The Blind Assassin

Muteness is a recurring motif in The Blind Assassin, most notably in connection to women. The mute, sacrificial girls of Sakiel-Norn symbolize in extreme fashion the ways in which Iris's own society exploits and silences women. To take just one example, Liliana Chase's experience of married life involves silently submitting to her husband's sexual advances even as multiple pregnancies jeopardize her health: "I'd overheard (Reenie to Mrs. Hillcoate): 'The doctor's not pleased. It might be nip and tuck.’ Of course, she'd never say a word, but she's not a well woman. Some men can never leave well enough alone'" (88).

This same basic pattern repeats in the lives of Liliana's daughters, Iris and Laura, but gains additional nuance. Laura, for instance, transforms silence into a kind of weapon in response to Mr. Erskine's abuse and, later, Richard's: 

[s]he developed the ability to subtract herself in the blink of an eye—one minute she'd be focused on you, the next she'd be elsewhere. Or rather you would be elsewhere: she'd dismiss you, as if she'd waved an invisible wand; as if it was you yourself who'd been made to vanish (164). 

Both men find this alarming, and Iris—noticing her husband's discomfort around Laura—asks her sister what she said to him while they were on the Water Nixie together. Laura's response—"I never say anything to him…because I have nothing to say"—suggests that it is Laura's silence itself that has upset Richard, perhaps because it is a way of shutting him out of her inner life (394).

Iris, meanwhile, breaks her silence first by publishing The Blind Assassin and later by writing the novel's frame narrative (though anonymously, in the case of the former). She is cynical, however, about language as a means of actually communicating with people, and often frames writing (her own, and that of other people) as a kind of desperate assertion of identity. Furthermore, her repeated association of speaking with suffering (e.g. describing her novel as a means of memorializing "wounds endured") also raises questions about the possibility of actually speaking rather than—as she says in the opening pages of the novel—"howling" (508, 2).

Atwood frequently uses fantastical stories and imagery metaphorically, as a way of pointing to deeper truths about the everyday world. At the most basic level, for instance, the science-fiction story embedded within the novel-within-a-novel is a symbol for the society in which Iris and Laura live, as well as for many of the events that make up their lives. Like early 20th-century Canada, Sakiel-Norn is a highly socially-stratified society, with an economy based on the exploitation of the working classes; it is no coincidence that both Sakiel-Norn and Port Ticonderoga specialize in the manufacture of items related to cloth and fabric (carpets and buttons, respectively). Sakiel-Norn is also quite clearly a patriarchal society. The ability of male aristocrats ("Snilfards") to sell their wives and children into slavery in order to avoid bankruptcy parallels Norval Chase's "sale" of Iris to Richard, and the elaborate Zycronian beliefs surrounding female sexuality (e.g. their fear of virgins, "dead ones especially") evoke the uneasy gender relations at play throughout the novel (115).

Atwood, however, imbues even the more "realistic" sections of the novel with a sense of magic and otherworldliness. The Chase mansion, for instance, draws its name from Arthurian legend, and images of nymphsand angels are abundant.Where Laura is concerned, these comparisons tend tounderscorethe abstraction that sets her apart from her peers. More broadly, though, the novel's references to mythology further blur the lines separating truth and fiction: an entirely fictional story, like the one set in Sakiel-Norn, may be "true" in a symbolic sense. Meanwhile, what we take for reality is actually a series of stories that hinge on individual perspective. Iris, for instance, describes the two bronze statues commissioned by the Chase family as "mythic figure[s]" in the town (145). Both bear some sort of relationship to history, but they depict that history in entirely different ways; the statue of Colonel Parkman depicts a gallant cavalry leader, while the Weary Soldier represents a much more cynical take on war. Iris's (and Atwood's) sympathies tend more toward the latter point of view, but by populating the novel with diverse and often incompatible versions of reality, Atwood underscores the slippery nature of truth.

Water imagery is pervasive in Atwood's novel, often overlapping with other motifs and symbols. Port Ticonderoga is close to two rivers, and both Iris's house and the button factory sit on the Louveteau, which initially provided power to the town's mills. Avilion is home to a lily pond, and takes its name from an island in Arthurian legend. A canal running out of Sakiel-Norn empties into the ocean, just as "Alph, the sacred river" runs "down to a sunless sea" in Xanadu—the legendary city that inspires Winifred's charity costume ball (333). Even theChase family boat is named the Water Nixie, which is a kind of water nymph or fairy.

