1Joyce Carol Oates has often portrayed her female characters as victims of exploitation and abuse in a male-dominated society, thus raising controversy among feminist critics who blame her for the lack of strong female role models in her fiction. Yet, Oates’s stories feature a significant number of murderous women who have decided to take revenge on their oppressors. Examples include her 1993 novel Foxfire: Confession of a Girl Gang in which five teenage girls unite to work out a revenge for what men have inflicted on them, or her 2005 collection of short stories The Female of the Species in which each of the female protagonists turns out to be a dangerous murderer.
2This murderous woman is also featured in the short story “Assassin,” first published in a collection edited by Oates in 2009 entitled Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers. This chilling noir collection features women whose role is not limited to that of muse or sexual object as is the case in traditional male noir fiction (Cutting Edge 6). In her introduction, Oates refers to her own short story as “a surrealist incursion into the dark places of the (female) heart” (14), thus auguring a feminist crime tale which subverts the traditional plot and structure of crime fiction and triggers a reflection on the psychological effects of female oppression.
3“Assassin” is the confession of a murder by an elderly, unattractive woman, who is a resident of a psychiatric halfway house. The unreliable first-person narrator, in the line of Poe’s protagonists, recounts in great details how she methodically devises a plan to decapitate the Prime Minister, whom she considers the symbol of oppressive male power. Not only has she been “cheated of [her]destiny by reason of [her] sex (female)” (“Assassin” 227), but she has now become invisible to men who do not “see” her. To commit this murder, which she is convinced will allow her to “go down in history” and be respected, she uses her invisibility as an asset: it is precisely because she cannot be seen that she can easily approach the PM, cut off his head to take it with her, and dispose of it as she wishes. The paradox involved in being an invisible woman mirrors that of the female writer who suffers from a lack of recognition, but can also take advantage of this invisibility in the practice of her craft to free herself from gender stereotypes and articulate a feminist vision.
4To gain power over male oppression, the female protagonist in “Assassin” performs the masculine role of the killer, thus transgressing gender norms and challenging the dominant power. Yet, the surrealism that pervades the story and manifests itself through the grotesque portrayal of the protagonist and the parodic use of gothic elements invites the reader to interpret the murder as the product of the imagination of a deranged mind, which deprives the woman of all credibility and actual agency. The reader might then wonder if, by portraying a character so far removed from feminist ideals, Oates is not entrenching the stereotypical notions of women as victims by pathologizing female violence.
5The invisibility from which the narrator of “Assassin” suffers constitutes, paradoxically, her strength. Ralph Ellison’s narrator’s words perfectly fit her situation: “It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves” (3). Donning the uniform of her friend Priss Reent, the PM’s cleaning woman, she sneaks into the politician’s bedroom without arousing suspicion: “The assassin in the figure of a middle-aged cleaning woman, flush-faced and panting on the stairs, . . . who’d suspect?” (“Assassin” 229). She perfects her invisibility to better blend in and execute her macabre plan. Her position as invisible executioner mirrors that of the woman writer who, according to Oates, “may well become bodiless and invisible, defined to herself as what she thinks, dreams, plots, constructs” ((Woman) 22). For the woman writer, as for the female narrator, invisibility generates a form of empowerment, when it is no longer suffered, but consciously adopted. Although it may seem paradoxical to label a writer as prolific and celebrated as Oates as an “invisible writer,” she nevertheless cultivates a certain form of invisibility, distinguishing between Joyce Carol Oates, the visible woman who “exist[s] in time” and “continue[s] to age year by year” (Faith 154) and “‘JCO,’ the other,” the artist who inhabits her and enables her to free herself from gendered notions of identity. As an invisible writer, she enjoys total artistic freedom and thus, as Brenda Daly puts it “deliberately transgresses generic conventions in order to challenge implicit hierarchies of gender, race and class” (x). In “Assassin,” Oates uses the codes that govern the gothic genre and notably draws inspiration from Poe’s tales that she reshapes into a kind of feminist nightmare.
