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Adelia Montfort Chase
Benjamin is Iris and Laura’s paternal grandfather; Adelia’s husband; and Norval, Percival, and Edgar’s father. The descendant of Puritan immigrants to Pennsylvania, Benjamin opens a button factory in the 1870s and soon grows wealthy as a result. He is a rather simple man who marries Adelia for her class status and good taste. Benjamin is horrified when Percival and Edgar are killed in World War I and he suffers a stroke around the time he learns of their deaths.
Benjamin Chase Quotes in The Blind Assassin
The The Blind Assassin quotes below are all either spoken by Benjamin Chase or refer to Benjamin 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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Benjamin Chase Character Timeline in The Blind Assassin
The timeline below shows where the character Benjamin Chase appears in The Blind Assassin. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3
...a few flowers left by 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...
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...was instead a pleasant and even “enchanting” place. There is a photo of Iris’s grandfather Benjamin from 1901, then her father Norval, standing next to a World War I memorial. There...
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Iris’s grandfather Benjamin built the button factory in the early 1870s. At the time, there was a surge...
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...is the version of the story printed in The Chase Industries: A History, a book Benjamin himself commissioned in 1903. Sitting on a bench eating her cookie, Iris feels dizzy and...
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Benjamin is 40 when he marries Adelia; he hopes to benefit from her refined taste. Avilion...
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After Benjamin and Adelia are married, they have three sons: Norval is the eldest, followed by Edgar...
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...business; Norval dreams of working in law and then politics. This likely causes tension between Benjamin and the boys.
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...where they spend a leisurely period playing cricket, apparently desperate to join the real action. Benjamin, whose business profits greatly from the war, nonetheless remains gripped by fear about the fate...
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...in 1916. Within a month, both Percival and Edgar are killed in France. In August, Benjamin has a stroke that damages his speech and memory, and Liliana becomes his “interpreter,” claiming...
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Chapter 11
...Laura left a message for her before being institutionalized. Suddenly, she remembers finding Laura in Benjamin’s study at the age of about 10 or 11, cutting out the passages of the...
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