Post on 24-Apr-2023
In Search of Grace Marks:
Historical Subjects and Narrative Representation in
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
Tiffany McErlain
Contents
Statement of Sources i
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iii-iv
Introduction The Politics of Narrative Representation and Alias Grace 1-9
Chapter One The Presence of the Past: Historiographic Metafiction 10-24
Chapter Two Making Grace Marks: Strategies for Self-Representation 25-42
Chapter Three Text and Textile: The Rhetoric of the Patchwork 43-59
Conclusion Stitching New Patterns 60-63
Works Consulted 60-70
Statement of Sources
The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief original, except
as acknowledged in the text, and has not been submitted either in whole or in part, for a
degree at this or any other university.
Signed
Tiffany McErlain
Abstract
Margaret Atwood’s novel, Alias Grace, can be read as a critique of the complex enterprise of
narrative representation in relation to history and historical subjects. In this thesis I approach
the text from a postmodern perspective to argue that the novel mobilises a historical event in
order to challenge such traditional orthodoxies as the belief in an essential self and the
transparent referentiality of language. Although set in nineteenth-century Upper Canada, the
novel is primarily concerned with underlining and undermining realist forms and conventions
from a late-twentieth- century perspective, to denaturalise the historical archive and to
question whether we can know the “truth” about the past through its textual traces. Chapter
One addresses the rhetorical strategy of historiographic metafiction as a key to Atwood’s
methodology in terms of her problematisation of history and historical subjects, in which she
demonstrates that the past is unavoidably mediated by discourse and narrative representation.
Chapter Two explores rhetorical strategies relating to the protagonist’s fictive autobiography.
Atwood redefines the subject in her novel by foregrounding the narrator’s performative acts
and her storytelling abilities, devices that challenge the notion that the subject is underpinned
by a fixed and essential identity. The final chapter reflects on the rhetorical strategies
discussed in the first two chapters of this thesis and examines the two narrative spheres of
history and autobiography in relation to the motif of the patchwork quilt, showing how
Atwood stitches her historical novel and its historical protagonist into a multifaceted and
ambiguous patchwork that resists the totalising unity of realist epistemologies. Throughout
this thesis I will argue that Atwood’s narrative strategies echo a poststructuralist investment
in discourse as a signifying practice that conveys the norms and practices of social life,
mediates representations of reality, and shapes subjectivity.
Introduction:
The Politics of Narrative Representation and Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood’s ninth novel, Alias Grace, is a revision of an episode in Canadian colonial
history which took place in Kingston, Ontario in 1843. Grace Marks, a young immigrant
Irishwoman, is arrested for the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his
housekeeper and mistress Nancy Montgomery, while attempting to flee Canada with her co-
accused James McDermott. Subsequent to her trial, she serves a jail sentence in the Kingston
Penitentiary until her release in 1872. These are the facts concerning the historical figure
which lay the foundations for Atwood’s fictionalised account of the Grace Marks story.
Questions about Grace’s guilt and innocence, as well as her psychological condition at the
time of the murders are left unanswered in both the historical records and the novel to
highlight problems of historical representation. Did Grace collaborate with McDermott and
coerce him into murdering Nancy with the promise of sexual favours? Or was she corralled
by McDermott into taking a part in the murders of Nancy and Mr. Kinnear with threats of
violence against her if she did not? Can Grace remember the events of the Kinnear-
Montgomery tragedy? Or does she suffer from traumatic amnesia after witnessing the
atrocities? From the novel's title Alias Grace, arise the central themes of subjectivity and
representation as readers are left to ask, ‘who is Grace?’ Is she a cold-blooded murderer? An
innocent victim? Or a woman possessed by an alternate personality?
The methodology Atwood employs in her historical novel is outlined in her Bronfman
lecture “In Search of Alias Grace,” in which she comments that:
I felt that to be fair, I had to represent all points of view. I devised the
following set of guidelines for myself: when there was a solid fact, I could not
alter it . . . Also, every major element in the book had to be suggested by
something in the writing about Grace and her times, however dubious such
writing might be; but in the parts left unexplained – the gaps left unfilled – I
was free to invent.
Similarly in her “Author’s Afterword” to the novel Atwood tells the reader that, “I have not
changed any known facts, although the written accounts are so contradictory that few facts
emerge as unequivocally ‘known’” (541), and that to this end, “[w]here mere hints and
outright gaps exist in the records, I have felt free to invent” (542). The ambiguity of the
historical figure is preserved in her fictionalized account, as the “gaps” of her story are
mirrored in the text by the fragmentary nature of historical evidence that frames her identity.
Rather than solve the mystery of Grace’s involvement in the murders by delivering a
definitive version of events, Atwood demonstrates that historical representation is a far more
paradoxical and problematic enterprise than it appears.
For Atwood, history, individual memory, and historical fiction are each concerned
with the central question: “[h]ow do we know we know what we think we know?” (In
Search” 1505), and indeed the question is reformulated to signal the central question of the
novel, “how do we know what we think we know about Grace Marks?” This epistemological
dilemma is negotiated in Alias Grace through a redefinition of the subject and an
interrogation of the premises on which the past may be known by contemporary readers. The
historical subject is one that is constructed at the intersection of various discourses, and the
tools of narrative, as this thesis contends, are invaluable for constructing, representing and
inscribing the subject within the historical archive.
The novel evolved out of a series of encounters between Atwood and the Grace Marks
story which took place over twenty-five years, initially emerging out of an account recorded
by the journalist Susanna Moodie in Life in the Clearings versus the Bush (1853). In
Moodie’s account, Grace is presented as a jealous rival for her master’s affection who
successfully coerces the weak-willed McDermott into murdering Nancy. McDermott
confesses on the night before his execution to disposing of his victim by “cut[ting] [Nancy’s]
body in four pieces , and turn[ing] a large washtub over them” (Life 203), a highly
improbable event that Atwood describes as “pure invention” on the author’s part (“Author’s”
538). Moodie even incorrectly records records the victim’s names as “Hannah Montgomery”
and “Captain Kinnaird,” and Grace’s co-accused as “Macdermot.” Despite these abberations,
Moodies version of the story became the source material for a television play The Servant
Girl, produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Commission in 1974, and following this, a
script for a theatre play called Grace in 1979 which was later abandoned.
Atwood points to her own youth and naivety for storing confidence in the
trustworthiness of Moodie’s account, because, as Atwood admits, it was “the first version of
the story I came across, and, being young, and still believing that ‘non-fiction’ meant ‘true,’ I
did not question it” (“In Search” 1513). Moodie’s inaccurate historical record continued to
intrigue her, and in an interview with Laura Miller, Atwood discussed her interest in the
fictionalized account and the way it reflected more widespread problems with the
representation of reality and the contingent nature of experience:
What then made it much more interesting to me, as a novelist, is the fact that
Susanna Moodie was wrong! Other people were just making the story up from
the moment it happened. They were all fictionalizing. They were all projecting
their own views onto these various people. It is a real study in how the
perception of reality is shaped (2)
Her later engagement with story of the alleged murderer in Alias Grace exhibits a self-
conscious awareness of the problematic nature of historical representation that is
symptomatic of the author’s questioning of her earlier source material. Atwood adopts
various perspectives on her historical protagonist in Alias Grace, including those of her
supporters and detractors, reminding the reader of the existence of competing, and often
equally plausible, historical accounts. Amid the frisson generated by Grace Marks trial in the
novel, Moodie’s perspective becomes a mere thread in a complex web of history, rather than
a totalising frame through which to view past events and persons.
Alias Grace is a meditation on the problem of historical knowledge and not a
transparent documentary representation of historical events as Atwood asks readers to
consider whether or not we can actually know the ‘truth’ about the past. Some critics have
overlooked the novel’s engagement with complex problems of historical representation.
Judith Knelman in her essay “Can We Believe What the Newspapers Tell Us?: Missing Links
in Alias Grace” faults the novel for its flawed historical evidence and uses a realist
framework to demonstrate that events in the novel are historically improbable. The novel, I
argue, illustrates a problematic relationship between the past and its inscription in language,
being less concerned with historical accuracy than it is with denaturalising the idea of
historical truth.
Atwood engages in what Linda Hutcheon has called “complicitous critique” - a
rhetorical strategy that involves a simultaneous “installing as well as subverting of
conventions” of representation (Politics 13). The term describes a simultaneous use of realist
forms and conventions of representation while subverting those forms and conventions in
order to loosen one’s confidence in the concept of an unmediated truth. “Atwood uses and
abuses,” according to Hutcheon, “the conventions of both novelistic language and narrative in
her fiction to question any naïve notions of both modernist formalism (art is autonomous
artifice) and realist transparency (art is a reflection of the world)” (Canadian 9-10). Hutcheon
coins the term “historiographic metafiction” to define a type of literature that employs this
polysemous strategy in which the forms and conventions of historical representation are both
inscribed and subverted in a way that “asks us to question how we represent – how we
construct – our view of reality and our selves” (Politics 40). Atwood, like Hutcheon,
dispenses with the view of an unmediated reality which can be represented outside of
discourse, as Atwood employs the doubleness of “complicitous critique,” to redefine the
boundaries of the subject and history while foregrounding the premises on which these
phenomena have hitherto been established.
