The Power of Landscape: Place, Memory, and Identity in The Blind Assassin

Abstract

In Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Iris Chase dredges up her long memory, mostly suppressed and hidden, in order to compete against various versions of memory about who she is and consequently to find her own place. Atwood addresses the tricky connection between time and place, which plays a very significant role in inventing, maintaining, contesting, or deleting memory. Since the sense of place results from social and cultural constructions, a place is ridden with layers of meaning as time elapses and as ways of seeing the place vary. The interplay between place and memory therefore produces manipulative discourses that shatter one’s self-identity and sense of belonging. In addition to a general introduction, the paper consists of three sections. “Landscape, Place, and Memory” introduces current theories on human geography in terms of space, place, and memory. “Whose Memory ? Whose Memorial ?” deals with Atwood’s questions about the meaning of memory and self in flux. “Transgression and Exclusion” illustrates how manipulative strategies are used to exclude transgressors so as to define and safeguard the “appropriateness” of place. The paper concludes that Iris eventually constructs her self-narrative by denying the arbitrary and “authoritative” sense of place.