Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and the Construction of a Trial Narrative

Abstract

MANY OF THE ARTICLES PUBLISHED on Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace since late 1990 reveal a measure of discomfort with what appears to be novel's incompatible aims, namely those of providing a postmodernist critique of history within framework of nineteenth-century literary conventions. I argue that these two aims are reconcilable when novel is understood as a trial novel that questions construction of a teleological courtroom narrative (1) deliberately based upon nineteenth-century novel-writing strategies and delivered in large part by a fictional Grace Marks, who acts throughout novel as her own defence attorney. Critics have noticed contradictory currents in Atwood's writing yet have failed to harmonize them. Hilary Mantel, Burkhard Niederhoff, Alice Palumbo, Barbara Hill Rigney, and Margaret Rogerson, for example, acknowledge postmodernist sensibility and techniques at play within Alias Grace. Mantel lays emphasis on novel's fragmentation (4); Niederhoff classifies novel as an example of historiographic metafiction and concedes that such a genre is fundamentally sceptical, eroding distinction between fact and fiction as well as undermining all claims to and knowledge (81); Palumbo characterizes Atwood's work as one which makes clear that it is nearly impossible to expect one single 'true story' to emerge from wealth of alternatives (85); Rigney similarly states that Atwood's major thesis is the inherent ambiguity of nature of truth (159); and Rogerson recognizes novel's function as process rather mere product when she refers to its central quilting metaphor and suggests that in act of reading and interpretation, reader him- or herself becomes a quilt maker (9). The same scholars, however, give voice to a certain anxiety when they attempt to make sense of Alias Grace's outcome. Despite work's skeptical stance toward truth, matter of whether character of Grace Marks is guilty or innocent, a temptress or a victim, a liar or a paragon of integrity is one which these critics are unwilling to abandon. Mantel raises question: [W]ith her background of deprivation, how likely is that she had retained any innocence at all? Grace is a deceiver (4). Niederhoff, in turn, concludes that Atwood is after all less interested in value of historical reconstruction than in its effects on people's lives (82). his reading of novel, he accepts unequivocally that Grace was involved in murders as Mary Whitney (80). Among Atwood scholars, Magali Cornier Michael is perhaps one who is most persuasive in her attempt at resolving dichotomy between Atwood's postmodernist approach and her love of nineteenth-century narratives. Michael does indeed see in Alias Grace a feminist, postmodern approach to recovery of past that deals a clear blow to scientific positivism that continues to dominate Western thought (423). The novel, she argues, insists on validity and importance of women's oral history. Grace's quilting itself stands as a metaphor for alternative forms of thinking about and narrating past (427). Narrative, however, is offered both as key to times gone by and as a fallible tool because, as Atwood herself puts in In Search of Alias Grace, [H]uman beings [...] are subject to error, intentional or not, and to very human desire to magnify a scandal, and to their own biases (32). Michael also briefly looks at role of trial narratives within her reading of novel. She asserts that Alias Grace presents a legal case and a convicted murderess as its focal point and claims that although the legal process presents itself as an objective, positivist enterprise in its aim to uncover 'truth, its thoroughly discursive nature highlights impossibility of accessing past outside of narrative. Thus, for Michael, novel's references to law become one more way to stress both importance and relative value and impact of narrative, generally (425). …