and Alex’s Rooms: Iris as a Wife, Mistress, and Social Product

Avilion’s dining-room’s stained-glass windows, picturing the tragic fairytale lovers, Iseult and Tristan, offer Iris a colored, romantic world receding from view as she becomes an adult with a classical bent that she foregrounds in her narrative to challenge depictions of her victimization and posit herself as her masculinist culture’s product. Still, in leaving Avilion, Iris enters houses with clear, glass windowpanes transparent in nature but no less opaque for women’s purposes of viewing their worlds. Having failed in business, Norval, who married a woman of his choice, urges Iris to tie herself to Richard, an older business associate she hardly knows. The Chase patriarch sacrifices Iris to save his pride, if not his legacy, in terms of the mansion and factory. Likewise, in Alex’s parallel saga on Planet Zycron, set 8,000 years before, power shifts are ever present: The rising aristocracy threatens the ruling class, and men treat women abjectly, from the sacrificial maidens to the king’s mistress herself, who he plans to sell into slavery, because “everything was for sale,” in the city’s epicenter (p. 28). In Luce Irigaray’s (1998) Marxist-based theory concerning women’s objectification and marketplace commodification, men exchange women, who are displayed for social consumption, as commodities: In a male-dominated culture, mothers hold a use value, virgins an exchange value, and prostitutes possess both. Similarly, during the novel, Iris, first as a virgin and then as a wife and mother, fulfills, in Irigaray’s terms, her “value” as a social product.

If marrying Richard makes Iris, barely an adult, a victim, she also represents an outcome of culturally enacted norms, as she considers her fate, as well as that of her father, sister, Reenie, and the button-factory workers, in reviewing her options as a woman facing displacement and replacement within male-centered realms. As a female character, Iris is defined, according to Judith Butler’s theory of gender conceptions, not only by sex but also by socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and other identity aspects comprising gender, an ideation formulated by social strictures as opposed to being generated by personhood (Butler, 2004). Yet, like Sakiel-Norn’s virgins, singing about “absence and silence” (Atwood, 2000, p. 29), the king’s mistress, requesting courtship-inspired poems that he fails to pen, and perhaps even the king’s wife, mentioned only briefly, as if she possesses no desires, Iris discovers that the noble gesture of self-sacrifice she offers in becoming a wife is meaningless to everyone involved, including her family, community, and Richard. When Laura tints Iris’s wedding photos, making them appear hyperreal, Iris is upset that her pictures, serving as “clues and evidence” for her story, according to Barzilai (2010, p. 156), are ruined. Nevertheless, despite her position as a social product, Iris cannot “recall having been present” at the ceremony at all (Atwood, 2000, p. 239) to memorialize its function or signify her compliance with her role as Richard’s wife. Betty Friedan (1963) depicts the emptiness that Iris encounters as a housewife during this era as “the problem that has no name”; for Friedan, the “silent question” that housewives were asking themselves concerning their state was, “‘Is this all?’” (p. 15). In The Blind Assassin, Iris as a wife searches for something else, too, if locating no new function for herself that might crystallize forms for female heirs.