The idea of a homogeneous and unitary selfhood is eroded by the novel’s questioning
of the premises on which historical truth is based. This thesis examines many of the rhetorical
strategies Atwood employs in order to present her protagonist’s subjectivity as highly
ambiguous and multifaceted. In contrast with Knelman’s emphasis on historical probability, I
interrogates the historical protagonist as one who is constructed through narrative
representations which stand between the ‘truth’ of Grace Marks, and our understanding of
her, in order to show that Atwood's portrayal of Grace Marks challenges the idea of a
homogeneous self.
Alias Grace is Atwood’s first attempt to represent a historical protagonist in novelistic
form; however, the author’s engagement with the problems of representing identity is hardly
an innovation in her creative oeuvre. Many critics such as Stanley Fogel have observed her
“obsession with character formation and the difficulty of maintaining ontological security”
(116).1 Atwood's novels often feature a female protagonist who is undergoing change and
whose subjectivity can be seen as a continually metamorphosing construct rather than a fixed
and stable entity.
A brief outline of the narrators of some of Atwood’s novels will highlight the way in
which she promotes rather than polices the shifting boundaries of identity, never attempting
to silence the multiple voices that emerge from her fictive protagonists. The unnamed
narrator of Surfacing (1972) reconciles herself with a changing environment from which she 1 See also Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood; In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and the Novels of Margaret Atwood; and Margaret Atwood Writing and Subjectivity for an analysis of the representation of subjectivity in her earlier novels.
feels alienated, and recuperate her identity by accepting her part to play in human culture:
“[t]his above all, to refuse to be a victim” (197). Elaine in Cat’s Eye is represented as a
composite of different voices in her fictive autobiography, those of her childhood and her
adult life as an artist. She tries to reconcile the eras of her life in her painting, but these voices
and images do not combine easily into a unitary ‘I’-centred narrative as Elaine believes
herself believes that, “[t]here is never only one, of anyone” (6). Importantly for many of
Atwood’s characters, metamorphosis can be a source of healing. After suffering sexual abuse
at the hands of her Uncle, Karen in The Robber Bride (1993) abandons her name and assumes
the alias “Charis” in order lead a life unencumbered by her past. Similarly, the protagonist of
Oryx and Crake (2003) distances himself from his traumatic childhood by forging a new
identity as “Snowman.” The narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) however, is given her
name “Offred” by the totalitarian regime of Gilead to designate her relationship to her
husband.
These representations shake the audience’s faith in the essentialism of the narrator’s
subjectivity, and their ability to tell a story that demands a unitary ‘I’- centred subject. I
disagree with Fogel’s assertion that, “[d]espite the disruptions and dislocations, often severe,
which are undergone by Atwood’s heroines, the form itself remains unshaken and serene”
(103-04). Atwood’s narrators demonstrate that the contrary is mostly true. Her protean
subjects are fragmented and multi-faceted, often comprised of an amalgam of different selves
that do not easily coexist, as in Grace’s alleged bodily and spiritual possession by Mary
Whitney in Alias Grace.
Atwood’s heroine is a culturally determined construct around which boundaries are
artificially erected that are less seamless than they might appear. In this way, Atwood’s
treatment of subjectivity shares similiarities with the philosophical treatment of the subject by
Michel Foucault. In The Order of Things (1970), Foucault famously announced the “death of
man,” a phrase by which he signalled the erosion of the Enlightenment model of selfhood –
the unitary and coherent individual capable of autonomous expression outside of culturally
determined relations of power. The perspective adopted throughout this dissertation
highlights the close imbrication of narrative and subjectivity in Alias Grace to the extent that
her representation as a historical subject is unavoidably mediated by cultural discourses.
Foucault used the term “discourse” to describe signifying practices of many different kinds,
including those formulated within institutions such as medicine, religion or criminology, and
those that govern our narrative relationships with each other. Broadly speaking, discourse is a
practice that prescribes the way an object can be talked about within different settings in
society. By prescribing what may be said, how it may be talked about, and by whom,
discursive practices are powerful regulatory strategies which do not merely reflect, but
“systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Archaeology 54). As a disciplinary
technology that regulates objects, and a type of knowledge, discursive practices operate
within, and structure the power relations within, society. Atwood’s redefinition of the subject
in Alias Grace corresponds with this challenge to subjectivity, in which the enigmatic
protagonist, like the text itself, leads readers to question whether it is possible to know and
understand Grace, outside of narrative representations.
With Foucault’s challenge to received notions of the subject, and Hutcheon’s idea of
“complicitous critique” of realist convention, and her historiographic metafiction in mind, the
problematic of subjectivity and narrative representation are defined throughout the three
chapters of this thesis. Chapter One, “The Presence of the Past” examines the novel’s
historiographic metafictional structure in which realist conventions of history such as
coherent narrative perspective, and the transparent referentiality of language, are inscribed
and subverted. The novel presents many, often contradictory, representations of Grace which
raise questions about historical ‘truth’ and whether it is possible to know the past through its
textual traces. Chapter Two, “Making Grace Marks” explores Grace’s problematic
relationship to the language of self-representation. I examine the way Atwood installs the
conventions of autobiography in her text, while subverting these conventions through
rhetorical strategies such as performance and storytelling. Finally, in Chapter Three, “Text
and Textile,” the motif of the patchwork quilt will be explored as a structuring device for the
novel. Atwood reconstructs the historical archive into a fragmentary, and yet unified
patchwork. The quilt is also a way of reading the novel’s central character. Grace’s self and
narrative are constructed from fragmented textual pieces, assembled and juxtaposed into a
complex patchwork organization.
In this thesis I necessarily ask open-ended questions, as they are fitting to a novel that
problematises historical representation. Firstly, can Atwood’s Grace construct an identity for
herself amid the many discursive representations imposed on her? Popularised in the media
as a “celebrated murderess,” Grace faces imprisoning definitions and attempts to forge an
identify on her own terms. Can rhetorical strategies of performance and storytelling result in
an authoritative self-representation? These concerns are addressed through an examination of
the discursive nature of the historical subject, in an attempt to provide answers to these
questions and draw light on the complexities of Atwood’s innovative historical novel.
Chapter One
The Presence of the Past: Historiographic Metafiction
Margaret Atwood’s first historical novel is not a documentary historical fiction. The novel
mobilises a historical event — a double murder that took place in Victorian Upper Canada —
to emphasise its boundaries and activity as a fictionalised reconstruction of historical events.
The conjunction of documentary and self-reflexive modes of representation characterises the
novel’s portrayal of the Grace Marks story in which realist techniques such as coherent and
unitary narrative perspective, the apparent reliability of historical sources, and the transparent
referentiality of language, are both inscribed and subverted to denaturalise the concept of
historical truth. In this chapter, I interrogate the novel’s problematisation of history and
historical subjects through the rhetorical strategy of historiographic metafiction. The novel
does not offer a direct route to the past, rather, the past is revealed to be unavoidably
mediated by textuality and comprised of multiple historical perspectives.
In discussing the representational strategies employed in a selection of contemporary
Canadian novels, Hutcheon argues that writings of authors such as George Bowering,
Timothy Findley, and Audrey Thomas, self-reflexively critique realist conventions of
representation. Their novels “both use and abuse the conventions of the realist novel”
(Canadian 21). Hutcheon goes on to add that their writings subvert realist structures of
representation by disrupting some of its most common rhetorical strategies:
Such novels destabilize things we used to think we could take for
granted when we read novels: narrative unity, reliable point of view,
coherent character presentation. The once ‘transparent’ has now been
made ‘opaque.’ (Canadian 21)
Alias Grace can be seen similarly to problematise realist representation, unearthing
possibilities for representing the subject, both in history and, as I demonstrate in Chapter
Two, in autobiography. By revisiting an episode in nineteenth-century Canadian colonial
history from a twentieth-century perspective, the novel is able to layer postmodernist and
realist epistemologies which highlight the complex enterprise of historical representation and
the enduring, and unavoidable, dialogue between the past and the present.
The genre of historiographic metafiction undermines the representational powers of
history by foregrounding acts of reading, writing and interpretation — practices that produce
history, rather than refer to an essentialised past. “Historiographic metafiction,” according to
Hutcheon, “while teasing us with the existence of the past as real, also suggests that there is
no direct access to that real which would be unmediated by the structures of our various
discourses about it” (“History” 173). This questioning of the premises on which the past may
be known is not to suggest that there is no truth. Alias Grace does not lapse into a type of
relativism in its portrayal of historical events and persons by suggesting that an objective
truth about the past does not exist: rather the author insists that “[a]lthough there undoubtedly
was a truth – somebody did kill Nancy Montgomery – truth is sometimes unknowable, at
least by us” (“In Search” 1515).
The illusory nature of historical truth which is central to Atwood’s novel, is entirely
missed however, by one critic who investigates the historical veracity of Atwood’s portrayal
of history. Judith Knelman, in her essay “Can We Believe What the Newspapers Tell Us?
Missing Links in Alias Grace,” employs a positivist methodology to demonstrate that events
in the novel are historically improbable. In her examination of historical documents
pertaining to the historical Grace — mainly articles published in Toronto newspapers of the
period — she uncovers several discrepancies between the historical record, and Atwood’s
representation of historical events. For example, “Thomas Kinnear was murdered on 29 July
1843, not on the 23rd, the date unaccountably given by Atwood” (679). In terms of Grace’s
medical condition, Knelman accuses Atwood of historical anachronism for ascribing a
medical condition to her protagonist which was not widely known in the 1850s: “[w]e have
here,” according to Knelman, “a misleading and indeed anachronistic reconstruction of
nineteenth-century theories about multiple personality” (682). The diagnoses of “double
consciousness” and “dédoublement” that are attributed to Grace by characters in the novel
after the neuro-hypnotism scene (see my Chapter Two), refer to later theories of the mind and
beliefs in the power of hypnotism. These medical frames of reference, Knelman points out,
invariably describe multiple personality disorder and appear to have no precedent in historical
accounts of mid-nineteenth-century medicine (682-83). Consequently, the methods employed
to “cure” Grace’s amnesia are equally anachronistic: “[t]here was no suggestion at the time
that hypnotism could be used (as Grace’s doctor, Simon Jordan, does) to recover memory”
(Knelman 682).
Knelman overlooks Atwood’s frequent and deliberate use of historical anachronism
throughout her text which serves to highlight the resonance of late- twentieth-century views
and attitudes in her neo-Victorian novel. Alias Grace, although largely set in 1859 while
events are being narrated, consists of flashbacks to 1843. It also exhibits a dialogue between
these periods and the one in which Atwood was writing. For Atwood, this dialogue between
past and present is unavoidable: “we can’t help but be contemporary, and Alias Grace,
though set in the mid-nineteenth century, is of course a very contemporary book” (“In
Search” 1515). The author demonstrates this self-conscious temporal overlap in her
epigraphs, by providing excerpts from historical sources that do not always conform to the
historical period in which the novel is set. For example, the final chapter of the novel is
prefaced by three epigraphs that are contemporaneous to events, as well as a line from a
poem by Wallace Stevens that was published in 1938, almost eighty years after the events
being narrated. These epigraphs, taken together, resist the linear sequence of events evinced
in realist historical fiction by corresponding thematically to the text, rather than
chronologically.
Similarly to Knelman, Debora Horvitz focuses on the quality and accuracy of
Atwood’s historical research, albeit without a view to impugn the author for a lack of reliable
historical evidence. According to Horvitz, Atwood “renders an intricate, scholarly history of
specific ideas which influenced how certain mental disorders were treated – from bleedings
to the modern “talking cure,” with much, such as phrenology and hypnosis, in between”
(100). In contrast with Knelman’s approach, Atwood’s exploration of nineteenth-century
medical sciences is cited as a cultural and literary innovation, rather than as historical
anachronism: “Atwood’s aim is to contribute to the evolving, organic discourse on
psychological phenomena, central to cultural and literary studies” (100). As Horvitz
recognises, Atwood does not intend to present a straightforward case of multiple personality
disorder that will transcend other categories of definition for Grace, but rather “scrutinizes,
challenges, and pulls apart . . . the idea of any one explanation —‘certainty’ itself” (113).
Indeed, meaningful closure is consistently suspended, to remind the reader of contradictory,
and yet equally valid, theories of Grace’s medical condition.
The types of critical analysis evidenced in Knelman’s, and to a lesser extent, in
Horvitz’s essay, invoke Atwood’s realist narrative structure by exploring the way historical
ideas, events, and persons are depicted “as they were” with attention to the tangible details of
nineteenth-century society. Stanley Fogel argues that Atwood “use[s] language in a largely
referential way, providing the verisimilitude that is a staple of realist fiction and that
authenticates the world and the word’s relationship to it” (102). These formulations of
Atwood’s novelistic technique primarily focus on realism and overlook the self-reflexive
qualities of her fiction, in particular, their duplicitous capacity for installing and subverting
realist models of narrative representation.
Atwood does not entirely dispense with a realist narrative framework, but rather
inscribes realist conventions, while subverting them in order to question the limitations of
realist epistemologies. This doubled strategy challenges the notion that language is a simple
window out onto the world. According to Hutcheon, “[w]e only have access to the past today
through its traces – its documents, the testimony of witnesses, and other archival materials
(Politics 55). History is a practice therefore, of reading, writing, and interpretation, rather
than a material reality that is directly accessible to the historian or writer. In words that mirror
those of Hutcheon, Atwood herself acknowledges that: “the past is made of paper,” there are
“[r]ecords, documents, newspaper stories, eyewitness reports, gossip and rumour and opinion
and contradiction” (“In Search” 1513-14). These textual elements present in her novel,
emphasise the discursive environment in which history, as well as its subjects, are created by
readers and writers.
Fascinated with the public rhetoric surrounding the trial of the historical figure of
Grace, “the process of public opinion and how it’s formed, how people read into situations
and concerns,” as well as the contingent nature of opinion, “[h]ow each person, even people
who are witnesses, have their own version,” Atwood described her as “the O.J. Simpson of
her time,” drawing an equivalence between the media attention generated by Grace’s trial,
and that of the North American twentieth-century celebrity (Wiley 43).2 In line with her
interest in the processes of narrative representation, the novel stages a cogent critique of the
power of public discourse which points to the way discourse both refers to and shapes history
and historical subjects.
2 See Douglas Kellner’s Media Spectacle for an illuminating analysis of media representation during the O.J. Simpson trial.
The intense media attention that surrounds Grace’s trial is preserved within the pages
of the Governor’s wife’s scrapbook which, unusually, contains “not violets or a picnic,” but
“all the famous criminals . . . the ones that have been hanged, or else brought here to be
penitent” (29). The album is a historical archive capturing the media frenzy, and the
enormous volume of written commentary generated by it. Grace’s identity in the novel,
according to Hilde Staels, is only known to readers through such archives and our
interpretations of them: “We know [Grace] only from the texts, from fictionalized history,
past and present” (430).
Gillian Siddall, in her analysis of Grace’s subjectivity, identifies the split between
public and private representation as a site of tension in the novel. In the Victorian period,
public representations, she claims, were constructed in terms of a gender ideology in which
Grace “becomes a titillating figure through which the public can articulate and consolidate
[Victorian ideas of femininity and sexuality]” (85). Indeed, many of the opinions ascribed to
Grace in the novel represent various categories of Victorian womanhood. Grace performs a
succession of roles that illustrate the ambiguous nature of prescribed modes of nineteenth-
century femininity, including the “celebrated murderess” (25), the “paramour” (30), and the
“innocent woman” (513), discussed further in Chapter Two. Atwood herself notes that the
media conflagration that surrounded her trial:
reflected the contemporary ambiguity about the nature of women: was Grace a
female fiend and temptress, the instigator of the crime and the real murderer of
Nancy Montgomery, or was she an unwilling victim, forced to keep silent by
McDermott’s threats and fear for her own life? (“Author’s” 538)
Amid the maelstrom of public rhetoric surrounding her trial, Grace’s testimony was
not given any authoritative significance: she complains to the reader that her “true voice
could not get out” (342). She learns to see herself as a “doll”— a submissive figure upon
which the discourses of her society, including its fears and anxieties, come to be inscribed
(342). Moreover, “[h]er incarceration becomes a metaphor for repressive aspects of
nineteenth-century ideologies” that imprison her within a discursive web of textuality
(Siddall 85). The images of Grace as both doll and prisoner each refer to a lack of autonomy
or agency: her enslavement by Victorian discourses and ideals of proper feminine behaviour.
Dr Simon Jordan himself projects a romanticised myth onto the figure of Grace, one
that is reinforced by the disparity between her public representation and her private persona.
In the chapter entitled “Young Man’s Fancy,” he studies her published confessions (there
were three versions), a transcript from her trial, as well as a portrait in which he sees the
“heroine of a sentimental novel” (67). On their first meeting he constructs her according to
several, equally sensational, possibilities: “a nun in a cloister, a maiden in a towered dungeon
awaiting the next day’s burning at the stake, or else the last-minute champion come to rescue
her” (68). However, as soon as Grace “stepped forward, out of the light” that distorts his
perception, these images of her are replaced with a sobering view of reality: “the woman he’d
seen the instant before was suddenly no longer there. Instead there was a different woman —
straighter, taller and more self-possessed” (68). His initial impression of Grace as a
romanticised figure needing to be rescued is disappointed during their first meeting.
However, Simon continues to construct her according to Victorian ideals of gender, installing
a new and eroticised myth of her as a fallen woman: “Murderess, murderess, he whispers to
himself. It has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias. Lurid, but also furtive” (453).
His constructions of her character appear to move between the two poles of victimhood and
agency, reflecting the ambiguity of women’s roles noted earlier by Siddall and Atwood.
The Methodist minister Reverend Verringer and the medical practitioner, Dr
Bannerling offer starkly contrasting views of Grace which illustrate the divided and
contingent status of public opinion and its investment in Victorian ideals of femininity.
Verringer believes in Grace’s innocence and campaigns for her release from prison by
organising a petition to present to the Prime Minister. In his view, she is simply an unwitting
victim of the politics of the day, claiming, “[t]he Tories appear to have confused Grace with
the Irish Question” (91), influenced as they were by Bannerling, a “Tory . . . of the deepest
dye” (90). Bannerling, on the other hand, sees Grace as a “sham” who is attempting to hoax
the medical community and her sympathisers with mock-hysteric performances in order to
secure better living conditions for herself in the Asylum (81).3
Excerpts from Susanna Moodie’s aforementioned Life in the Clearings are installed
within the text to contrast with these two perspectives (see Introduction). However, the
veracity of her account is subverted within the text when characters view it as a romanticised
fabrication rather then a reliable source of evidence. Verringer tells Simon of Moodie’s
penchant for literary drama:
“Mrs. Moodie,” says Reverend Verringer, “has stated publicly that she is very
fond of Charles Dickens, and in especial of Oliver Twist. I seem to recall a
similar pair of eyes in that work, also belonging to a dead female called
Nancy.” (221-22)
According to Moodie, Grace is a remorseful murderer whose victims’ “bloodshot eyes”
continue to haunt her (Life 208 qtd. in Alias Grace 221), just as Nancy’s “widely staring
eyes” haunt Sykes in Oliver Twist (Oliver 353). Verringer perceptively notes that Moodie has
borrowed certain elements from Dickens’ novel in order to achieve dramatic effect. Grace is
also as a monstrous hysteric, according to Moodie, with a face “lighted up with the fire of
insanity” (Life 271). Her inaccurate and highly sensationalized memoir blurs the boundaries
between fact and fiction, entering into a problematic that operates equally throughout the
3 Dr. Bannerling’s belief accords closely with the view of many other nineteenth-century physicians who regarded the hysteric’s symptoms as “fabulation” (Didi-Huberman 157-58). The implication that Grace is manipulating her audience of doctors is an interesting one, and significant in terms of the victimhood/agency binary that operates throughout the novel.
various accounts of Grace presented in the novel. From these examples it becomes evident
that Grace is represented in public discourse from multiple, and often conflicting, narrative
perspectives.
The juxtaposition of multiple discourses on Grace highlights the textuality of history,
and the constructedness of any narrative representation of events and persons. Atwood’s
novel subverts realist conventions of representation by refusing to privilege any of these
perspectives, and provide a unitary and coherent narrative voice that will authorise history.
The fragmentary nature of the Grace Marks story, constructed by these fictionalisations,
undermines a totalising view of history, and on the personal level, the certainty regarding
Grace’s identity.
Grace insightfully recognises herself as a subject represented in a series of narrative
(mis)representations. At the Governor’s house where she spends her day as a domestic
servant, she compares the subject that she sees reflected in the mirror, a self-constituted
image, with the multiple identities accorded to her in the media:
I think of all the things that have been written about me — that I am an
inhuman female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced
against my will and in danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know
how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder, that I am fond of
animals, that I am very handsome with a brilliant complexion, that I have blue
eyes, that I have green eyes, that I have auburn and also brown hair, that I am
tall and also not above the average height, that I am well and decently dressed,
that I robbed a dead woman to appear so, that I am brisk and smart about my
work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that I have
the appearance of a person rather above my humble station, that I am a good
girl with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me, that I am cunning and
devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. (25)
Rather than accept the authority of any of these versions of her identity, Grace challenges the
ontology of their truth claims. She comments ironically, “[a]nd I wonder, how can I be all of
these different things at once?” (25). The truth status of these representations is raised in such
an overt manner that received notions of historical knowledge and the assumed unity of the
subject are foregrounded. Grace also points to the deeply flawed historical record as she
wryly, and speaking from experience, comments to Simon, “[j]ust because a thing has been
written down, Sir, does not mean it is God’s truth” (299). In the effort to totalise history by
providing a unified and coherent interpretation of the Grace Marks’s story, these narrative
representations, ironically, contest the historical truth in their contradictory claims.
Questions the novel raises about the authenticity of the historical archive are
framed within the novel’s treatment of textuality. Atwood emphasises elements of reading,
writing and conversation throughout Alias Grace, illustrating the production of the historical
archive through textual practices. Simon has an opportunity to create a narrative
representation of Grace through his cross-examination of her, much like his predecessors, the
journalists, doctors and other writers who obscured the truth of her identity with their
contradictory claims. By contrast Grace appears to be excluded from the discursive activities
and “her guilt and . . . innocence are determined . . . by discourses and institutions to which
Grace has little access” (Siddall 87). However, as I argue in Chapter Two, this imbalance is
redressed in her decision to talk to Simon and recount her personal history to him throughout
their conversations in the Governor’s house.
Simon’s notebook and pencil, otherwise innocuous implements used to record their
sessions, become the objects of Grace’s fear of yet another discursive inscription of her
character. References to Grace’s discursive construction are metonymic, her skin emphasised
as a site of inscription: “While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me,
drawing on me – drawing on my skin” (emphasis added 79). Atwood deploys the metaphor of
skin to signal the boundaries of the subject and the material realities of discourse. The
metaphoric incision of skin may be viewed as a reference to Foucauldian ideas, in particular
the cultural inscription model of subjectivity in which the body becomes a legible text for the
reader once it has been “drawn on” by cultural discourses.4
The various narrative representations accorded to Grace, including those of Simon,
inscribe her subjectivity in a way that echoes Foucault’s view of the culturally constituted
subject. The subject in Foucault’s works is ineluctably bound up with the relations of power
and produced as an effect of prescriptive cultural norms and practices. Foucault describes the
body as the “object and target of power” (Discipline 136), while Judith Butler asserts that
“[t]he body is a site” for Foucault, “where regimes of power and discourse inscribe
themselves” (“Foucault” 601).
Foucault figures discursive inscription, according to Butler, as a process that takes
place on a bodily surface throughout his works (“Foucault” 603). In “Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History” for example, he explores the body as “the inscribed surface of events,” and describes
genealogy’s aim to “expose a body totally imprinted by history” (148), and in The Birth of
the Clinic, Foucault figures the body through the metaphor of the portrait or picture — a
space on which disease is mapped out, becoming intelligible under the doctor’s clinical gaze
(6). Moreover, as Butler asserts, Foucault images discursive inscription as a process that
involves a writing instrument that leaves its imprint on the body, and points to the similarity
between his notion of bodily inscription, and an exemplary form of body writing that takes
4Foucault’s cultural inscription theory is shared by Butler who posits that the feminine body is the effect of social and cultural practices (rather than being natural or essential to women). For Butler, sex and gender are written on the body through gestures and expression of the body. See Bodies That Matter.
place in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (“Foucault” 603). 5 In a similar way to that of the
unnamed prisoner in Kafka’s novel, Grace’s body becomes a tabula rasa on which a series of
cultural norms and practices are inscribed through Simon’s breaching of the borders of her
skin. Simon describes Grace’s character prior to public notoriety as a “flat landscape,” a
phrase that, like Foucault’s images of bodily surfaces, appears to signal the body prior to its
inscription by discourse (453). Rather than an essentialist view, in which the subject is
represented as an ontologically secure and stable entity, Foucault describes a subject that is
constituted as a cultural construction, formed by the effects of power in society that operate
on the body. Atwood appears to adapt this view of the subject in her novel, opening up
opportunities for various and contradictory articulations of Grace that shape her subjectivity
through a process of discursive inscription.
The protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) is similarly aware of herself as a
subject who has been discursively shaped by her society, albeit by the totalitarian regime of
Gilead, a more overtly repressive society than that of Grace’s. Just as Grace is able to pose
the question, “how can I be all of these different things at once?”, Offred too, questions the
ontology of these historical truth claims and resists its totalising assumptions. History, and
indeed Offred’s own personal narrative, are undermined by the fragmentary and contingent
nature of experience to the extent that Offred can only describe her own account as a
“reconstruction” because:
it’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can
never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many
parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances. (134)
The multiplicity of possible perspectives, in the form of the “many parts, sides, crosscurrents,
nuances” that make up the representation of historical events, resist a universally valid, and
5 In Kafka’s short story the body of the prisoner becomes an explicit locus for the inscription of subjectivity in which a machine called the “apparatus” delivers punishment by inscribing the prisoner's sentence onto his skin.
totalising perspective. This description of the complexity involved in historical representation
reflects Grace’s own discursive predicament. As I have demonstrated, she is a figure whose
identity is refracted through a kaleidoscope of different perspectives across the spectrum of
public opinion and the historical record. Taken together, these multiple perspectives
challenge the traditional notion of history, and the historical subject, as a coherent and unified
totality.