6“Assassin” inevitably evokes Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Both stories take the form of a confession in which the unnamed narrator tries to convince the reader that he/she is not mad. Both narrators admit that their mental health is questionable but strive to prove that their alleged madness is exaggerated. Oates’s narrator insists on “the sharpness of her intelligence” (“Assassin” 230), which allows her, not without pride, to tell how methodically and meticulously her crime is prepared and goes “exactly as planned” (230). Oates uses the same narrative techniques and rhetorical devices as Poe: the stream-of-consciousness style characterized by the large number of italics, dashes, exclamatory and interrogative sentences, and repetitions; the succession of short sentences, sometimes without subject or verb, which accelerate the rhythm and mimic the narrator’s agitation, especially at the beginning of the story; or conversely, at the time of the execution of the crime, the use of long sentences with a profusion of coordinating conjunctions that slow down the rhythm this time as if to prove that the narrator’s madness is not devoid of method.
7According to Brett Zimmerman, such stylistic features are “obvious signs of the madman’s frenzy” (20) and reinforce the idea that Poe’s narrator suffers from “paranoid schizophrenia” (342). The supporting evidence listed by Zimmerman equally applies to Oates’s narrator who also experiences auditory hallucinations, a common sign of the disease. Her constant repetition of the word “assassin,” “hissing in the radiator” (“Assassin” 228), echoes the “acute sense of hearing” of Poe’s narrator who claims to hear things “in the heaven,” “in the earth,” and “in hell” (“Tell-Tale” 303) and who imagines he can hear the beating of the old man’s heart. In both cases, the narrator, as Zimmerman puts it, “is obviously unaware that it is a mental aberration” (344). The use of the adverb in Oates’s sentence “You would be as surprised as I was how swiftly I moved on my swollen ankles” (“Assassin” 230), is reminiscent of several sentences uttered by Poe’s narrator such as “You should have seen how wisely I proceeded” (“Tell-Tale” 303) or “Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust [my head] in!” (303). These adverbs are part of what Zimmerman calls Poe’s “frantic forensic oratory” (34): the rhetorical device named “paradiastole” (39) consists in “putting [the narrator’s behaviour] in a positive light according to his twisted values and assuming that his audience would be persuaded to adopt these values also” (39). The allusions to “The Tell-Tale Heart” are numerous and often obvious in “Assassin,” as when, for example, there is a mention of the eye of the PM imploring the narrator: “The Head comprehended my plan, for the right eye was fixed upon me with alarm. Though luridly bloodshot that eye was sharp-focused. Don’t abandon me—it begged” (“Assassin” 233). “The Tell-Tale Heart” is thus undeniably an intertext for “Assassin,” even though Oates’s story does not constitute a true rewriting of the tale.
