Atwood's Alias Grace Research Articles

"I am a celebrated murderess": Female Criminality and Multiple Personalities in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

Abstract: Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace illuminates the history and mechanisms of the ties between criminal behavior by women and multiple personalities by contextualizing the representations and perceptions of the female criminal and the criminological and medical discourses during the nineteenth century. Atwood uses the mystery around Grace's crimes as a means for her enigmatic female protagonist to have agency, but only through the veneer of her multiple personalities.

Displaced: Canadian Mindscapes in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

Displaced: Canadian Mindscapes in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

(In)famous subjects: representing women's criminality and violence in historical biofictions

ABSTRACTHistorical fiction writers can be drawn to the true stories of women who have committed violent or criminal acts, as are readers. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Hannah Kent's Burial Rites are popular, acclaimed examples of this trend. In my own creative work, Treading Air, I fictionalise the life of Lizzie O’Dea, petty thief and sex worker. The women in these stories are vulnerable subjects unable to give their consent, and the often elliptical and unreliable historical records that are the textual traces of their lives, coupled with the discomfort of the voyeuristic gaze, make representations of criminal women in historical biofiction a fraught act.

Feminist Narratology Revisited

In 1986, in pages of Style, a debate was launched between Susan Lanser and Nelli Diengott on feasibility of a new theory, which Lanser named narratology. Lanser argued that as a textual and structuralist methodology could be very useful to feminist critical inquiry, but only if its principles were fundamentally changed to accommodate materialist issues vital to most feminist critics, including gender of author, psychology of character narrating, and time and place of fiction. In a subsequent issue, Diengott countered that such synthesis, by its own terms, would not be possible because materialist feminism is completely antithetical to as theory; combining two into a single methodology called narratology would cross impenetrable line between narrative poetics and interpretive criticism that in practice strictly observes. The debate was revived by Kathy Mezei a decade later in her Introduction to Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. There she explicitly argues for legitimacy of Lanser's definition over Diengott's opposition, defining narratology as a method of analysis that includes the sexuality and gender of author, narrator, character, and reader (2), elements that transcend narratology's normal structural and textual bounds. In 2002, in Feminist Metafiction and Evolution of British Novel, I argued, in contrast, for a theory of narratology that does not depend on gender of author or qualities of female narrating character as person. My thesis instead focused on structure and discourse of woman's narrating activity on level of text, demonstrating that narratology is feasible as a strict narratological theory and can also be used as critical methodology in that way. Since that time, perhaps because of oxymoronic difficulties inherent in term, narratology has mostly been dropped from critical lexicon and its use in feminist criticism has become almost extinct. The kinds of analyses produced in response to Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, however, suggest relevance of reexamining narratology as a methodological approach and validity of renegotiating its possibilities to include both sides of theoretical debate. Alias Grace is a novel based on real murder of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery in 1843. Each chapter opens with excerpts from actual historical documents relevant to murder case and published around same time as crime. Alongside these excerpts are pieces of canonical English and American poetry, all also written during nineteenth century and all by or on subject of women. The primary narrative, however, is delivered by a fictionalized version of real convicted female killer, Grace Marks, imprisoned for crime and trying to reconstruct, in a mostly linear fashion, events leading up to murder she claims she cannot recall. Also included in narrative text are fictional sections of free indirect discourse attributed to Simon Jordan, male psychiatrist who elicits Grace's first-person story, as well as occasional fictional letter from other official and unofficial sources in connection with his enterprise. Precisely because of this unique structural polyphony of different generic narratives, focus on narration in critical response to this text is almost inevitable; and because primary narrative, one that shapes plot and structurally coordinates all other discourses, is delivered in voice of a woman, complexities of woman's narrating act become central to a number of critical essays on a variety of hermeneutic subjects written in response to book. (1) To date, all critical attention paid directly to complexities of female narration in Alias Grace has concerned itself with credibility of its main narrating character as a person and, consequently, as a story teller. …

Fictive Memoir and Girlhood Resistance in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace takes the form of a fictive memoir, in which the protagonist, based on the historical Grace Marks, who was tried and convicted of murder at age sixteen, gives an account of her life to a doctor who could arrange her release from prison. Through the strategic interplay of silence and revelation, purposeful invocation of her girlishness, and re-evaluation of notions of guilt, innocence, and identity, Grace positions herself as an agent capable of radical social critique rather than as a victim or a passive object of rescue.