When Iris moves to Richard’s house, a refurbished, contemporary palace of his choosing and purchase, Iris is no less ready to call this space her own. The Griffen abode, decorated in pearly shades, prefigures Laura’s Bella Vista hospital room, and its sanitized, airy, heavenly nature is no more freeing than Iris’s ancestors’ heavy, ornamented fortress rendered as Valhalla in Norse mythology. Even as wallpaper patterns and paint colors change with the era, for Iris, the roles for women and the windows out of which they gaze at their prospects do not. Indeed, Iris mentions that the Griffen garden, a landscape women before her must have observed similarly while imprisoned in the bedroom, remains unaltered. When Iris designs its plot, she discovers she has no plans for it, because her person has been co-opted systematically by those making every decision for her, from clothing choices to grooming practices. Winifred, both decorating Richard’s palace and bedecking Iris’s body as temples, might appear at any time, as if Winifred does not possess her own space either, and under Winifred’s influence, Iris is expected, like an expensive piece of furniture, to bear the weight of a masculinist regime wishing her to be gracious, dependent, submissive, and virginal. Feeling herself “erased, featureless, like an oval of used soap, or the moon on its wane” (Atwood, 2000, p. 235), Iris retreats to the bathroom, a room without windows, first prior to her wedding night, then on her honeymoon, and at the Griffen abode, because her view is blocked at every angle by Richard, the new king, or his sister, the High Priestess in the Sakiel-Norn allegory. Although Richard requires Iris for the bedroom’s sexual pleasures, she remains peripheral to him, while Winifred, roaming the premises, is “necessary” (p. 331). Nevertheless, in the novel, writing and secretion practices offer a means for women to gain subjectivity (Ku, 2004), and in advancing age, Iris, visiting the donut shop’s bathroom, aligns washroom writing acts with composing messages to other occupants sharing this private space for urination and defecation. Because the messages presented, representing scribbles, lack clear meaning, women may interpret them however they want, validating their perspective decisions, whatever these may be.

As Richard’s romantic partner, Iris finds that her marriage transaction goes unrecorded in “official” historical accounts, such as the one that Benjamin offers in his leather-bound book relaying economic success. Gothic literature focuses on the motifs of what Gina Wisker (2012) calls “pursuit, terror, power, and the potential of real rape” (pp. 51-52), and Iris’s and Richard’s union represents what Wisker might deem a “tale of conformity and hidden abuse” (2012, p. 134). Just as Iris, maintained in one masculinist stronghold or another, stays indoors mostly and looks out windows at what lies beyond, her suffering in marriage is not only veiled from public view but also exists as an acceptable version of the contract itself, a context precluding Iris from fashioning herself simply as a martyr. Still, in Butler’s (2004) theory of gender as involving a performative act allowing one to function within social boundaries, Iris cannot signify her gender and lay claim to any value supposedly associated with it, for better or worse, despite her entrenchment in the book’s varying locations linked to traditional female functions. While Iris’s fate in marriage is perhaps no worse than that of Laura’s, who Richard sends to a mental institution for refusing the place he fashions for her, a bedroom festooned in pink, Laura becomes a saint for her later supposed suicide, while Iris, in old age, is left as the town’s recluse. Of the sisters, Laura represents the more independent, stubborn, and giving character, attempting to avoid the patriarchal Griffen landscape by escaping on the train and providing for herself by working at a fair. There, Laura makes the donuts of which Iris finds herself to be the center, absent of features. Iris neither aligns herself with the sacrificial maiden’s role, nor does she become the predatory opportunist Winifred plays, either. Avoiding these dualisms as exemplary of her lineage’s options, Iris invokes and mimics both offices in turn.

Nonetheless, Richard, a foil to the Chase men and sweatshop tycoon, compensates Iris, an aristocratic wife, with new money. As a social product, Iris benefits from the “sale” of her person via what Irigaray (1998) describes as the market exchange’s terms, ones not unlike Chambers’s reader/writer contract in which both parties possess obligations and expect returns. While Laura colors Richard’s photograph green to indicate his financial appetites, and green signifies Benjamin’s book’s shade, Iris also conforms to her newest part, having acting lessons, clothes, and makeup, along with the house Richard purchases to replace the one she left, which, “out of sight,” is also “out of mind” for her until Norval dies, Laura phones, and Iris reconsiders her alliances. Having given herself over to outward appearances like the Chase and Griffen houses to be remodeled, Iris dresses stylishly and applies potions to soften her hands and brighten her face. Simone Beauvior (1997), discussing women’s conceptions, argues that “[t]he social significance of the toilette allows woman to express, by her way of dressing, her attitude toward society. If she is submissive to the established order, she will assume a discreet and stylish personality” (p. 547). In their storytelling, Alex compares Iris, who he implies is a “pampered society bride,” to Sakiel-Norn’s sacrificial virgins: Both ceremoniously “fulfill [their] duties with decorum” (Atwood, 2000, pp. 29, 28), as if their actions represent temple-residence rites, and as a new wife, Iris is seduced by the popular culture depicted in women’s magazines to mirror its modes. Capitalism engineers one’s gender and thus one’s story, and, according to Isabel Carrera (1994), Iris represents not only a product but also a consumer who consumes.

