Generations of Canadian Women Alone Together in Margaret Atwood's the Blind Assassin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In The Blind Assassin (NY: Anchor Books, 2004), Margaret Atwood tells the story of five generations of Canadian women who find alternatives to the oppressive rules imposed by their husbands and fathers. Constrained by a patriarchal mentality, which reduces women to mere puppets, Atwood's protagonists imitate patriarchal discourses and submit themselves to patriarchal laws to expose the contestable nature of these laws. Their parody of masculine models results as an effect of the strong relationships with the other women in their family. It is through these connections among women that female characters are successful at subverting patriarchal models. When Iris looks at her grandparents' portrait taken shortly after their wedding, she sees the tension and discomfort of their marriage. Although she never meets her grandmother, Iris understands the difficulties of arranged marriages and the status of her grandmother as hostess, household manager, and obedient wife with no money of her own (60). While assuming the patriarchal role of the submissive wife, grandmother Adelia found an outlet in architecture, interior design, and art. She decorates the house in an artistic fashion and expresses her individuality. Not only are her sculptures, decorations, and poems on Christmas cards Adelia's means of self-expression, but they also mediate her communication with future generations. Although their grandmother dies before they were born, Iris and Laura are the products of her silent but decisive education and are modeled after their grandmother's taste and subtle messages about marriage. The marble Medusa over the fireplace suggests a dangerous femininity that can disturb patriarchal structures. Iris's narrative about her parents' marriage portrays her mother, Liliana, as submissive, silent, and blind to her husband's infidelities. Yet Liliana's moment of affirmation as a married woman occurs during her husband's absence when she unofficially takes over the family business. While she allows the patriarch of the house, her father-in-law, to believe in his sovereignty, she turns the situation into her advantage. Liliana makes decisions in Norval's name and under his signature and exposes the patriarchal original as contestable. Iris and Laura being taught to conform and strive to become proper ladies translates both into well-behaved and submissive future wives. Mr. Erskine, a rigid tutor and a pedophile, teaches them lessons about the ruling power of patriarchy. His lessons include: Virgil's Aeneid (in which Dido, betrayed by Aeneas and encouraged by Iris, kills herself), sexual episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the life of Phaedra (the daughter of Pasiphae and wife of Theseus who killed herself after accusing her stepson Hippolytus of rape), and stories about the rape of Europa by a bull, of Leda by a swan, and of Danae by a shower of gold. Despite his teachings of patriarchal paradigms, his beatings, and his sexual abuse, the girls eventually find a way to subvert his methods: What we really learned from him was how to cheat (164). Laura and Iris copy flawless Latin translations from books, insert a few mistakes, and turn in decent homework. They also learn how to conceal their forgeries by mastering the art of mimicry and manipulation of emotions. While they mime the patriarchal model imposed by Mr. Erskine, the two sisters demonstrate its questionable effectiveness. After Iris's arranged marriage with the wealthy industrialist, Richard Griffen, the sisters' relationship changes but does not diminish in intensity. Although both Iris and Laura mime patriarchal models and deconstruct them, they do so separately. While Iris perturbs the patriarchal sacrament of marriage with an extramarital affair, Laura is perturbed by Richard's adulterous and perverse inclinations. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".