8Oates has repeatedly expressed her admiration for Poe and for “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in particular, as exemplified in her introductory note to the tale in The Oxford Book of American Short Stories: “‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is at the very core of Poe: unhampered by the writerly turgidity of certain of his other stories, utterly convincing in its pathology, and its obvious zest in his pathology. So much, so swiftly: this is genius” (67). While the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” eventually confesses his crime to the police, Oates’s protagonist in “Assassin” succeeds in committing the perfect murder. By writing her “gothic” story from a female murderer’s perspective, she frames the violent crime in the context of gender-power relations: the woman’s agency violates the traditional conception of femininity constructed as passive and weak and threatens the patriarchal order. The gendered roles are reversed: the unattractive, elderly woman, powerless and invisible, turns into a cunning powerful aggressor through her masculine gender performance whereas the Prime Minister, a powerful and charismatic politician, is subjected to the violence of the female narrator. By assigning her the traditionally male role of the killer, Oates deconstructs the relationship between masculinity and power and gives the woman the position of power. Empowerment is also manifested in the change of tone in the narrator’s voice. The one who only inspired her hatred is now at her mercy and becomes the object of her mockery: “‘Missing your hairpiece, are you, love?’—the wisecrack issued from my lips, unbidden” (“Assassin” 232). By calling him “love,” a word that can be used as a contemptuous way in addressing women, and by making fun of his physical appearance, she pushes the gender performance even further. The feminization of the PM shows in his victim status and his imposed passivity. After receiving a blow on the head, “he lay helpless on the floor” and “could put up little resistance” (231) when she severs his head. The man ceases to be the PM: he is objectified and becomes “the Head.” The supplications that he addresses to his aggressor and that are interspersed throughout the last part of the story (“Don’t abandon me, please! Your secret is safe with me—I will not tell what you’ve done” [234]) are very similar to those uttered by the victim in Oates’s abduction story “The Girl with the Blackened Eye”: “Don’t kill me please. I won’t tell anybody. I won’t tell anybody don’t kill me” (81). The blood that drips from the severed head, forcing the narrator to “wrap [it] in plastic to prevent the blood from soaking through” (“Assassin” 232), might evoke the menstrual blood, the abject bodily fluid that characterizes the female grotesque body as Bakhtin sees it. This inversion of gendered roles, just like the transgression of literary genres, may be viewed as Oates’s attempt to give women agency and engage in a liberating counter-discourse. Both the female writer and the female narrator, through their invisibility, question the traditional gendered performances, exposing, as Judith Butler does, gendered norms as constructs and thus changing the way readers of crime fiction perceive women.
9Although female murderers are not uncommon in Oates’s fiction, they are most often victims of gender-based aggression, particularly rape victims, who decide to resort to violent means and take revenge into their own hands. The narrator of “Assassin” does not fall into this category. There is nothing feminine about her. She suffers from not being seen and from no longer being the object of male gaze; she “moves through the world invisible” (“Assassin” 229). The first-person narrative begins with an account of the injustices she faces. She is detained in a “halfway house” after having been committed to a psychiatric hospital and “deemed not ready to return to normal life” (227). The frequent use of the passive voice emphasizes her status as a victim, as in the following example: “Waking open-mouthed and the inside of my mouth raw and festering from what had been done to it while I’d been made to sleep a drugged sleep in this terrible place” (226). The victimization is reinforced by the presence of the causative structure which denotes the idea of constraint and implies physical violation. In addition, the use of the pronoun “it” to designate her mouth conveys a sense of dehumanization. Dehumanization is also expressed through animal metaphors (“panting like a dog,” “like a rat in a maze” [226]). The description of her room, at the end of a “winding corridor,” “in a bloody attic” with a “low ceiling,” “a lumpy smelly mattress,” “a dreary dripping lavatory,” possesses the characteristics of a gothic setting and brings to mind the trope of the madwoman in the attic. The protagonist insists on her declining health: “Insult at my age. Pre-diabetic was the diagnosis. Hypertension” (226). The short sentences, of which the whole paragraph is made up, express her agitation, while also mirroring her shortness of breath. Each sentence is intended to arouse the reader’s indignation, as in this example: “And now the worst insult, to be assigned one of the fifth-floor dormer room where at fifty-three I am old enough to be the grandmother of most of the residents. And I am not a junkie, or a souse. I am not gaga like some. I am not a filthy slut” (227). The mention of her age, and the use of the word “grandmother” are intended to provoke empathy, while the accumulation of negative forms reinforces the feeling of injustice and the desire to distinguish herself from the other residents she calls “such crippled specimens of humanity” (227). However, the excessive complaints of the narrator, coupled with her mental instability, do not result in the expected indignation: no sympathy arises from the grotesque display of grievances, which only emphasizes her unreliability.
