“You are one of us”: Communities of Marginality, Vulnerability, and Secrecy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Abstract

“You are one of us”: Communities of Marginality, Vulnerability, and Secrecy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace Maria J. Lopez (bio) It is revealing that Margaret Atwood should have chosen for her 1996 novel the title of Alias Grace, which points to two central and interrelated aspects of this literary work. On the one hand, it indicates that the fictional world it denotes revolves around one individual, namely, the historical figure of Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant in Canada sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted in 1843 for her involvement in the murder of her household employer, Thomas Kinnear, and of his housekeeper and lover, Nancy Montgomery. On the other hand, the introduction into the title of the term “alias” suggests that in their search for the truth about Grace Marks, both readers and characters may be frustrated by their continuously encountering duplicity and falsity. This process takes place because Grace resists being comprehended by the knowledge and discourse of what I would like to call communities of power, namely, the scientific, religious, and legal communities and by the Foucauldian disciplinary system created by them. She belongs, on the contrary, to the marginal communities of immigrants, servants, and mad people, who share strong bonds of solidarity based upon vulnerability and secrecy and who challenge the rigidity of social categories, together with official middle- and upper-class constructions of national identity. [End Page 157] In her essay “In Search of Alias Grace,” Atwood asserts, in relation to Canadian history and historical writing, that “it’s the very things that aren’t mentioned that inspire the most curiosity in us. Why aren’t they mentioned? The lure of the Canadian past, for the writers of my generation, has been partly the lure of the unmentionable—the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo” (218). In her novel, Atwood is precisely concerned with a mysterious story, Grace Marks’s, an individual who escapes all attempts to enclose and apprehend her. The textual excerpts and fragments that we find at the beginning of each chapter, coming from newspapers, letters, poems, and other textual sources, denote a collective eagerness to translate her story into meaningful and articulate terms, although the fragmentary and incoherent result points to the impossibility of doing so. In this sense, the scrapbook owned by the penitentiary governor’s wife, a collection of newspaper cuttings on famous crimes and criminals, can be seen as a microcosm of the novel as a whole. Grace herself has looked at it many times, finding both “lies” and “true things” and what constitutes the “chief concern” of “the gentlemen and the ladies both”: not whether or not she killed anyone, but whether or not she was “really a paramour” (30). The scrapbook underlines, then, where Grace stands in relation to social class divisions: as a marginal figure on which the upper- and middle-class desire for sensationalism and feminine stereotypes comes to be projected. The scrapbook also presents Grace as spectacle, an object everyone can look at and examine. This condition is one of which she is aware, as we see her reflecting upon the hanging of James McDermott—the fellow servant who supposedly committed the murders and with whom Grace is complicit—in front of the jail in Toronto: “It was raining, and a huge crowd standing in the mud, some of them come from miles away. If my own death had not been commuted at the last minute, they would have watched me hang with the same greedy pleasure” (32). Not only were executions public spectacles, but so too were penitentiaries and asylums. It is in this way that the nineteenth-century settler Susanna Moodie approached Grace Marks, to whom she refers in Life in the Clearings (1853), the text in which Atwood first encountered Grace’s story, as she explains in the “Author’s Afterword.” Pointing to Moodie’s descriptions, in Life in the Clearings, of the provincial penitentiary in Kingston and the lunatic asylum in Toronto, Atwood explains that “such public institutions were visited like zoos, and, at both, Moodie asked to see the star attraction, Grace Marks” (538). Grace, as a low-class woman, becomes the object...