A Few Comments on the Epigraphs to Margaret Atwood's ALIAS GRACE and Their Relation to the Novel as a Whole

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: Alias GraceMargaret AtwoodCanadian literatureclose readingmurder in fiction

Supplementing the Supplement: Looking at the Function of Afterwords and Acknowledgements in some Canadian Historical Novels

But the supplement supplements. adds only to replace. Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology IN perhaps the most well-known chapter in Of Grammatology,... That Dangerous Supplement ... Jacques Derrida examines the concept of the supplement. Here, he uses Jean Jacques Rousseau's work to show how writing complements/stands in for the speech act and tries to recapture the presence of the speech and the speaker: It is the addition of a technique, a sort of artificial and artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent (144). Rousseau, Derrida goes on to argue, perceives writing as a dangerous means for capturing presence, but a necessary one: Writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself. And there is a fatal necessity, inscribed in the very functioning of the sign, that the substitute makes one forget the vicariousness of its own function and makes itself pass for the plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements. (144) The supplement is dangerous because it fools the reader into perceiving a completeness when, in fact, the supplement only ever points to a lack not only in the absence it is ostensibly rectifying but in itself as well. Derrida's notion of supplement, then, is one that plays with the space between presence and absence. Its very presence highlights its own absence; what is there highlights what is missing. Supplementarity is perhaps a particularly useful lens through which to consider the end notes so often included in historical fiction. These afterwords or acknowledgements, as they are typically titled, potentially occupy the infinite regression of the supplement in that they are themselves supplements to novels which are themselves supplements to previous narratives about capital-H history. Moreover, these paratextual devices simultaneously point to the presence of historical authority and archive as well as its absence in both the novel they proceed and in themselves as ostensible complement to that novel. At the heart of these afterword/ acknowledgements there is an anxiety about the ways in which not just history and not just historical fiction but the paratextual apparatus itself falls short. Using Derrida's discussion of supplementarity as a means of illuminating how the material of the afterword/acknowledgements functions within historical fiction, this paper will examine the ways in which these paratextual devices expand on, conflict with, and further complicate the issues of absence and presence with which a novelistic narrative of history engages. Through a close analysis of the afterword/acknowledgements sections of five contemporary Canadian novels--John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic, Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road--I will explore how each engages with the problems of representation (problems also explored within the novels themselves) to varying degrees and in different ways. However, before unpacking the novels, let me first draw a more in depth connection between history, afterwords, and supplementarity. Although Derrida discusses the supplement within the context of language, it is a concept that is also applicable to representations of history. That is, when a historian presents a new account of the past, it is a supplement to those accounts that already exist--it both adds to and completes the existing records. However, there is a further complication with the supplement, for in its paradoxical function there also exists a latent sense of continuity. We expect, in other words, that the supplement will be added to or further completed by other supplements. The supplement, therefore, is never enough. The supplement will always already require another supplement. This problem with the historical supplement is particularly apparent within contemporary historical fiction, a genre that exists to supplement history, while bearing within it an awareness of its own supplementarity. …

“Deep deep into the river of her mind”: “Meneseteung” and the Archival Hysteric

WHILE THE DIAGNOSIS MAY BE OFFICIALLY DEFUNCT, the language of is still rampant in popular, cultural, literary, and scientific discourses. A search on the term hysteria in PubMed returns over five hundred hits from the year 2000 to date. As of the slipperiest illnesses of the mind, continues to invoke fear, curiosity, and the desire for interpretive mastery. (1) Studied by a range of scholars including historians, feminists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and ethnologists, has been defined primarily by its protean and varied symptoms such as headaches, dysmenorrhea, alterations in mood, pain, non-organic paralysis, and general weakness that resemble symptoms of other, more fully understood diseases. According to Canadian historian Wendy Mitchinson, nineteenth-century hysterics suffered from the nebulous symptoms of violent emotions and attention-seeking behaviour (285). All of these symptoms could be explained by hysteria's defining characteristic: a lack of control over the emotions, which most doctors perceived as a predominantly female problem (Mitchinson 280). Seeing as a dysfunction of the mind and body, many nineteenth-century hysterical sufferers and their families turned to the medical profession for help (Mitchinson 281). While hysteria's cultural significations changed over the centuries, the figure of the hysteric was largely feminized in the nineteenth century. (2) What can we learn from the nineteenth century's hysterical legacy? In particular, how does the body--the self-regulating, respirating, digesting, thinking, eliminating human body--figure into this feminized and protean illness of the mind? In many ways, contemporary literature has been able to go further than medical science in exploring the causes and healing of hysteria. While the medical field eschews the speculative, anecdotal, and liminal, fiction embraces multiple ways of knowing. Bestselling fictions including Jane Urquhart's Away (1993) and Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996) turn to the archives of nineteenth-century Ontario to explore how and why the hysterical mindbody acts as an archive of past emotional traumas and how this might suggest a model of recovery. In particular, I would like to explore how Alice Munro's Meneseteung (1990) uses the archive as a literal and figurative structure to tell the story of a hysterical nineteenth-century Ontario poetess. In both the story and nineteenth-century medical discourses, the hysterical body interacts with its environment in complex and unexpected ways. Meneseteung was written at a critical point in the history of mental illness. While the psychopharmacological revolution started in the 1950s, the emergence of in 1987 changed the contemporary psychiatric landscape, with family doctors in addition to psychiatrists prescribing the pills. (3) Elizabeth Wilson notes a change in the 1990s with a transition from feminist politics under the influence of anti-psychiatry to feminist politics after Prozac (Organic Empathy 376). In the medicalized context of the 1990s, a sufferer may see herself as a victim of a medical condition: The medications make it easier for someone who is afflicted by such a mental illness to think of it as something 'other,' a thing, almost an agent that acts upon one (Hacking 113). In the nineteenth century, however, was seen less as an agent in itself but rather as a potential--and even natural--part of female subjectivity. As was treated by wide-ranging therapies including surgery, blistering, botanical remedies, marriage, talk therapy, cold douches, firm pressure applied to the ovaries, clitoridectomy, and rest (Mitchinson 286-88), the nineteenth-century conception of the condition rooted it in the social, biological, and cultural life of the sufferer. In Meneseteung, Munro depicts her hysterical heroine as both a sufferer and a resistant subject; is impacted by social and familial trauma, and it springs from the complexities of the mind-body connection. …