Following matriarchal leads dictated by patriarchal codes, Iris, a cultural product, acts as a hostess, housewife, and, eventually, mother at Richard’s palace. Iris represents a rich, nominally educated socialite, yet, to her credit, in postmodern terms, she remains unrefined and unimpressed by her surrounding system of patriarchal enterprise and industry. At the Chase home, Iris had confused original masterpieces with fabricated classics, and she possesses no relationship with the museums, buildings, and high-culture artifacts Richard dispatches her to see for educational purposes on their honeymoon. Both Irigaray (1985), describing women as the “sex which is not one,” and Cixous (1975), calling for women to implement écriture féminine, founded on the original relationship that women, as language teachers, possess with their children, posit that in a patriarchally inscribed universe, women are constructed by numerous forces, least of all themselves. Yet, in “actuality,” Iris possesses no real “self” at all to assert as a female character contained in masculinist spaces. Iris’s only escape lies in tending a rock-filled garden, a barren landscape, where she holds no responsibility to nurture anything living, from the perspective of her culture’s fatherly origins, back to the primordial Garden of Eden. Still, stones may roll, and Sakiel-Norn’s vanished people could live beneath their city’s rubble. Years later, Richard’s house with its “squinty” windows (Atwood, 2000, p. 295), from which Iris, as a wife, had difficulty seeing, boasts a broken, second-floor pane allowing for the possible departure, one Iris herself never made, of some female resident.

Richard’s house serves as Iris’s prison, and she walks about town, enters shops, and attends movies to escape it, even though she is subject to male purview in these public areas. Iris cannot express her “self” in Alex’s changing series of rooms either, because there she assumes an identity as his mistress while retaining her function as Richard’s wife. Iris does not possess her own place, and there is no location where she might meet Alex on “free” ground in some alternate space that she and Alex, as storytellers, might invent together to empower men and women equally. Indeed, Zycron’s inhabitants of an alternate universe later people Earth. Having fled Richard’s palace, Iris hides in Alex’s hovel-like sanctuaries, located often on the town’s wrong side but offering furnishings that seem offputtingly similar to Iris, if of lesser quality, like the shoes worn by the street’s women exhibiting their perambulation’s value and nature. The narratives that the lovers tell to release themselves of the tedium and duress of their affair’s constraints become barriers demarcating their respective gender roles, and Iris realizes that there is little difference between her marriage to Richard and liaison with Alex, men dedicated to their given occupations and not to her. Alex, both like Richard and the alien creature Alex himself invents for his stories, “love[s]” Iris by attempting to “assimilate her” into himself (p. 279), and while Iris resists Alex’s mission to possess her, she never escapes his gravitational pull, one as strong and bright as the Apollonian sun of masculinist truth in Nietzsche’s (1886/2008) war between Apollonian and Dionysian forces. While Alex signifies his own milieu’s outcome, Iris represents his mistress and a prostitute, according to her jokes and Irigaray’s (1998) portrayal of women’s use values, with prostitutes having both male exchange and use purposes. As in being paired with Richard, Iris remains contained within the same patriarchal strictures.

