Engendering Metafiction: Textuality and Closure in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

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In the five years since Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace (1996) appeared, a number of readers have been attracted to the implications of the quilting trope. Each of the novel's fifteen parts takes its name from a traditional pattern in quilt making. It becomes clear, as Margaret Rogerson has noted, that Atwood offers a linear equivalent to the spatial arrangement of blocks in a quilting pattern, and Grace herself is aware of the function of quilting as a metaphor for her own storytelling (Rogerson 8, 19). Thus, it is highly unlikely that most readers will miss the way in which the patchwork trope functions as the organizing principle in this narrative. The novel offers patches of found texts stitched together in a manner which foregrounds both their provenance as received texts and the constructedness of the larger text(ure) into which they have been worked. In this sense, Alias Grace may be read as a text whose stitches and seams are anything but blind, being so obtrusive as to be unmistakable. And because quilting has been an almost exclusive cultural expression of women's s work, this novel, written by a woman, about an historical woman's crime and punishment in mid-nineteenth-century Canada, is inevitably implicated in issues. In Alias Grace it might be argued that Atwood has constructed a text whose obtrusiveness as construction so blatantly expresses metafictionality that it may be read as gendered, not by the sexual identity of either its central consciousness, Grace Marks, or its author, so much as by a postmodernity that might itself be usefully explored as a feminine binary opposite of a masculine modernism. Because both of these terms, and gender, have been problematic for contemporary discourse, this project of examining Alias Grace as engendered metafiction requires a critical or theoretical framework before a discussion of the text can begin. Of the two terms, may be the more manageable. The term has been a part of critical discourse for a generation and thus should nor require a lengthy rehearsal here. Metafiction denotes a fictional text that draws attention to itself as text in a variety of ways. The metafictional text stands in marked contrast to the realist text, which may be conceived of as one whose language aims at its own invisibility, so that the reader looks through the realist's language at the world represented, as though the text were a transparent window. The metafictional or postmodern text, on the other hand, brings itself inescapably to the reader's attention so that the text foregrounds itself as though it were a Tiffany windowpane: a world may exist on the other side of the windowpane, but it is the text or representation that seems to have become more important. Accordingly, reality becomes textual. At the same time, such reflexivity is not synonymous with and the metafictionality of postmode rn texts is implicated in an effort at a more radical subversion than the self-referentiality of older texts. From a number of conventional examples of earlier, self-reflexive texts, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-67) will serve the purpose here. Despite its playful subversions of the reader's expectations and its calling attention to its own textuality, Sterne's novel demonstrates little effort at subverting a reality outside itself in the more radical manner in which a novel such as Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) or John Barth's Once Upon a Time (1994) seems intent on affirming that textuality itself may be reality. As with the term metafiction, gender ought not to require extensive rehearsal. A generation of theorists, many of whom at least began as readers of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic writings, has encouraged us to think of as culturally constructed, rather than fixed by differences of sex, or biology. Of particular importance to our shared notions of have been French writers such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, as well as American theorists such as Jane Gallop and Barbara Johnson, who have followed Irigaray in reading differences in Lacan's tropes. …