Home and Nation in Margaret Atwood’s Later Fiction

Abstract

My opening phrase, taken from The Blind Assassin is, in its turn, a wellknown quotation from The Wizard of Oz. In Atwood’s novel, it relates to an episode from the Chase sisters’ adolescence, where it is irreverent, odd, loony Laura who rewrites the sentence she heard many times from Reenie, the family housekeeper, whose language floods over with common sense, folk sayings, and popular wisdom. Laura’s rewriting of “There’s no place like home” – a stupid statement in her opinion – goes like this: “She wrote it out as an equation. No place = home. Therefore, home = no place. Therefore home does not exist.”1 The Blind Assassin destabilizes received notions of home, with their conventional meanings of comfort, security, and custom. The Chase family estate – Avilion – acts as a refuge for the whole family; it functions as a bastion to keep the world outside at bay. In this novel, however, homes are also represented as provisional; they are unstable entities, like the patrimony of the Chase family. The sense of security, stability, and reassurance that Avilion has provided for Iris and Laura crumbles at one point in the narrative. Such a precarious figuration of home parallels the representation of nation and issues of national identity. Contemporary Canada, seen through Iris’s eyes, appears, much to her astonishment, an odd assortment, a multicultural mosaic of ethnicities and languages with an elusive identity, which for people of Iris’s generation and background comes very much as a surprise. Crucial also in this novel is the presence of an outsider, here embodied by Laura.2 Iris’s condition, on the other hand, is one of a beleaguered present and an excruciatingly painful past; her tale is one of place and displacement, constantly shifting between a now and a then. This tale underscores her dislocation and her dream of an elsewhere (both as a young and as an old woman). Over the past ten years Atwood has argued against the importance commonly attributed to national identity for writers in postcolonial contexts,