In the novella, the maiden trusts the assassin to lead her from the castle, even though outside the city gates, there lies as much danger as within. Yet, Iris is unable to abandon her comfortable metropolitan lifestyle, and neither does Alex wish to take Iris with him to an open, foreign country. Like “Kubla Khan’s” lover, Alex, whose name means “to aid,” is absent when needed. Meanwhile, similar to Adelia, Iris possesses “no money of her own” (Atwood, 2000, p. 60), because everything belongs to Richard via marriage, and Iris is unwilling to get a paying job herself. Indeed, as a waitress, a role Laura suggested for the two sisters, Iris’s obligation would be to serve all men, instead of a handful. Before departing for Spain, Alex asks Iris to leave Richard and his house, but she declines. In reply, Alex decides that if Iris were to get a room, he would obsess about other men possessing her through their gaze instead of him or Richard. No matter where Iris travels in her contemporary world, she remains a captive of some masculinist-created stronghold, while Alex, slipping among apartments to avoid detection for his Communist leanings, the tenor of which remains murky, is less impeded. When Alex flees to Spain, his fate remains open. Iris expects his reappearance until receiving the telegram, which does not provide the confirmation of his death that a body’s return would. It is easy for Alex as a younger aged male to vanish, his corporal form missing, yet the elderly Iris imagines death via heart failure as the path to freedom from the patriarchally sewn cloaks that she has donned and exchanged as so many costumes.

Before news of Alex’s death, Iris imagined getting an apartment with her daughter, Aimee, above a grocer’s store to await Alex, and, once, Iris dreams that he or his semblance appears at her tower-like residence of an unknown location, where she considers sneaking out of the bedroom window to meet him but does not want to “fall” (Atwood, 2000, p. 468). Iris does not want to drop into the night or, later, tumble alone into her cellar as an aging woman facing the end, although, in this state, women’s possibilities for journeys might present themselves more openly, Atwood suggests, as one enters a state of mental darkness, and the “self” disintegrates. Both sisters live with Richard while setting their sights on Alex, and the romantic Laura dies when she loses Alex, while Iris, steeped in classicism, pines in old age. Like Iseult, Laura assumedly commits suicide, and Iris deconstructs her “self” as a woman alone in her tomb-like house.

In the book, Iris resides in various tower-like structures sheltering but imprisoning her. The mythical Rapunzel makes herself accessible to male rescuers, yet Iris does not offer any hand in her escape, because she foresees having nowhere to go. In The Blind Assassin, Iris is rendered a zero, a space defined by absence, the scooped-out egg. She acts as the indefinable male obsession: Alex “invents[s]” and “makes[s] her up” as with his stories’ characters (Atwood, 2000, p. 276). Still, Iris’s lack of subjectivity provides her and her lineage with options: Even as Iris contemplates being with Alex, she hopes to forget her name, to black out and float in space, as “[s]he render[s] herself up, is blotted out” (Atwood, 2000, p. 261). Iris, spinning tales with Alex, has wished for happy endings, yet she will not receive one herself, because reaching foregone conclusions involves writing stories that then have been told. When Alex argues that all stories terminate with wolves, Iris refuses to agree with him. Instead, claiming that there are other endings without speculating about their essence, she leaves her descendants’ fates open to unfold as they will.

At an Unspecified Location: Iris as (Not) a Mother and Villain

On her honeymoon, Iris, without foreknowledge, stays at a hotel later associated with Paris’s Nazi headquarters. Moreover, she describes Richard as a fascist. However, composing a self-narrative, Iris also writes of “her struggle” from her jail-cell-as-small-house to inspire future generations to remember her. From the beginning, Iris acknowledges her significance not only as a casualty and product of her masculinist system but also a villain in its terms. Nonetheless, psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin (1998) describes a scenario involving “the bonds of love” in which all parties in a liaison are complicit in adhering to and recapitulating acts of domination because they do not recognize them as such: Even when parties espouse equality and personal autonomy, they may apply a set of dominating strategies with sexual partners, family members, and community relations. Still, Iris raises questions of where to draw the line between being compliant to and forming an alliance with the Griffens once she believes Richard had been raping Laura. With Iris’s professed inability to protect Laura, if also herself and later Aimee, Iris flees Richard’s palace. Iris cannot abscond to Alex’s rooms now that he is gone, nor return to the Chase mansion, never refurbished, even though Laura admits to having lived there after Bella Vista. When Iris leaves Richard, an unacceptable act for a woman of her stature and purposed grounds, because Laura’s novella is unpublished, and Richard remains above suspicion, Atwood places Iris in no notable space at all. Although victorious, Iris remains vague concerning her downgraded living circumstances, which she has detailed in excess, down to the items she packs in her suitcase to travel from one residence to another in earlier periods, such as with her honeymoon. Iris provides no clear timeline demarcating her new independence, even though she has referenced historical events as backdrops anchoring her spatio-temporally to prior scenes, such as World War I, either.

