CHAPTER X

THE BLIND ASSASSIN: THE END OF FEMINISM?

The Blind Assassin functions self-consciously as a milestone in Atwood’s canon; her tenth novel, it appeared in 2000, when Atwood was sixty-years old. It was the novel for which she finally won the Man Booker Prize, after having previously been nominated for The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, and Alias Grace. Her eventual success in 2000 might be considered as acknowledgement of previous contributions as much as of this particular achievement. In the same year, Atwood was to be the subject of a collaborative retrospective, written on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday. Nischik’s Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact purports to “take stock of the full breadth of … one of the most important literary chroniclers of our time”.1 The tenth novel, bearing some resemblance in this respect to Cat’s Eye, is equally conscious of the passing of time and the construction of celebrity. The Blind Assassin is concerned with the manner in which events are lived, encoded in myth and legend, and passed down to a future generation. It involves a dual aspect: a looking to the future and also a looking to the past. In encapsulating the whole of the twentieth century, the retrospective aspect of the novel implicitly raises questions about the future. The future, it is suggested, must learn from the past, but can only hope to do so if the past is viewed honestly, without nostalgia or bitterness. When the ageing protagonist Iris concludes her narrative, she instructs her granddaughter Sabrina, who is the tale’s absent auditor: “Don’t prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.”2 Remembrance, monuments, and recollection season the text, which provides a ready platform from which to survey Atwood’s development over thirty years of novel writing.

1 Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact, ed. Reingard M. Nischik, New York, 2000, 1. 2 Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, London, 2000, 637. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. 252 Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction

The turn of the new millennium also functioned as a watershed moment for the feminist movement. The millennium provided the clearest demarcation of the much-debated subsidence of the second wave of feminism and subsequent rise of the third. Reference was first made to the third wave in the mid-1980s, and the term was frequently conflated with another new label, “postfeminism”. Elizabeth Wright highlights the opposing perceptions of this apparently synonymous concept. Seen positively, postfeminism is “continuously in process, transforming and changing itself”,3 and should be considered as a critical advance on earlier feminist discourses. Alternatively, postfeminism can appear anti-feminist, a view that “assumes that feminism is being sabotaged by the ‘post’, which indicates that feminism can now be dispensed with, at least in the form of making a special plea for the subjectivity of the feminine subject”.4 A generation of feminists who had conceived of and developed the feminist renaissance of the 1970s was to see their work dismissed as repressive, essentialist, and elitist by certain younger women. Rene Denfeld’s 1995 text, The New Victorians, argues this point:

The fact is that feminism has changed – dramatically. While there are some feminists still in touch with most women’s concerns, the movement for the most part has taken a radical change in direction. It has become bogged down in an extremist moral and spiritual crusade that has little to do with women’s lives. It has climbed out on a limb of academic theory that is all but inaccessible to the uninitiated.5

The subtitle of Denfeld’s book, “A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order”, points to the common conceptualisation of the history of feminism into waves, generations, and successive orders which inevitably results in the construction of a matrilineage of ideology. As this lineage progresses, each generation passes judgement on those who went before. Atwood’s tenth novel is grounded in this theme, and works to expose the compulsion to both demonise and deify one’s predecessors. Written on the cusp of the third wave, The Blind Assassin

3 Wright, Lacan and Postfeminism, 5. 4 Ibid., 8. 5 Rene Denfeld, The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order, New York, 1995, 5.