The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin is Atwood’s Gothic version of Canadian history in the twentieth century, told by an eighty-two-year old woman, Mrs Iris Chase Griffen, who dies of a heart attack in 1999 just as she finishes writing her memoir, which she leaves in a locked steamer trunk in her kitchen as a legacy for her granddaughter who is away travelling in India. With its shifting boundaries between subjective and objective representations of reality and its duplicitous mixture of fact and fiction, Iris’s autobiographical narrative is a memorial to the end of an era as it offers a retrospective view of some of the key national and international events of the past century and of Canada’s changing social and political ideologies, though it is also the memoir of a survivor, an old woman haunted by ghosts for whom life writing becomes a kind of ghost writing in her prolonged negotiations with the dead. In this novel Atwood leads her female protagonist further into the Gothic maze than ever before as like a spider Iris spins out the black thread of her handwriting, weaving her devious way between the present and the past where ‘dead people persist in the minds of the living’.2