Dying in a state of grace: memory, duality, and uncertainty in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996) is examined in relation to her theorization of death and authorship in Negotiating With the Dead (2002). Broader theories of death, the author, and posthumous narration, as proposed by Roland Barthes, Alice Bennett, and others, are also employed. The novel is further linked to what Atwood herself calls a Jamesian form of ghost story, and is read alongside two stories by Henry James (‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908) and ‘The Middle Years’ (1893)). Elements of both the ghost story genre and the crime genre are shown to be used by Atwood to create a sense of uncertainty in the narrative structure of the novel. It is argued that this sense of uncertainty is part of Atwood's use of a sylleptic narrative structure to achieve an authorial position that keeps Author and scriptor simultaneously in play.

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

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). …

Haunting Physicality: Corpses, Cannibalism, and Carnality in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

‘Out of the gravel there are peonies growing. They come up through the loose grey pebbles, their buds testing the air like snails’ eyes, then swelling and opening, huge dark-red flowers all shining and glossy like satin. Then they burst and fall to the ground’ (Atwood, 5). Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace opens with this image of organic infiltration, which combines the realms of plant and animal, and functions as an ominous introduction to the novel’s central concern with transgressive physicality. This concern haunts the novel’s characters and coexists with the male protagonist’s obsessive desire to see and gain access to interiors, corporeal and forbidden. The flowers, with their red satin glossiness, on the verge of climactic explosion, highlight the carnality of the infiltration and, more generally, the text’s preoccupation with fleshly bodies. In the novel, this preoccupation repeatedly intrudes via imagery and dreams that reduce the individual to the terrifying sameness of grotesque physicality. The repressed corporeality of the lusting, wounded, carnal body haunts the text and its characters, threatening to undermine the boundaries and structures that govern the novel’s Victorian-era society. The novel is haunted by the possibility of the self being lost, its autonomy damaged by infiltration and convergence, its humanity annihilated by a reduction to mere flesh. To demonstrate the haunting quality of the text’s concern with bodies, my paper begins with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of haunting and the uncanny, stressing the shared concept of boundary transgression, which is fundamental to my own interpretation of the intrusive, inevitable return of the abject. To analyse the text’s confrontations with the harrowing sameness of corporeality that threatens the subject, this essay focuses, in particular, on two characters, the servant Mary Whitney and Dr Simon Jordan. Mary Whitney’s refusal to conceal her body and her knowledge of other bodies leads to her absolute abjection as corpse. In contrast, Simon Jordan’s loss of subjectivity results from his obsessive preoccupation with the female mind and body. In Atwood’s novel, haunting involves a Gothic return of the repressed, 1

History as poetic indetermination: the murder scene in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

Alias Grace, roman de Margaret Atwood, raconte l’histoire d’une femme envoyee en prison pour meurtre. La representation du meurtre que construit Margaret Atwood s’appuie sur de nombreux documents. Elle met en place une strategie qui s’efforce de laisser place a toutes les hypotheses suggerees par les sources. En meme temps, Margaret Atwood refuse de se limiter a ces possibilites. Ceci lui permet de produire une version tres poetique de la scene du meurtre, qui connait deux occurrences dans le roman. Mise en valeur par un changement de contexte, cette repetition contribue a l’effet d’indetermination et d’irresolution qui caracterise la version de l’histoire proposee par Margaret Atwood.

The Gospel According to Grace: Gnostic Heresy as Narrative Strategy in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

The Gospel According to Grace: Gnostic Heresy as Narrative Strategy in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

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

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. …

Rethinking History as Patchwork: The Case of Atwood's Alias Grace

Rethinking History as Patchwork: The Case of Atwood's Alias Grace

How to Do Things with History: Researching Lives in Carol Shield's Swann and Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

How to Do Things with History: Researching Lives in Carol Shield's Swann and Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace