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Summary: The presentation

The narrative shifts to Iris narrating in the first person, in the present day, when she is an elderly woman. She gets ready to attend a graduation ceremony at the local school. Walter drives her—he is the partner of Myra, a woman who helps Iris with day to day tasks. Iris reflects that, while no one speaks openly about it, Laura has become a larger-than-life figure because her death is widely assumed to have been a suicide. Laura’s novel, published posthumously, garnered attention because of the mystery surrounding her death and because the book was sexually explicit. Most people assume that the novel revealed that Laura had herself been involved in an affair. Iris assists in awarding a prize commemorating her sister’s memory to a young graduate.

Summary: The silver box

Iris has been diagnosed with a heart condition and doesn’t have much longer to live. Her doctor has recommended that she start taking regular walks, which she reluctantly does. Iris has also started to write a record of her life. Iris’s walks through the small town where she lives give her the chance to reflect on the changes she has seen over her lifetime. On her walks, Iris sometimes visits the graveyard where Laura’s ashes are scattered and where other Chase family members are buried. the Chase family are buried. In her recollections, Iris often references Reenie, who played a significant role in her childhood. Richard and Aimee, Iris’s husband and daughter, are buried in a different graveyard. Iris’s recollections of Winifred imply that the two women did not have a good relationship. Iris’s granddaughter, Sabrina, was raised by Winifred after Aimee’s death, and as a result, Iris and Sabrina are not close.

Summary: The Button Factory

During the summer months, Iris continues her walks, providing more information about the town in which she lives. Port Ticonderoga is a small Ontario town located at the junction of two rivers. The town’s economy was once driven by a button factory, established in the 1870s. It has long since closed, and after being abandoned for decades, has now been converted into a courtyard and boutiques. Iris’s grandfather, Benjamin Chase, founded the button factory, and as a result, her family was wealthy and socially important. Now, Iris lives alone, and although she struggles to be independent, she relies on help from Myra, who runs a small gift shop in the town.

Summary: Avilion

Iris continues to recount the history of the Chase family and Port Ticonderoga. She and Laura grow up in a large mansion, which is later converted into a home for the elderly. The house, known as Avilion, is built and decorated under the supervision of Iris and Laura’s grandmother, Adelia Montfort Chase, who came from a wealthy Montreal family. Benjamin Chase marries as a middle-aged man, having made a fortune and wanting someone to help cement the family’s reputation in high society. Adelia and Benjamin have three sons: Norval (Iris and Laura’s father), Edgar, and Percival. Adelia dies of cancer in 1913. At this time, Reenie’s mother begins working for the Chase family, and Reenie also starts to spend a lot of time at Avilion. After Adelia’s death, Benjamin’s relationship with his sons becomes more distant. All three boys have been well-educated and dream of more glamorous lives than staying in a small town and managing factories.

Summary: The trousseau

Iris reflects that her knowledge of the Chase family history comes from Reenie, who spent almost her entire life in close proximity to the family working as a nursemaid and housekeeper. In 1914, Norval marries Liliana, Iris and Laura’s mother. She is a serious young woman who, although from a good family, is not wealthy or glamorous. World War I begins almost immediately after the wedding, and all three Chase sons enlist and depart for Barbados. The war is initially good for business, and Liliana moves into Avilion where she keeps house for Benjamin. In August 1915, Norval’s regiment is stationed in Halifax before being deployed to France. Liliana visits her husband there, and this is when Iris is conceived. Iris is born in June 1916, and her two uncles are killed in battle within months of each other. Reeling with grief, Benjamin suffers a stroke. Liliana is parachuted into both motherhood and a significant role in running the Chase factories.

Summary: The gramophone

In 1918, the war ends, and Norval returns to Port Ticonderoga, scarred by both physical injuries and psychological trauma. Norval begins to drink heavily and have affairs with other women, straining his marriage to Liliana. Iris grows up amidst this tense and emotionally strained atmosphere. Laura is born in November 1919.

Summary: Bread day

Laura’s birth is difficult, and Liliana never fully recovers her health. Iris recalls her earliest memories of her sister, and how she adapted her behavior as a young child in response to her mother’s ill health. When Laura is six and Iris is nine, their mother is pregnant again (although the girls are too young to understand this at the time) and seems to be suffering ill health as a result. One day, while Liliana and Reenie are baking bread in the kitchen and the girls are playing at their feet, Liliana collapses and begins to bleed. She suffers a miscarriage, and Laura and Iris look at the body of the stillborn baby in secret. Five days later, Liliana dies due to complications from the miscarriage. Before she dies, she urges Iris to be a good sister to Laura.