10Oates’s physical depiction of her protagonist is also highly grotesque. She is described as an overweight elderly woman with “bunions, varicose veins, swollen ankles” and “with breasts like balloons collapsed to her waist, fattish thighs and buttocks” (229). Oates’s portrayal presents “the exaggeration, hyperbolism [and] excessiveness,” that, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, “are generally considered fundamental attributes of the grotesque style” (303). The narrator’s abnormal and deformed body is reduced to a caricature and the underlying comic effect makes the reader uncomfortable. Her protruding body parts make her repugnant to the men who happen to look at her; it has lost its femininity, transforms itself, hypertrophies, or, as Bakhtin puts it “transgresses its own confines, ceases to be itself” (310). This degrading portrayal is also that of her childhood friend, Priss Reents, who resembles her like a twin sister. By including herself in the group of “short squat middle-aged women like Priss Reents/me” (“Assassin” 229), the narrator seems to have lost all social visibility; a feeling reinforced by the fact that she is never named, and that no mention is made of her past, nor of her family, or her profession.
11In voicing her frustration, the narrator denounces society’s tendency for being sexist and ageist, depriving women of their identity. Referring to her friend as her “twin sister,” she ironically points out the interchangeability of women in patriarchal society. Her ageing body affects the way men perceive her, making her feel discarded: “If a man does glance at you, if you are Priss Reents/me, his eyes are glazed with boredom. Not for an instant does he see” (230). As Jeannette King puts it in Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism, fittingly subtitled “The Invisible Woman,” in which she deplores the fact that older women are still too rarely integrated into feminist studies, “women’s bodies inevitably become invisible, if not objects of disgust, when they no longer perform the reproductive functions for which they were designed” (xiii). This idea is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s way of expressing Mrs Dalloway’s thoughts about ageing: “Often now this body she wore, . . . this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She has the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown” (9). Unlike her friend, Oates’s narrator suffers from her invisibility and experiences anger: “No one has glanced at us in decades. Not a man or a boy in memory. We are deserving of respect as any of you yet we do not receive your bloody respect so bloody hell with you” (“Assassin” 229). This anger will prompt her to commit murder as the repetition of the adjective “bloody” foreshadows. As King points out, “For a woman to express her anger has always been less acceptable and more dangerous than it is for a man, since the verbal and physical aggression this anger may give rise to have often been read as symptoms of instability, irrationality and hysteria, invalidating any legitimate cause for anger she may have” (53).
12Oates’s narrator holds men responsible for her ordeal and sees murder as a means of redemption, a way to obtain reparation on behalf of all invisible women and thus, to act “in the service of fairness and justice” (“Assassin” 228). Yet, despite the apparent seriousness with which she considers the “mission” that has been entrusted to her, she does not convince the reader for a second of the validity of her criminal act. Oates fills her narrative with comical elements, creating an impression of ludicrous horror that makes the murderer’s confession utterly grotesque. The first sentences of the story set the tone: “Assassin. Hissing sounds like snakes” (226). While the reader is immediately plunged into tragedy thanks to the alliteration, the poetic effect is immediately undermined by the sentence that follows: “First came to me through the steam radiator” (226). The same comic effect is achieved through incongruous comparisons (“What began in the hissing, in a dream, and spread out of the dream, like a potato sprouting roots in dank soil” [228]) or through the discrepancy between the horror of the act she is about to commit and the casual tone in which she expresses it (“Somehow it came to me that I would saw off the head of the arrogant bastard PM” [228]). By portraying such a grotesque character who both arouses pity and repulsion, laughter and horror, Oates emphasizes the suffering of this invisible woman and the anger and madness resulting from her loss of identity. The act of assassination is then the desperate act of a woman who finds no other solution to exist than to eliminate the origin of all her troubles. The comic element of the story can thus be seen as “that saving element” as Frances K. Barash puts it, as a “device to protest against terror and shield man [and woman] from the deep inner anguish of [their] humanity” (164).