Historical reconstruction in Alias Grace is a dynamic process, full of unpredictability
as Atwood “invent[s]” in order to fill in the inevitable “gaps” that are encountered in the
historical record (“Author’s” 542), in which she enacts both the role of the historian and that
of the writer in her investigation, reinterpretation, and textualisation of the past. Atwood
employs historiographic processes while subverting them through metafictional self-
consciousness to show that history is comprised of textual elements and is not a direct route
to the past. Her novel does not eschew realist conventions of representation altogether;
however, conventions such as coherent and unitary narrative perspective, the reliability of
historical sources, and the transparent referentiality of language, are underlined and
undermined to highlight the textuality involved in historical representation. The historical
protagonist’s identity is therefore afforded the status of a fiction. It cannot in any case be
accorded any one definitive truth. The search for Grace’s identity, confronts the reader with
the awareness that there is no direct route to the past, or guarantee of its authenticity.
Consonantly, as Atwood remarks in her “Author’s Afterword” to the novel, “[t]he true
character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma” (539).
Chapter Two
Making Grace Marks: Strategies for Self-Representation
During their afternoon sessions in the house of the Governor of the Kingston Penitentiary,
Grace recounts her personal history to Dr. Simon Jordan, a psychiatric physician who
specialises in amnesia. He engages Grace in a prototype of the talking cure, a therapeutic
method he uses to evaluate her soundness of mind, and to restore her memory of the Kinnear-
Montgomery murders. In terms of recovering Grace’s memory and solving the mystery of her
involvement in the murders, the talking cure may be said to fail. However, it elicits a detailed
story from Grace of her childhood in Northern Ireland, her immigration to Canada, and her
work as a domestic servant in Kingston and Toronto. This chapter examines Grace’s fictive
autobiography, and the way the tools of narrative allow her to constitute herself as a speaking
subject in a society which has suppressed her voice. Narrative, and the rhetorical strategies of
storytelling and performance, form significant sites of agency, enabling Grace to construct
her subjectivity amid multiple and contestatory public discourses. However, Grace remains
ambiguous and indeterminate. The central question of the novel, and therefore of this thesis,
is voiced by Dr Jordan who asks, “Grace, what are you? Fish or flesh or good red herring?”
(116). Like many other questions, this one is left unanswered as Atwood refuses to adhere to
the artificial boundaries of the traditional subject by delivering a definitive explanation. I
compare Grace’s autobiographical subjectivity to that of the traditional subject of
autobiography which is fixed and stable, in order to examine the way Atwood redefines
subjectivity in her novel.
As I outlined in Chapter One, Grace is inscribed within the pages of history according
to nineteenth-century discourses of femininity and sexuality which in turn shape the way
other characters represent and respond to her. The powerful discursive machinery and
ideological pressures of nineteenth-century English-Canadian society do not however,
foreclose possibilities for Grace’s agency. To illustrate this point I draw on Foucault’s
analysis of power in which he acknowledges the possibilities for resistance to disciplinary
technologies such as discourse. Power in modern society, according to Foucault, does not
simply flow from the top down; instead, it has a “strictly relational character” in which the
“existence [of power relations] depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance” (History
95). This view accords with Siddall’s assertion that “power” in the relationship between
Grace and Simon “shifts back and forth” (94). For both Foucault and Atwood, power is not
simply hierarchically organised: rather it is multiple and dispersed, distributed across the
spectrum of society in a web-like organisation. The diffuse nature of power frames Grace’s
activity as a narrator as she both colludes with, and resists, certain cultural scripts in which
she is to perform as the “celebrated murderess,” the “hysteric” and the “innocent woman.”
As many critics such as Gillian Siddall and Stephanie Lovelady have noted, Atwood
confers agency on her protagonist by representing her as a speaking subject. 6 According to
Siddall, “through [Atwood’s] construction of Grace as a narrator of her own story,” Grace is
able to constitute herself as a subject (92). Lovelady claims that in narrative Grace “finds an
opportunity to participate in shaping her own representation” (35). Atwood herself remarks
that “Grace . . . is a storyteller, with strong motives to narrate but also strong motives to
withhold; the only power left to her as a convicted and imprisoned criminal comes from a
blend of these two motives” (“In Search” 1515). Because narrative is a significant site of
agency, it enables Grace to achieve a certain measure of freedom amid the discursive
representations that have imprisoned her metaphorically. At first, she is reluctant to recount
her life story to Simon, telling him:
6 See also Hilde Staels and Heidi Darroch.
You won’t believe me. . . . Anyway it’s all been decided, the trial is long over
and done with and what I say will not change anything. You should ask the
lawyers and the judges, and the newspaper men, they seem to know my story
better than I do myself. (46)
By eventually choosing to talk and to offer her own narrative, Grace enacts a dynamic
counter-script that writes back to the myriad discursive inscriptions in public discourse.
The story Grace relates to Simon is characterised by its first-person perspective, the
compulsory “I” of the genre of autobiography. In traditional autobiography, according to
Sidonie Smith, this “I” stands for the stable and universal subject of discourse that has
dominated Western liberal thought. She develops a critique of Western individualism,
asserting that during the twentieth century there was a foundational paradigm shift in
autobiographical criticism in terms of defining and categorising the subject of autobiography,
one that leads away from the Enlightenment view of “man” as a fixed and essential entity.7
This traditional subject was popularised throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as
the idea of unitary selfhood became an alluring fiction that offered an unproblematic
relationship between the autobiographer and the language of self-representation:
Western autobiographical practices flourished because there seemed to be a
self to represent, a unique and unified story to tell that bore common ground
with the reader, a mimetic medium for self-representation that guaranteed the
epistemological correspondence between narrative and lived life. (Subjectivity
17)
Consonant with this paradigm shift is Atwood’s confrontation with the problematised subject
of autobiography through her protagonist’s equivocal first-person narrative.
7 See Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body (1993).
In “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance,” Smith draws on Butler’s
theory of performative gender to theorise an alternative subject of autobiography that
emphasises the subject’s protean qualities such as its shifting boundaries. She examines a
selection of twentieth-century autobiographical texts to demonstrate the way in which the
“performative subject” of autobiography has replaced the unitary artifice of the “self
expressive” Enlightenment subject. According to Butler, performativity is a dynamic process
that posits a rebuilding of the subject through the reenactment of the prescriptive norms in
daily social life. This concept is illustrated in her analysis of modern gender roles in Gender
Trouble (1990), in which she argues that, “[t]here is no gender identity behind the
expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions”
that are said to be its results” (Gender 24-25). Thus “gender,” and by extension, “self,” are no
longer delimited to prediscursive, or essential phenomena. The self is receptive to the
transformative possibilities of narrative construction in so far as it is always incompletely
materialised: “it is the instabilities, the possibilities for rematerializations, opened up by this
process that mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against
itself to spawn new rearticulations” (Bodies 2). If identity is a process, rather than an essential
attribute, therein lie the possibilities for Grace’s narrative self-transformations.
Grace manipulates her identity by resistance to, or collusion with, repressive cultural
scripts such as that of the “celebrated murderess” the “hysteric,” and the “innocent woman”
by exploring possibilities for negotiating her discursive predicament through a performative
mode of self-representation in which she assumes multiple autobiographical postures.
Through her recitation of specific cultural scripts, the fictional status of identity and the
possibilities for personal transformation are revealed within the novel. These ideas are
reiterated by her continual shifts between these scripts leaving open the possibility that she is
in fact the “celebrated murderess.” With a sense of detachment, Grace leaves behind the role
of the “celebrated murderess” once she is released from prison, to take up the role of
“innocent woman”:
I have been rescued, and now I must act like someone who has been rescued.
And so I tried. It was very strange to realize that I would not be a celebrated
murderess anymore, but seen perhaps as an innocent woman wrongly accused
and imprisoned unjustly, or at least for too long a time, an object of pity rather
than horror and fear. It took me some days to get used to the idea; indeed, I am
not quite used to it yet. It calls for a different arrangement of the face; but I
suppose it will become easier in time. (513)
The pragmatic manner in which Grace takes up and leaves behind different roles illustrates
that her subjectivity is a socially expedient construct for negotiating the self amid
constestatory discourses.