As a woman with a small house but someone without a known social residence, Iris represents an outlaw without refuge, even though she pits Richard as the novel’s darker force. Although Iris’s location remains remote, if her own, during Aimee’s early childhood, Iris does not skip town and the masculinist constraints and figures associated with it. Indeed, Winifred, with legal support, seizes Aimee subsequent to Iris leaving her home territory and sharing a bed with an unnamed man at a hotel in a maneuver placing her, as both a mother and so-called prostitute, beyond masculine use values in Irigaray’s market-exchange theory. In the novel, Iris does not represent the traditional mother figure taking steadfast care of her wards; she critiques Liliana, rejects the matriarchal part with Laura, watches her daughter be removed, and finds herself barred from involvement with Sabrina. Nevertheless, because Iris both reaches out to her granddaughter through writing but avoids assuming an overly directive tact toward her in prototypical terms, Iris, who might be called a villain in masculinist terms, allows descendants to depict a mother’s role in broader strictures or refuse it totally.

At the Small House: Iris as a Writer, Assassin, and an Avenger

Regardless of the years’ passage, Iris’s cottage, like Coleridge’s pleasure dome, retains its masculinist structure providing limited sightlines for women. Yet, it is at Iris’s little house where she assumes a writer’s personality to address Laura’s case as well as her own. In The Blind Assassin, as with William Faulkner’s (1936) novel, Absalom, Absalom!, readers must assemble the book’s events and assign blame for family members’ misfortunes spanning multiple generations. Reading represents a decoding act, but Faulkner’s narrative’s structure, like Atwood’s, remains one of mirrors and endless reflections. After The Blind Assassin’s digressions and detours, readers return to its puzzle concerning Laura’s death presented in the first sentence. Where did Laura go, and why? The mystery as to whether Laura committed suicide and, if so, who is to blame remains unsolved, to Iris’s benefit, detriment, and sense of affected removal from the so-called crime scene. In Atwood’s Alias Grace (Atwood, 1996), a novel with a similar theme portraying a female character involved with criminal circumstances, readers never learn whether Grace Marks is guilty of the murders of her employer and his housekeeper/mistress either. Grace, like Iris, represents both a “villain” and a “victim” (Cooke, 1998, p. 325), and Atwood’s (1979) novel, Life Before Man, is concerned similarly with the narrator’s former lover’s suicide and the corresponding nature of the couple’s involvement. Iris’s name derives from the eye’s black-hole center, signifying an expanse beyond mapped locations, and in her varied settings, Iris portrays herself as a victim, product, and villain. Now, as a writer-as-blind-assassin, Iris will avenge her female line. In keeping secrets, representing logocentrically constructed knowledge gaps, and telling lies, signifying displacements of masculinist truths, Iris chooses a middle ground for herself, never accepting nor defying any one self-characterization. Iris’s ability to, as Butler (2004) puts it, perform and “trouble” her gender allows her to play diverging roles supporting and undermining women’s stances.

In The Blind Assassin, a postmodern narrative about someone constructing a narrative, Iris assumes her function as a writer-killer undertaking the task of character assassination to dispel singularly defined female constructs. Indeed, as a writer, Iris is intent on, if unable and even unwilling to, understand and convey Laura’s persona. Iris remarks that Laura possesses the same traits as the average person, except that Laura refuses to hide her essence, a feature that Iris finds “frighten[ing]” to others (Atwood, 2000, p. 89). Also, Iris is jealous of her alter-ego, who utilizes Iris’s property, from her nail file, hairbrush, and car to the white gloves that Laura wears to her death to nullify any fingerprints associated with her location, one now beyond the pale. By the conclusion, the sisters are conflated, so that any damage Iris does in affecting Laura’s death, Iris renders to herself. Iris represents her sister’s maker and savior but also her grim reaper, and Iris creates and removes many of the book’s agents, including Laura, from their hegemonic settings to free them from the masculinist lines of which they cannot break loose themselves. Ultimately, Iris believes that she does not own the “I” in her name in the manner that Laura wields the “L” (p. 88), because everyone possesses an “I” with which to tell one’s story. Yet, Iris’s name’s expansiveness leads her to become an avenger of women and a leader at their forefront’s cause, whatever that might be.

Like many of Atwood’s novels, The Blind Assassin deals with social strictures, whether women accept these standards, and how they will be judged if refusing to comply. Often, Atwood’s female characters face bleak futures and view themselves as having fractured identities (Deery, 1997, p. 4). However, Iris, grappling with multiple subjectivities and choosing none, is empowered, not dysfunctional, in her fluctuating state. Iris contemplates Laura as another version of her “self,” and Atwood presents comparisons between the protagonist and female family members, such as Liliana and Winifred, too, propelling Iris to contemplate her personality’s set of fissures based on these outliers. Besides likening herself to family, Iris divides herself still further upon seeing women, who she resembles, walking the street, too. The breaches in Iris’s semblance allow her to represent a large, diverse female sphere as opposed to rendering her a casualty in terms of Lacan’s (1985) mirror stage theory, in which people are damaged, if left enlightened, upon discovering their subjectivity. McWilliams (2007, p. 30) finds that Atwood’s “novel is fundamentally concerned with the idea of selfhood as a narrative construction or invention”, and as an octogenarian, Iris posits herself as being “perfect” and in her prime (Atwood, 2000, p. 311), because she has tried on every self available to female characters but assumed no single cast. Beryl Donaldson-Langer (1981, p. 91) argues that The Blind Assassin possesses an “absence of viable role models”. Nevertheless, this lack of inspiring prototypes renders Iris free of the masculinist-constructed identities for women that she attempts, deconstructs, and finally explodes in the book. Many of Atwood’s (1969) novels, such as The Edible Woman, invoke a society demanding that women choose between marriage and having a career, yet as a widow and writer, Iris assumes both of these roles, along with others, and problematizes each via its appropriate locale.

In reliving her past, Iris believes that she is gaining insight into her affairs. However, Iris also reveals her “wish to conceal,” one common to others holding secret knowledge of their backgrounds. Then, she admits that what she has written is “wrong”; the “truth” is missing, because Iris’s message represents “a voice outside the window” (Atwood, 2000, pp. 448, 395). Alternately, Iris confesses that she is buried alive in the so-called information she has amassed. As a writer exploring and judging her past and Atwood’s novel’s protagonist, Iris represents a “remembering self” recalling her “historical self” as she veers between “self-reproach and the desire to justify or vindicate herself” (Robinson, 2006, n.p.). Nonetheless, Iris’s compiling of logocentric knowledge leaves her speechless and confused, because, as a female writer, she both lacks information concerning women’s affairs, reproducible in feminine lights, and possesses it in excess. Iris represents an unreliable, fallible narrator, unable to assemble the “full” details of Laura’s death. Hence, in traditional terms, Iris’s culpability in Laura’s tragedy is blunted and diffused. Nonetheless, with her position as protagonist-narrator decentered, Iris resigns any claim to male-enacted legitimacy and Socratic-based insight. In the face of readers’ expectations for the novel genre, Iris offers no singular secret to be revealed and no one case to make. Instead, as a writer-assassin, she builds and destroys the book’s characters, including herself, morphing from the young princess in the castle to the aging witch in the gingerbread house to render women’s possibilities open.