13In the afterword of her 1982 collection of poems, Invisible Woman, Oates explains: “[T]he theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being—her ‘visibility’—figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive,’ while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow” (99). Many of Oates’s heroines take advantage of their femininity and potential attractiveness. Yet, the narrator of “Assassin” no longer has physical visibility. Like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, she is invisible simply because others do not see her and this suffered invisibility has become the image of a suppressed identity that leads her to resentment: “You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world . . . and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And alas, it’s seldom successful” (Ellison 4).
- 1 When the Head begs for her mercy and cries out “Kiss my lips! I love you please!” (“Assassin” 234), (...)
14By assassinating a man of power, she would not only achieve social visibility but also collective recognition, and even the status of a heroine. She would “go down in history like the Hebrew Judith in her triumph against Holofernes” (“Assassin” 228). The comparison is highly ironic: indeed, the biblical heroine who entered the pantheon of powerful female figures by beheading an Assyrian general to save Israel from oppression, used her beauty to seduce the tyrant. Oates takes the comparison further and makes some of the similarities between the two murders comical. While Judith “seized the man’s hair” and “struck twice upon his neck and cut off his head with a sword” (Kristeva 77) before placing the head in a bag and displaying it to her people, Oates’s narrator insists on the difficulty she has in cutting off the head with a kitchen knife: “To sever a (living) head from a (living) body is no easy task and it is very bloody and tiring as you might imagine” (“Assassin” 231). She then puts it in a bag and takes it away, but only to keep it for herself. When she later places the head on a platter, she recalls another biblical figure, Salome, who famously demanded the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Here, Oates once again revises the scene: her narrator adds “some moisture beneath [the Head], to keep it moist, as you would keep a succulent plant moist” (234).1 The contrast between the horror and disgust conveyed by the severed head and the mundane image of a plant, a mere decorative item, creates a sense of incongruity and absurdity that further distances her from the heroic status to which she aspires. Julia Kristeva tells the stories of these famous castrating women in The Severed Head. They are castrating in that they “do not hesitate to sacrifice . . . the capital organ” (79). Together with Judith and Salome, Kristeva also mentions Delilah who “is content with cutting Samson’s hair to deprive him of [his] strength. . . . A milder version of decapitation, this act of humiliation similarly harbors the torments and pleasure of castration as it anticipates murder” (80). Oates may also have had Samson’s story in mind when she describes the PM’s silvery hairpiece, an indispensable attribute from which he derives his power of seduction. In a fit of pity, but also to ridicule the man whose head has been freshly cut off, the narrator carefully replaces the missing hairpiece “for even in his decapitated state the PM was something of a lady’s man” (“Assassin” 232). Since decapitation is “a symbolic substitute for castration” (Kristeva 78), Oates’s narrator symbolically takes possession of the phallus and the power that it represents. Simultaneously, by depriving the PM of his head, “the symbol of the thinking living being” (4), as Kristeva puts it, she renders him powerless and invisible: “Being headless a body is not of much interest and interchangeable with others of its sex, it seems to me” (“Assassin” 233).
15These comic allusions to biblical heroines and decapitation, with its highly symbolic significance, allow Oates to approach murder with the detachment possessed most particularly by the woman writer who, according to Kristeva, “is always somewhat a stranger to phallic ordeals”; a strangeness that “allows a woman to look coldly at the small details of a mutilation or an execution” (117). Moreover, imagining a murder and putting it into words, particularly if it involves a decapitation, Kristeva explains, “appears to be a reversal of the expression of suffering: a kind of cathartic elaboration, not through erotic displacement, but through detailed observation of the logic and economy of the violence itself” (118). This detachment applies to Oates, who has often been criticized for dealing with the most brutal and graphic violence in her work. In response to her detractors, who implied that violence was more of a “masculine” subject, Oates argued in an essay entitled “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” that serious writers, whether male or female, “take for their natural subjects the complexity of the world, its evils as well as its goods”; “My writing,” she goes on, “deals most of the time with the phenomenon of violence and its aftermath, in ways not unlike those of Greek dramatists” (35). The idea of a catharsis is thus implied and explains, in part, the attraction of readers to Oates’s work. The act of writing is just as liberating for the female writer since “a woman should acknowledge her hurt, her anger, and her hope of ‘justice’; even a hope for revenge might be a good thing, in her work if not in her life” (Faith 27).
- 2 The expression is used by Oates in The Faith of a Writer: “Dreams may be temporary flights into mad (...)
16Oates’s grotesque and even detestable protagonist clearly does not provide female readers with the potential for identification that is usually found in feminist fiction. Not only is her revenge unmotivated, but she does not hesitate to drug her only friend to steal her cleaning lady’s uniform in order to murder a man she does not know for the sole purpose of satisfying her need for recognition and her dreams of glory. These elements tend to call into question the nature of her empowerment and cast doubt on Oates’s feminist intent. In this respect, she is reminiscent of the female character in “The White Cat,” Oates’s parody of Poe’s “The Black Cat,” who is presented as “capricious, selfish and even adulterous” (Nadal 463), and manages to triumph and take her revenge on her husband. According to Marita Nadal, “The White Cat” points out Oates’s “adoption of a pseudo-feminist, vindicative and playful role” (470) and evokes “the distortions of the mock-feminist tale” (471).
17Moreover, because the narrator of “Assassin” is immediately labeled as insane, her extreme violence seems to be the result of a pathological condition, which consequently deprives her all the more of any form of agency. This idea is supported by her being presented as the instrument of a higher authority, the executor of a quasi-divine plan for which she has been chosen: “And I would wonder if they had sought out others as the assassin in this case, and these others had proved inferior, and so they had settled upon me with the knowledge that I would not disappoint” (“Assassin” 230). The absence of a referent for the pronoun “they” suggests her belief in a conspiracy and further confirms her madness. “They” could also metatextually refer to the author, Oates, who pulls the strings and manipulates the heroine, robbing her of her agency.
18Oates, the invisible (woman) writer, has been experimenting with a broad range of literary conventions since the beginning of her career: “Each angle of vision, each voice,” she explains, “yields . . . a separate writer-self, an alternative Joyce Carol Oates” (“Stories” 1). “Assassin” can thus be seen as an experiment in which she deliberately adopts the same writing methods as Poe, notably those of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Just like Poe, she “puts various rhetorical figures of speech and thoughts, and argumentative appeals into [her] narrator’s [mouth] then sits back with [her] perceptive readers to watch the narrator fall short in [her] attempt at persuasion” (Zimmerman 28). Yet, even though “Assassin” displays all the characteristics of Poe’s grotesque, Oates adds an obvious parodic dimension to it that represents, according to Daly, “a strategy for resisting the Law of the Father, including the laws governing genres” (xiii). The parodic quality of the story provides, as Nadal puts it “the additional distortion that subverts Poe’s formula—here the fearful turns into the comic rather than the horrible” (470). Thus, Oates seems to present the readers with the comic portrayal of a grotesque and pathetic woman, trapped in one of Poe’s tales, a female version of Poe’s unreliable narrators, manipulated by the author, whose dream of challenging the patriarchal order is subjected to ridicule.
19If we admit, as Gita Rajan does in her “Feminist Rereading of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’” that Poe’s narrator could well be a woman since Poe uses no gender markings to prove the contrary, then his tale would already represent a critique of male domination over women. Yet, whereas Poe’s narrator wants to rid herself of the male gaze, “feeling abused and objectified by his paternal surveillance” (Rajan 295), Oates’s narrator wants above all to be seen. Poe’s female narrator fails: under the gaze of the male policemen, she becomes once again the weak, passive victim, obliged to submit to the law of men; she resigns herself to the idea that “patriarchal morality condemns a woman for being aggressive, for desiring power, and ultimately punishes her for achieving this power, even temporarily” (297). Oates’s narrator is pathetic in that she mistakenly believes she has succeeded. Admittedly, she does not confess her crime or get arrested (she thinks she is “too smart for that” [“Assassin” 141]), but she does take the man’s severed head with her in the hope of forcing it to look at her. While Poe’s narrator’s auditory hallucinations lead her to recognize her crime (the old man’s heartbeat representing her own guilty conscience), those of Oates’s narrator push her further into her delusion: she believes she can hear the Head begging “Please have pity on me. Please love me. Don’t bury me” (234). These words might refer to the narrator herself—an unattractive, invisible woman confined (“buried”) in a psychiatric hospital—as Oates suggests in the following sentence: “The Head most feared being buried alive. I took pity on the Head, for I could understand how it felt in such circumstances” (234). In both stories, the female narrator’s discourse “becomes a painful tool of signifying and defining herself within the confines of patriarchy” (Rajan 300).
- 3 Original text: “Si l’homme a besoin de raconter toute son histoire à un auditeur qui le croit fou, (...)
20The surrealism that pervades Oates’s story and culminates in the last part blurs the boundaries between dream and reality. For instance, when the narrator takes the Head to a remote location “down behind a boardwalk by the beach, in an area of the beach that is no longer much frequented” (“Assassin” 233), she expresses her attachment for the Head in what reads like a parody of Poe’s narrator’s love for his beautiful dead bride in the poem “Annabel Lee”: it becomes “a familiar presence. Like a husband of many years” (234). The absurdity of the story reaches its climax when the narrator, in the last lines of the story, loudly proclaims her triumph by addressing the severed head: “Fact is I am just sitting here having a rest, and I am thinking, and when I am finished thinking I will know more clearly what to do, and I am not taking bloody orders from you, my man, or from any man ever again” (234). The irony comes from the repetition of the pronoun “I” through which she asserts her total agency and the polysyndeton that adds weight and power to her words, when the readers are perfectly aware that they are dealing with an unreliable narrator who has probably invented the whole story she confesses. As Henri Justin points out in his analysis of “The Tell-Tale Heart”: “If the man needs to tell his whole story to a listener who thinks he is mad, it is probably because nothing has happened. There was nothing to see. The text has always been language, first in the dream, then in the narrative” (282).3 If nothing has happened, the story is just a temporary dream of empowerment, or as Wayne Stengel puts it, “a nightmare of feminine consciousness” in which the woman’s triumph only exists in her imagination. Ridding herself of men is only a desperate attempt for Oates’s protagonist to regain her visibility; an attempt doomed to failure but which has the merit of opening readers’ eyes to women’s enduring struggle for self-realization. Through the underlying irony of her confession, she subtly expresses her view on discrimination against women. It is from this perspective that Oates manages to take a feminist standpoint. The protagonist’s plight also echoes the female writer’s struggle to achieve the same visibility as her male counterparts. Through its parodic dimension, Oates’s short story—to borrow Linda Hutcheon’s words—“signals its dependence by its use of male canon, but reveals its rebellion through its ironic abuse of it” (130).
- 4 Oates reprinted this short story two years later in a collection entitled The (Other) You. In most (...)
21By confessing her murder, albeit imaginary, the narrator of “Assassin” immerses the reader in an alternate reality4 where an invisible woman, a victim of male oppression, is capable of redressing the power balance. It is by putting words on the suffering she undergoes that she can raise awareness, in the same way as Ellison’s narrator: “Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through” (581). Oates allows her narrator to articulate her story of a perfect crime in gruesome and grotesque detail in order to exorcize violence and give it, as Kristeva puts it, “a fantastic visibility completely woven from the uncertainties and polyvalence of language” (118). If the invisible narrator does not represent, strictly speaking, a feminist role model, Oates’s story nevertheless contributes to the feminist discourse by deconstructing conventional views of women and questioning their agency. Imagining a murder, and especially an act as symbolic as a decapitation, and writing it out, is, according to Kristeva, a liberating act, a “rebirth,” and allows crime fiction to be seen as an “optimistic genre” (120).