The Plurality And Fluidity Of Female Identity

Margaret Atwood is a prestigious contemporary Canadian woman writer with international celebrity. Her works on the whole are concerned with women's condition of entrapment inside their bodies and social myths of femininity. Her tenth novel The Blind Assassin, the winner of the influential Booker Prize, through its embedded narrative structure, in the same vein examines the female identity and constructs a unique, complicated female protagonist, Iris. As a book written by and of woman and with scarce critical commentary, the systematic study of Iris as a construct of female complexity should be worthwhile.From the feminist perspective and with the help of psychoanalytical theories, this thesis is intended to probe, largely through textual analysis, into the complexity and multi-layers of the female identity of Iris, in order to find out the author's understanding of women. It will analyze the image of Iris evidenced in the three layers of the narrative, which form a rather complicated construction interwoven vertically and horizontally, In the process of analysis, the muted, perfect female image constructed in public memory is reversed, and the hidden dark side behind her flat facade, namely, a woman with villainy, is showcased. Based on theories of Freud and Atwood's own ideas of writing, it also examines Iris's hidden identity as a writer who, through writing, reveals her multiple identities and unites her split subjectivities meanwhile. By constructing a unique complicated female image that transcends the tradition and literary tenet, Atwood calls for a more humane reconsideration of the female—neither polarized in angel or monster nor confined in dull definition, but a pluralized and fluid entity.