Summary: Black ribbons

The day after their mother’s funeral, Laura and Iris are sent to play in the garden. Iris becomes annoyed by how calmly Laura is accepting their mother’s death and hurts her sister by pushing her.

Summary: The soda

About a month after her mother’s death, Iris’s father unexpectedly takes her into town with him. While having lunch at a diner, Norval instructs Iris to take care of Laura. He also begins to educate Iris about economics and how the factory works.

Analysis: Part III

In this section, Iris clarifies the connection between Laura’s life and her literary legacy. People seem to love Laura’s novel, but they also feel an intense personal connection to her. Because Laura died so young and many details of her life remain mysterious, she has become a kind of blank slate onto which her readers and fans can project their own fantasies and theories. As Iris observes, Laura’s life now retrospectively seems like it could also be the plot of a novel. If she truly did have a secret affair and then die under mysterious circumstances, these are tantalizing details for people to speculate about even decades after her death. The assumption that Laura’s biography has to mirror the events of the novel is revealing of social assumptions about women. Because Laura’s novel offers a fairly direct representation of sexuality, readers and scholars assume that she must have had some sort of sexual experience herself. This assumption challenges the expectations around what the life of an unmarried upper-class young woman would have looked like in the 1930s and 1940s. However, because Laura is a character within a novel while simultaneously being a novelist, Atwood can draw attention to these types of biographical interpretations. As readers will see when Iris is revealed to be the true author, the most obvious interpretation of a story or an event is not always the correct one.

While the nature of Iris’s relationship with her sister remains obscure, this section clarifies some of Iris’s personality and relationships with other characters. Iris seems to live a fairly lonely and isolated life and spends much of her time alone with her own memories of the past. While Myra and Walter are kind and generous in the help they offer, Iris is not always particularly gracious in the way she treats them. Some of Iris’s prickly personality might be attributed to old age and poor health. When her doctor tells her that she likely does not have long to live, Iris does not even have anyone to share this news with. On the surface, very little changes about her life. However, the fact that Iris does follow the doctor’s recommendation to take long walks even though she does not enjoy doing so indicates that she does have some desire to remain alive for as long as possible. It will eventually become clear that Iris responds to the news of her impending death by choosing to finally tell her full story, and her walks signal that she wants to give herself enough time to bring this story to light.

In order to tell the story of her own life, Iris chooses to begin with the generations who lived and died before she was even born. By beginning with the story of her grandparents, Iris implies that she sees the events of her own life to be interconnected with things that happened decades before her birth. While her life is an outcome of some of the choices she made, there are also events which were set in motion and informed a fate she could not have changed. This multigenerational narrative allows Atwood to engage with ideas of generational trauma and family legacy. Readers already know that Iris will suffer many losses in her life, and the depiction of her as an elderly woman indicates that her life has not unfolded in a particularly happy way. By describing the experiences of Iris’s parents and grandparents, Atwood invites readers to reflect on how their traumas may have already made some of Iris’s own suffering inevitable. This notion of intergenerational trauma is particularly relevant given that Iris’s daughter also died a young and tragic death.

Previous generations of the Chase family suffered a great deal of tragedy and loss, which is often exhibited in gendered ways. For the two patriarchs of the family, Benjamin and Norval, their fears and griefs center on the idea of passing down their legacies and ensuring the family name lives on. Benjamin confronts the loss of his legacy twice: first when his sons’ educations make them aspire to ambitions beyond the family business, and second when all but one of his sons are killed in World War I. Norval is able to keep the Chase family name afloat, but his legacy threatens to die out when he is left with no sons and only two daughters. Women are expected to marry and take on their husband’s name, and without sons, the Chase name will eventually die out. Although Norval tries to treat Iris as a kind of surrogate son and introduces her to running the family business, it is eventually Laura who keeps the Chase family name alive for generations because of the novel she publishes. This subverts the notion that legacy lives through a male’s family name.

For the women in the Chase family, Adelia and Liliana, tragedy and trauma are associated with a lack of outlets for their ambitions and dangers associated with fertility and childbearing. Adelia is interested in art and beauty while Liliana is interested in helping others and making the world a better place, but both women are restricted in the extent to which they can pursue what matters to them. They are mostly forced to devote their time and energy to maintaining social appearances and caring for their families. Even their roles as mothers prove threatening since Adelia dies of a cancer associated with her reproductive organs, and Liliana dies due to complications from a miscarriage. Laura and Iris grow up in a world where the expectations for them as upper-class women are clear: they are supposed to marry wealthy and well-connected men and bear children for them. However, as a result of the unhappy marriage they witness between their parents and the suffering they see their mother experience as she tries to meet Norval’s desires for a son, Iris and Laura are exposed early in their life to the traumas that accompany conventional womanhood.


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