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Liliana Chase
Adelia is Iris and Laura’s paternal grandmother; Benjamin’s wife; and Norval, Percival, and Edgar’s mother. Born into a genteel French-English Montreal family, Adelia marries Benjamin in order to save her own family’s declining financial fortunes. She is a woman of lofty tastes and ambitions who dreams of a glamorous life of adventure, travel, and culture. However, these ambitions are curtailed by her much simpler-minded husband who prefers to stay in Port Ticonderoga and watch over his prosperous button factory. Adelia is known for her good taste; she’s the person who oversees the construction of Avilion, the family estate. Although Adelia dies of cancer in 1913, three years before Iris is born, Iris feels that she grows up in her grandmother’s shadow and she feels pressured to live up to the ideal of proper womanhood that Adelia believed in so passionately.
Adelia Montfort Chase Quotes in The Blind Assassin
The The Blind Assassin quotes below are all either spoken by Adelia Montfort Chase or refer to Adelia Montfort Chase . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3 Quotes
She wasn’t married, she was married off, said Reenie, rolling out the gingersnaps. The family arranged it. That’s what was done in such families, and who’s to say it was any worse or better than choosing for yourself? In any case, Adelia Montfort did her duty, and lucky to have the chance, as she was getting long in the tooth—she must have been twenty-three, which was counted as over the hill in those days.
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When I was the age for it—thirteen, fourteen—I used to romanticize Adelia. I would gaze out of my window at night, over the lawns and the moon-silvered beds of ornamentals, and see her trailing wistfully through the grounds in a white lace tea gown. I gave her a languorous, world-weary, faintly mocking smile. Soon I added a lover. She would meet this lover outside the conservatory, which by that time was neglected—my father had no interested in steam-heated orange trees—but I restored it in my mind, and it supplied it with hothouse flowers […]
In reality the chances of Adelia having had a lover were nil. The town was too small, its morals too provincial, she had too far to fall. She wasn’t a fool. Also she had no money of her own.
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And so Laura and I were brought up by her. We grew up inside her house; that is to say, inside her conception of herself. And inside her conception of who we ought to be, but weren’t. As she was dead by then, we couldn’t argue.
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Adelia Montfort Chase Character Timeline in The Blind Assassin
The timeline below shows where the character Adelia Montfort Chase appears in The Blind Assassin. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3
...Laura’s fans. Iris reads the names of those buried there: Benjamin Chase and his wife Adelia; Norval Chase and his wife Liliana; two young men, Edgar and Percival; and Laura. Last...
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Iris’s grandmother Adelia, who died before Iris was born, oversaw the design and construction of Avilion. Adelia was...
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Benjamin is 40 when he marries Adelia; he hopes to benefit from her refined taste. Avilion is finished in 1889 and is...
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After Benjamin and Adelia are married, they have three sons: Norval is the eldest, followed by Edgar and Percival....
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Adelia dies of cancer in 1913. During the last month of Adelia’s life, Reenie (who is...
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...Because Liliana was Methodist and Norval was Anglican, Liliana was beneath Norval’s social class. If Adelia had been alive, she probably would have prevented the marriage from happening.
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...they’d even starred together as Ferdinand and Miranda in a production of The Tempest that Adelia put on in the Avilion garden. Norval could have married a richer or more genteel...
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Chapter 5
...the Town Hall, which is adorned with two statues. One of them was commissioned by Adelia to memorialize the American colonel who named Port Ticonderoga, and the other was a “mythic...
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...Miss Violence likes reading romantic novels that she borrows from the library and looking through Adelia’s scrapbooks. Iris and Laura grow to like her. When she leaves, she cries, but the...
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...ends. Reenie reads Mayfair magazine, dreaming of Avilion’s former genteel glory. Iris knows that if Adelia were still alive, she would have a host of helpful advice for her.
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...preparation, Reenie consults a cookbook called The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, which had once belonged to Adelia. It begins with an epigraph by John Ruskin, which characterizes women across history and geography...
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...indicates that she wants to shape Iris into a new kind of person. She mentions Adelia and how the Montfort women were known for their wonderful style. Winifred insists that with...
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