How this imagery functions varies over the course of the novel. In a lot of literature and mythology, water is associated with femininity; Carl Jung, for instance,sees water as a symbol of the unconscious and the emotional, which Western culture has traditionally coded as feminine. Water's life-giving properties can also connote motherhood, while its liquid state evokes the blood shed during menstruation and childbirth. Atwood leans into all of these ideas in The Blind Assassin; at one point, a woman kills herself by jumping into the Louveteau, and Reenie brands it a distinctly female mode of suicide. The episode foreshadows Laura's ultimate fate, in part because Atwood surrounds Laura herself with watery imagery. Laura frequently appears next to the lily pond, and is at one point described as resembling the stone nymph that stands alongside it. Even more significantly, she herself jumps into the Louveteau in the wake of her mother's death in an attempt to conjure her back to life.

This last episode also highlights water's mystical or transformative qualities. Major life events and transitions tend to take place on water: Norval proposes to Liliana while skating on a frozen pond, Richard and Iris begin their honeymoon on a ship bound across the Atlantic, and Richard rapes Laura for the first time on board the Water Nixie. In the story-within-a-story-within-a-story, the assassin and the girl escape from the city via the canal and then sleep together on its banks. All of these events play on the idea of water as a purifying or transformative force (as in baptism), as well as the idea of flowing water as a symbol for change and the passage of history.As a narrator, Iris draws metaphorically on both these meanings, interpreting Laura's white gloves on the day of the crash as "washing her hands of…all of us," and describing the scene captured in the picnic photograph as "drowned now—the tree as well, the sky, the wind, the clouds" (2, 518).

The other element that appears frequently in The Blind Assassin is fire. However, where Atwood associates water with gradual destruction (e.g. the passage of time), she links fire to sudden and complete annihilation. This is clearest in the anonymous woman's dream of Sakiel-Norn in flames, but it's also evident in the burning of the button factory, which marks a complete break with the family's past. To a certain extent, Atwood also ties fire to masculinity; the "God of the Three Suns" is (among other things) the god of "furnaces," and Laura hints at Richard's crimes by tinting his photograph in a way that suggests flames (27).

Perhaps most significantly, though, Atwood also associates Laura herself with fire imagery. In fact, even Laura's suicide takes the form of what Iris elsewhere refers to as "self-immolation," since the car she's driving catches fire after going off the bridge (433). In this way, Atwood hints at Laura's underlying hardness; as Iris says, "Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown…a flint has a heart of fire" (427). This in turn perhaps helps explain why Iris so often describes Laura as unintentionally destructive; although Laura seems gentle on the surface, her passion and absolutism can cause a great deal of damage, simply because they are so uncompromising.

In The Blind Assassin, cannibalism in a literal sense occurs only in the story set on Zycron, where a "band of beautiful nude dead women with azure hair, curvaceous figures, ruby-red lips and eyes like snake-filled pits" inhabit the mountains, "prey[ing] upon unwary travellers"—sexually, but perhaps also physically (115). However, the idea of cannibalism (and carnivorousness more generally) crops up in all three narrative strands; the anonymous woman jokes to her lover that she is "fattening [him] up to eat later," Laura refuses to eat rabbits on the grounds that they look like "skinned babies," and the Chase sisters at one point overhear Reenie talking about "kitchen-table butchers" and think she is talking about cannibalism rather than abortion (341, 167, 325). Iris also compares herself to carnivorous animals, including the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood, "gnawing away, gnawing away" (366).

Perhaps the most significantthing about all of these passages is that Atwood consistently associates cannibalism with women, which is not what we might expect in a novel that deals so heavily with the male exploitation of women's bodies. Perhaps, however, this is one way of pointing to Iris's complicity in the novel's events; although she is in many ways a victim, Iris becomes a kind of predator herself in order to survive. In fact, The Blind Assassin depicts predation as somewhat inevitable; the Planet Aa'a, where all animals and humans are vegetarian, is revealed to be a kind of "Hell"—the implication being that while humans may think they want peace and happiness, they are not truly content unless they are preying on someone else (355).

The photograph taken of Laura, Iris, and Alex at the Labor Day picnic is, in part, a symbol for the complex relationship between the Chase sisters. Technically, the photograph only appears in its entirety in the local paper; Laura steals the negatives and makes copies for Iris and herself, but she crops both of these pictures so that nothing but Laura's hand is visible in Iris's copy (and vice versa). The photograph thus visually reproduces Iris and Laura's troubled but interdependent relationship, particularly in respect to Alex: as much as each sister would like to see her relationship to Alex in isolation, the presence of the other sister continually haunts her. The cropped photograph also features in both the prologue to Iris's novel (where we assume the figure depicted in it is Laura) and the epilogue (where we know the figure is actually Iris). Atwood, in other words, uses the photograph in a way that underscores the optical illusion-like qualities ofThe Blind Assassin, which we can read either as Laura's story or as Iris's. 

The photographis also a symbol of the fleeting nature of happiness. Images of paradise crop up repeatedly in The Blind Assassin, from the Planet Aa'A to Xanadu to Avilion. The picnic, however, with its apple tree and the image of a hand "creeping towards Alex…like an incandescent crab" (or snake), comes closest to the conventional depiction of the Garden of Eden (220). Ultimately, the novel suggests that this kind of untainted happiness cannot last, in part because it is incompatible with leading a full and meaningful life.

Entryways (or exits) of various kinds are a recurring motif in The Blind Assassin. Like water, they often represent moments or spaces of transition. Sakiel-Norn, for instance, has a symbolic stone slab at its center, which "open[s] without moving, and [swings] between life and death, between the flesh and the spirit" (27). A similar image appears in the novel's final chapter, entitled "the threshold"—a reference not only to Iris's fantasies about welcoming Sabrina into her house but also to her impending death. Gates and doorways also recall the boundaries of the human body and, in particular, the female body: the Goddess of the Five Moons, for instance, is the patron of both childbirth and "exits" (27). Generally speaking, these boundaries are constantly under threat for the novel's female characters: the Lord of the Underworld, for instance, is described as "clank[ing] into [the girl] like a ponderous iron key, turn[ing] himself in her flesh, wrench[ing] her open" (255).

On an even more abstract level, however, openings and passageways of different kinds serve as a metaphor for the ways we interact with one another. Iris, for instance, talks about language as a kind of "gateway" that allows us to engage (if only to a limited extent)with other people's perspectives: 

[w]here was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar—I say, you say, he and she say, it, on the other hand, does not say—paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we've agreed on (440).

In this sense, the novel itself is a kind of gateway, since itoffers us a window into Iris's mind and thoughts.

Hands appear throughout The Blind Assassin, often in connection to questions of fate. Because our hands are one of the main things we use to interact with the world around us, many idiomatic expressions about personal responsibility make use of them, and Atwood draws on these throughout her novel; Winifred, for instance, claims that "Richard's hands are absolutely clean" when Iris accuses her husband of raping Laura (505). 

More commonly, however, Atwood uses the hand motif to challenge our ideas about individual agency. The photograph of the picnic, for instance, features a hand that has been (visually) detached from its owner. Given that that owner is either Iris or Laura, the bodiless hand may symbolize the lack of control the Chase sisters have over their lives (partly as a result of their gender, and partly as a result of their family history). In fact, Iris frequently describes her writing process in similar terms, implying that she has only limited control even over how she presents her own story: "[s]ometimes it seems to me that it’s only my hand writing, not the rest of me; that my hand has taken on a life of its own, and will keep on going even if severed from the rest of me, like some embalmed, enchanted Egyptian fetish" (373).

Given how central the theme of history is toThe Blind Assassin, it is not surprising that heirlooms and mementos are such a prominent motif. In fact, Iris describes the novel-within-a-novel as itself a kind of memorial, "For Alex, but also for [her]self" (512). Even characters can become relics from an earlier era; Winifred, for instance, describes Callie as "a sort of family heirloom, like some old crock that gets passed down from hand to hand" (391).

Memory, however, is an ambiguous force in The Blind Assassin, and Atwood's treatment of memorials is correspondingly complex. Iris suggests that Reenie, for instance, would favor letting the past lie by destroying any documents that might cause a scandal: "[w]hy stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?" (286). Efforts to memorialize the past, meanwhile, inevitably say as much about the person doing the remembering as they do about the subject of the memories. This is particularly clear in Iris's descriptions of the two war memorials in Port Ticonderoga, which present competing visions of the nature of war.