At the beginning of the novel, Grace introduces herself to the reader as a “model
prisoner” (5). She is not a “model prisoner” by nature, but only achieves this status by a
tentative process of performance threatened with collapse. She tells the reader, “it’s not easy
being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen
over” (6). Grace describes herself as a woman “fallen over,” or rather a fallen woman — the
typified category of improper Victorian femininity that characterises her representation in
public discourse. The impasse between her understanding of her self and the way that others
expect her to behave, illustrates the difficulty she experiences in fitting into prescribed social
expectations of behaviour. Grace even contemplates performing the role of “monster” for the
prison wardens because that is what they expect: “If they want a monster so badly they ought
to be provided with one” (36). She illustrates that the most expedient role is achieved by
aligning herself with cultural discourse, with what society expects of her, in this instance, by
assuming the role of a hysteric.
Her most convincing and perhaps even earnest acts of collusion with cultural
discourse are those evidenced in her performance within the domestic sphere. Grace is put to
work at the Governor’s house as a domestic servant, a role she appears to have mastered: “I
come into the room and curtsey and move about, mouth straight, head bent, and I pick up
cups or set them down” (24-25). Grace tells Simon that she had learned to “act the part” of
servant after only three years of service (261), a comment which pays tribute to her
remarkable abilities to adapt to her employers’ expectations of her. Indeed, she is adept at
carrying out the duties that the role of a servant demands, and understands in full measure the
attributes that qualify her for the role, and the implicit expectations of her employers: “you
are paid to smile,” Grace tells Simon, “and it does well to remember it” (297).
By contrast, Nancy occupies an ambiguous role in the household by carrying out an
illicit affair with her master that blurs the distinction between class and sexual boundaries
such as “lady” and “housekeeper,” and “wife and “mistress.” The equivocal status of her
position threatens the stability of the household by presenting difficulties in terms of defining
and categorising her role within it, as well as her relationship with others of her own class
such as Grace and the stable-hand McDermott. The ambiguity of her role is caused not only
by her affair with Kinnear, but also by her possession of fine clothing, an important signifier
of gentility. Grace is attentive to the incongruity that characterises Nancy’s position, and the
clothing she wears, wondering, “what a housekeeper would be wanting with a [crimson silk]
dress like that” (232). Nancy attempts to occupy and maintain a role other than that of
housekeeper by dressing above her station; however, these attempts ultimately fail as her
performative dressing only amplifies the equivocal status of her position, rather than
facilitating a merge between the roles of “housekeeper” and “lady.”
Grace’s utterances are not always her own as she borrows heavily from the language
of her long-dead friend Mary Whitney, a practice that foreshadows a later episode in which
she appears to be possessed by her. This practice constitutes a type of authorial performance
in which Grace substitutes the coy, polite language that characterises her own authorial voice
in her conversations with Simon, with that of Mary’s transgressive language. For example:
“lady or lady’s maid, they both piss and it smells the same, and not like lilacs neither, as
Mary Whitney used to say” (251), or: “People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never
wrong. Also they never fart. What Mary Whitney used to say was, if there’s farting in a room
where they are, you may be sure you done it yourself. And even if you never did, you better
not say so” (36). According to Lovelady, Mary is a “crutch” that supports Grace at moments
when she wants to address her interlocutor directly, but does not have the courage to do so
(40). Mary initiated Grace not only into the ways of domestic service, but also, and more
importantly, she taught her to recognise the false premises on which the norms of Victorian
class were based. Grace’s borrowing of certain phrases is a way of recalling and
memorialising Mary which signals her continuing spectral influence in Grace’s life.
Performativity characterises not only Grace’s identity, but also that of her friend,
Jeremiah Pontinelli whose shifting identity blurs the boundaries between self and other. He is
first introduced in the novel as Jeremiah the Peddler, a traveling salesman of Italian descent,
and reappears later in the novel as Dr. Jerome DuPont, an American of French Protestant
descent. Towards the end of the novel he adopts an anglicised version of this name to become
Gerald Bridges the “celebrated medium” (529). 8 Jeremiah is a “bridge” as his surname
suggests, in many ways. He is a bridge across class boundaries, able to move among the
lower, middle and upper classes by mimicking their dress and manners. He frequently crosses
the US/Canada border to peddle his wares, becoming what Lovelady calls a “border crosser”
(43). In his persona as Dr. Jerome DuPont as well as Gerald Bridges, he acts as a bridge
8 Janet Oppenheim points to a parallel between nineteenth-century mediumship and theatrical performance which reinforces the link between Jeremiah’s activity as a medium, and performativity. Oppenheim asserts that many mediums led careers in acting: “a number of mediums were actors, consciously playing roles, purposely deceiving their audiences and giving public performances worthy of any trained thespian” (7).
between the spirit and material worlds by performing acts of hypnotism. In the kitchen at
Alderman Parkinson’s house, Jeremiah tells Grace, “[y]ou are one of us” which she takes to
mean that she is “homeless, and a wanderer, like the peddlers and those who work at fairs”
(179). However, the novel suggests an alternative meaning to this highly ambiguous phrase -
— that she is adept at disguise and masquerade, performing shifting identities much like
Jeremiah.
Under his alias of Dr. Jerome DuPont, Jeremiah visits the Governor’s house
professing to be a “trained Neuro-hypnotist, of the school of James Braid” (95). He takes an
interest in Grace’s case, and offers to hypnotise her in order to discover the truth of her
innocence. In a highly theatrical performance reminiscent of a séance in the fashion of the
spiritualism trend that was sweeping the country, Grace becomes possessed by Mary Whitney
while under hypnosis. 9 A voice identified as “Mary” takes responsibility for the murders:
“I told James to do it. I urged him to. I was there all along!”
“There?” says DuPont.
“Here!” With Grace, where I am now. It was so cold, lying on the floor, and I
was all alone; I needed to keep warm. But Grace doesn’t know, she’s never
known!” (468)
The long awaited truth of Grace’s involvement in the murders is finally revealed, but in such
a way as to cast doubt on its own authenticity. Is Mary Whitney’s uncanny speech evidence
of an alternate personality for Grace? Or her possession by the ghost of Mary? The novel
suggests a third possibility: that the audience is perhaps witnessing a self-conscious
performance orchestrated by Jeremiah. Simon voices this latter possibility when he wonders,
“[w]as Grace really in a trance, or was she play-acting, and laughing up her sleeve? He 9 See Stan McMullin, Anatomy of a Séance: A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada, for a discussion of the burgeoning phenomenon of Spiritualism in colonial Canada and of the early spiritualists such as Susanna Moodie. For a broader examination of the Spiritualist movement in England and its relationship to nineteenth-century scientific ideas, see Janet Oppenheim, Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914.
knows what he saw and heard, but he may have been shown an illusion, which he cannot
prove to have been one” (472).
The multiple interpretations derived from the neuro-hypnotism scene demonstrate that
there is no definitive explanation for Grace’s identity, as she is one of several possibilities:
“an amnesiac who has forgotten the key to a compelling mystery, a victim of possession who
cannot know, or a charlatan who knows all and will not tell” (Lovelady 36). This scene is a
turning point in the novel, the moment at which Grace reveals the doubled aspect of her
personality at the same time as she installs herself within a category of meaning that is
assimilable for almost all of those present during the episode. Verringer reconciles Grace’s
doubled identity with Christian faith, claiming that it represents a case of demonic
“possession” (470). Simon attributes Grace’s alleged possession to “dédoublement,” a
category of definition that fits within his scientific mode of belief (471). DuPont reconciles
events within his pseudo-scientific framework, as a case of “double consciousness.” (471). In
these varied descriptions, the interpretive possibilities for identity are laid bare as Mary can
be either a ghost who takes possession of Grace’s body, or an alternate personality,
depending on one’s perspective.
The nature of Grace’s psychological condition is a central ambiguity on which the
novel turns, and Atwood refuses to resolve whether the answer is to be found in natural or
supernatural explanations. Atwood replicates traditional Gothic tropes by foregrounding the
double, the possibility of supernatural phenomena, and the literary technique of suspense, in
which final, meaningful closure is consistently withheld from other characters, and the
reader. In this way, Atwood plays havoc with the notion of identity, provoking anxieties
about the instability of her protagonist. The unresolved ambiguity of the narrator exemplifies
gothic representations of identity as Grace’s possible second personality erodes the
boundaries of self and other, obfuscating any understanding of her identity as a fixed and
stable entity. In the liminal space between “Grace” and “Mary” there is a territory marked
out for the unexplained supernatural that haunts Simon. In a letter to his friend and colleague,
Dr. Edward Murchie, he writes: “Not to know – to snatch at hints and portents, at intimations,
at tantalizing whispers – it is as bad as being haunted” (490). The duplicitous and unresolved
character of his patient shadows Simon throughout the novel because it lurks outside of his
discourse of rational science and frustrates his desire for meaningful closure.
Grace’s narrative elides any universally valid diagnosis, or even an incontestable
symptomatology from which other characters may infer a diagnosis. Simon’s attitude toward
his patient is illustrative of this diagnostic dilemma, in which he remarks, “[i]t would be
helpful to me, if she were indeed mad, or at least a little madder than she appears to be; but
thus far she has manifested a composure that a duchess might envy” (153). Grace’s very
composure is a type of performance. Like the “good stupid look” that she tells the reader she
practices on Simon at the beginning of their sessions (43), Grace’s appearance may be a way
of eluding his scrutinizing clinical gaze. With these complexities of interpretation in mind, I
do not attempt a diagnosis; however, I do seek to show that the various conditions ascribed to
Grace are contingent, and are themselves cultural scripts of institutional discourses that she
manipulates for her own survival.
Grace transforms herself through a series of performative acts into a subject capable
of moving between and questioning cultural scripts into which she has been inscribed.
Performative strategies do not, however, provide a means of escape for Grace from the
discursive machinery that inscribes her identity. Performance only allow her to choose
between a limited variety of cultural scripts that are socially available to her. Grace negotiates
her identity amid both the expectations of her society and her own individual needs for
agency. Her autobiographical narrative in which she often performs what is expected of her,
is illustrative of this delicate balancing act between the two positions. In Foucauldian terms,
this social negotiation of identity may be seen as a process of resistance to, and collusion
with, cultural discourse. In this way, Grace determines which scripts she will adopt, and
which she will abandon, within a culturally determined arena, in a continuous process of self-
representation.
* * * *
Grace’s fragmented memories inevitably raise questions, not only about the validity
of her testimony, but also about her ability to create a coherent life narrative. Her putative
amnesia arouses deep feelings of scepticism from Simon, who progressively questions the
truth of her memories and asks why, for example, some memories have been preserved over
time and others repressed. Despite the insufficient memory that remains of the events of the
Kinnear-Montgomery murders, Grace tells a story that is replete with details of her domestic
life as a servant, in which, “every button and candle-end seems accounted for” (215). The
realist detail that Grace employs throughout her narrative leads Simon to suspect that “the
very plenitude of her recollections may be a sort of distraction, a way of drawing the mind
away from some hidden but essential fact” (215-16). Moreover, he reminds himself, “the only
witness who could corroborate her testimony — if this were a court of law — would be Mary
Whitney . . . and she is not available” (215-16). It is amid this close scrutiny of her life, and
the scepticism surrounding her testimony, that Grace attempts to assert her narrative voice
and construct a coherent life story that her audience will readily embrace. The novel raises
the question of how Grace can provide such a narrative, and the answer to this question
perhaps lies in Grace’s remarkable abilities as a storyteller, creating a narrative that lures
Simon into the maze of her recollections.
Grace continually constructs her stories with her listener in mind, carefully
considering which details to include and which to omit. For this reason Grace may be
classified as an “unreliable narrator” — that is, a narrator who “[does not] speak and act in
accordance with the norms of the work,” transforming the text by their own untrustworthiness
(Booth 158-59). Grace embodies this type of narrator as she continually reflects on her own
narrative, carefully selecting and appraising the material with which to construct stories about
her life. In the novel’s opening chapter she draws attention to the constructedness of her
narrative by telling the reader, “[t]his is what I told Dr. Jordan, when we came to that part of
the story,” rather than ‘this is what happened’ (7). When Simon presents Grace with a radish
she returns his generosity: “I set to work willingly to tell my story, and to make it as
interesting as I can, and rich in incident, as a sort of return gift for him” (286). Her tendency
to embellish her stories and adapt them to her listener is further illustrated by her assertion
that, “I will tell Dr. Jordan this, as he likes to hear about such things, and always writes them
down” (413). Grace’s self-conscious meditations on her narrative’s form and content are
simultaneously concealed from Simon, while they are revealed to the reader in her interior
monologue, reminding the reader that autobiography is not a transparent reflection of the
narrator’s life: it is always in the process of construction and never a fully formed artifact. In
this way her narrative challenges one of the staples of realist fiction, the belief in a
transparent relationship between word and world.
Grace recognises and articulates the role of storytelling in forming patterns out of
otherwise inchoate events when she tells the reader: “[w]hen you are in the middle of a story
it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion. . . . It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything
like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else” (345-46). Her story
is constructed retrospectively, in the act of telling it, and the tools of narrative are essential
elements in this process. Grace uses these tools to construct and perform a narrative identity
that will satisfy the expectations of her interlocutor, according to criteria of reliability,
chronology, and coherence.
The story she tells Simon appears to be modelled on others’ expectations of
coherence, rather than on her alleged traumatic amnesia. She aligns herself closely with the
traditional subject of autobiography by adopting a mode of storytelling that is outwardly
expressive of a fixed and stable self, in which events are ordered according to a logical
pattern of meaning. Grace’s lawyer, Kenneth MacKenzie, instructs her during her trial to
contrive her testimony in accordance with a juridical frame: “to tell a story that would hang
together, and that had some chance of being believed . . . according to plausibility, rather than
what I myself could actually recall” (415). MacKenzie’s instructions lay the groundwork for
a narrative that appears to incorporate these strict juridical expectations of reliability and
coherence into its framework.
In much the same way as MacKenzie had done, Simon imposes his own expectations
of a coherent narrative on his patient through coercion, by anticipating that a clear and
concise association will arise between the root vegetables presented to Grace, and the
repressed memories he believes to be buried, deep in her unconscious: “Beet – Root Cellar –
Corpses, for instance; or even Turnip – Underground – Grave” (104). However, this method
of association has merely managed to achieve “a series of cookery methods” from her on
each of the vegetables (104), as well as aphorisms such as, “[f]ine words butter no parsnips”
(228). Nevertheless, he exerts a clear shaping force on Grace’s narrative as she would “rather
talk with him about potatoes, if that is what he fancies, than not talk to him at all” (112). In
order to draw out a story that will follow a cause-and-effect pattern of logic, a story that will
fulfill his expectations of her narrative, Simon prompts her with directives such as, “[l]et us
begin at the beginning” (116), and “[s]hall we continue with your story where we left off?”
(228). Such expectations, like those of her lawyer, are readily assimilated by Grace into the
fabric of her narrative and can be seen in the way that she relates her memories of her daily
tasks at the Kinnear household to Simon in a markedly coherent and linear fashion:
Then I carried the slop bucket to the pump in the courtyard. . . . Next I went
into the summer kitchen and started the fire in the stove. . . . Then I went out
into the yard and pumped a bucketful of water and lugged it back to the
kitchen and filled the kettle from it with the dipper, and set it on the stove to
boil. . . . Then I got two carrots from the bin in the harness room off the winter
kitchen. . . . Then I milked the cow. (252-53)
This detailed recapitulation of daily life, plotted by chronology and ordered according to
historical time, projects a narrative in which the episodes in her life appear to exist without
interruption across time. Reminiscent of the Enlightenment model of selfhood criticised by
Sidonie Smith, Grace’s autobiographical subjectivity expresses an outwardly stable and
unitary self that appears to easily cohere to the tenets of traditional autobiography.
Appearances, however, are never what they seem in the novel, and Grace’s narrative self-
representation points to the possibility of an authorial performance.
As I have shown, Grace’s narrative continually anticipates the expectations of her
interlocutors, as she interiorises what others expect of her to produce a linear narrative. Her
detailed stories, however, appear to serve a purpose that goes beyond Simon’s desire for a
full case history. In one respect, her narrative may fulfill her own particular need for a
unified order to her experience, and in another, she believes that the continuation of her
conversations with Simon will secure her privileged position in the Governor’s household: “I
give you my word that as long as you continue to talk with me . . . you shall remain as you
were” (46-47). Beneath the realist surface detail of her narrative, her stories, like those of
Schehezerade, function as a delaying strategy to secure her privileges and enable her to
continue talking with her listener. Grace is compared to the storytelling figure of
Schehezerade by her lawyer, who outlines the problematic nature of truth and uncovers the
motivation for her enigmatic narrative:
“did Schehezerade lie? Not in her own eyes; indeed, the stories she told ought
never to be subjected to the harsh categories of Truth and Falsehood. They
belong in another realm altogether. Perhaps Grace Marks has merely been
telling you what she needs to tell, in order to accomplish the desired end.”
“Which is?” asks Simon.
“To keep the Sultan amused.” (438)
By adopting autobiographical practices that align her subjectivity with a fixed and stable
model of selfhood, she achieves her goal of forestalling Simon’s departure and prolonging
her own narrative.
According to one reviewer, Grace’s “autobiography is shaped by her affectionate,
funny, incompatible relationship with a good doctor who is a crumbling man” (Auerbach 2).
Indeed, Simon is “crumbling,” becoming noticeably weaker in the course of each and every
visit with Grace, losing concentration at times and lacking the energy to keep up with her
story: “The trouble is that the more she remembers, the more she relates, the more difficulty
he himself is having. . . . It’s as if she’s drawing his energy out of him — using his own
mental forces to materialize the figures in her story” (338). Weakened and disoriented, he
becomes lost in the maze of Grace’s memories of her past and finds himself unable to keep
up with the story she is telling. Her narrative resembles a labyrinth in which Grace’s true
identity is lost, as she leads her listener to a place he cannot follow, where rational categories
such as “Truth” and “Falsehood” appear to lose all meaning.10 The ambiguity that results
from her perplexing narrative, whether intentional or unintentional, is expressed by a pun on
10 The metaphor of the narrative as a labyrinth, in which the reader/listener feels compelled to follow the narrator, recalls Lady Oracle: “According to Lady Oracle, autobiography is a labyrinth in which we must follow an elusive ‘I’ through the complex, multiple layers of her being.” (Grace, “Gender” 195).
her name: “I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as
being innocent” (398).
When he eventually contemplates writing a report for Verringer, Dr. Jordan finds that,
“[h]is hands are empty; he has discovered nothing . . . like those who have searched
fruitlessly for the source of the Nile” (340-41). His search for Grace’s memories of the
double murders brings disappointment and failure, with the result: “Nothing has been proved.
But nothing has been disproved, either” (451). Atwood invites the reader to view Simon’s
quest for Grace’s memory and identity as a quixotic adventure. Like the search for the
“source of the Nile” (340), his objective is revealed to be futile, as Grace’s self proves to be
too elusive for comprehension through his univocal discourse of rational science: her stories
resist the kind of meaningful closure Simon’s profession seeks to pin down. The tenets of
traditional autobiography present in the text are subverted from within as the ambiguity and
multiplicity of the narrator tries to resolve itself by expressing its own selfhood in terms of a
fixed and stable “I”-centred narrative, which; however, attracts grave doubts as to its
authenticity. Storytelling and performance are, then, organising concepts in Grace’s
construction of self through which she attempts to capture the ubiquity of her own identity in
a genre that traditionally demands a coherent and unified subject. By aligning herself with
cultural scripts and by telling stories to keep her listener hanging on to her every word, she
transforms her subjectivity from that of an object of discourse, to that of an agent, capable of
asserting her own narrative self-representation, and of questioning the discourses in which
she has been inscribed.
Chapter Three
Text and Textile: The Rhetoric of the Patchwork
As an art of assembly, juxtaposition, and improvisation, the image of the patchwork quilt
marks the beginning of each chapter and runs through the text as a leitmotif. The patchwork
offers an insight into the narrative strategies and structuring devices employed throughout
Alias Grace. The novel, like the patchwork quilt, privileges heterogeneity over resolution.
Each of the novel’s fifteen chapters begins with an illustration of a quilt pattern that
corresponds thematically with the contents of the chapter. For example, the pattern called
‘Pandora’s Box’ foreshadows the unveiling of Grace’s alternate identity in the neuro-
hypnotism scene, an event that plays havoc with the notion of a fixed and stable self. The
chapters of the novel also take their title from the name of these quilt patterns. The quilt
becomes an emblem of Atwood’s challenge to the homogenous model of selfhood that
expresses the limits of the traditional autobiographical narrative. It is also directly a way of
addressing the problem of historical truth, as the patchwork represents a spatialised model for
historical reconstruction and an alternative to the linear chronology of history. This chapter
examines the quilt as a pivotal signifier of the relationship between the subject, history, and
narrative representation, as it suggests an image through which the protagonist’s identity is
refracted into a kaleidescope of fragmentary forms which must be pieced together into a
textualised pattern so that other characters, and the reader, can reassemble the protagonist’s
identity for themselves.
The traditionally feminine activity of quilting, and its associated forms of textile
work, sewing, and embroidery, frame many of Grace’s daily duties both in the prison, and in
the Governor’s house, and a large part of her narrative is taken up with the description of
domestic scenes involving women’s textile work. Grace admires the quilts at Alderman
Parkinson’s residence: “Mrs. Alderman Parkinson had more pieced quilts than I’d ever seen
before in my life” (184-85). She tells Simon that she preferred her employer’s Tree of
Paradise quilt above all, and to the reader she remarks that, “it was a lovely thing, made of
all triangles, dark for the leaves and light for the apples, the work very fine, the stitches
almost as small as I can do myself” (112). She also describes the Memorial and Attic
Windows quilts, attaching a personal significance to their designs which will be discussed
later in this chapter. Her preoccupation with these domestic works of art link to the realist
detail that she employs in describing domestic tasks to her interlocutor and to the reader. As
one reviewer has commented, “Grace is stubbornly and essentially domestic” (Auerbach 2).
Indeed the domestic sphere is an essential part of Grace’s narrative and her sense of self is
clearly tethered to this realm.
Grace’s association with her work as a quilter and with the domestic sphere in
general, undermines the traditional conventions of self-representation. As Smith claims,
autobiography typically documented exemplary lives:
Autobiographies told of public and professional achievements, of individual
triumphs in strenuous adventures. . . . They charted a progressive narrative of
individual destiny, from origin through environment and education to
achievement. (Subjectivity 18-19)
Grace’s life follows a pattern of development that is contrary to the teleological Bildung of
the traditional subject of autobiography as there is no expectation of a teleological itinerary
for her as a murderess. Instead, Grace’s development follows an itinerary that sees her move
between the prescribed roles of “celebrated murderess,” and “model prisoner,” to that of
“innocent woman” upon her release from the Penitentiary. Towards the end of the novel,
Grace moves to New York and marries the former stable hand, Jamie Walsh, now a farmer
and landowner near Ithaca. As she takes up the role of good wife, devoted to her home and
her husband, and potentially even that of mother, the final domestic activity she describes is
the making of a traditional marriage quilt, the Tree of Paradise.
By focusing Grace’s narrative on domestic arts such as quilting, Atwood redefines
women’s devalued textile practices, transforming the domestic sphere into an active site for
women’s artistic creativity. Atwood follows late-twentieth-century trends in feminist
criticism which see women’s textile practices as a valuable tool for self-expression. In “The
Needle or the Pen: The Literary Rediscovery of Women’s Textile Work,” Elaine Hedges
illustrates the way that the feminine practice of textile handicrafts has been redefined,
particularly in terms of the originality of their designs:
The rediscovery and celebration of women’s traditional textile — the domestic
arts of spinning and weaving, sewing and quilting — constitutes by now a
widespread and peculiarly interesting development in contemporary feminist
thinking. In the past two decades, visual artists and art historians, social
historians, folklorists, poets and novelists, and most recently literary critics
and theorists have discovered in the process and products of the spindle,
shuttle, and the needle a major source for understanding women of the past,
and, as well, a source of subject matter and of images and metaphors for new
creative work. (338)
The patchwork quilt in particular has become a frequent and powerful trope in feminist
criticism and according to Elaine Showalter, “one of the most central images in this new
feminist art lexicon” since the women’s movement in the late 1960s (Sister’s 161). Atwood
participates in this contemporary critical revival of textile work traditionally associated with
women, by imaging the patchwork as a central trope for women’s artistic creativity.
While this reading of the textile-as-text is compelling, women’s textile practices may
also be considered in a rather less positive light: as a symbolic marker of women’s
circumscribed roles within the private sphere. In the nineteenth century, quilting was
reinforced as a quintessentially feminine practice through prescriptive advice manuals in
which sewing was discussed alongside advice on women’s moral and religious duties,
fashion, etiquette, and education. The advice offered in a selection of manuals announces the
idealisation of needlework as a respectable recreation for women of all ages during the
nineteenth-century. In Letters to Young Ladies, a manual for women published in 1839, the
author states that “[n]eedlework, in all its forms of use, elegance and ornament, has ever been
the appropriate occupation of woman” (16). The Female Preceptor recommends the
“entertaining productions of the needle” as a diversion that should be undertaken by women
in the afternoons (90). Similarly, in Mrs. William Parkes’ Domestic Duties, the author
advises “drawing, music, or light and ornamental needle-work” as suitable activities to pass
women’s time (404), and goes on to add that, “[t]he greater part of a woman’s life ought to
be, and necessarily must be, passed at home; the more sedentary resources, therefore, she
possesses . . . the less will she suffer from any occasional privations of society or even of
health” (406). The gendered significance attached to women’s textile practices in general, and
quilting in particular, is voiced by Mary in the novel, who remarks that quilts were an
important part of a woman’s trousseau: “a girl did not consider herself ready for marriage
here until she had three quilts, made by her own hands” (185).
Textile work, however, is also a means of liberating women from restrictive cultural
conditions, offering a socially acceptable personal and creative mode of expression. In their
respective essays on the quilt motif in Alias Grace, Margaret Rogerson and Sharon R. Wilson
focus on the linguistic freedom implicit in textile work. Rogerson asserts that the quilt is both
a symbolic cultural object and a “form of female discourse” through which women could
express repressive aspects of nineteenth-century ideology (6). For example, Grace’s “quilter’s
idiolect” allows her to encode information about her past she does not wish to discuss openly,
through a medium which is culturally available to her (Rogerson 6). Sharon R. Wilson claims
that the quilt in the nineteenth century is a “vehicle for breaking silence and speaking,” a
culturally acceptable activity for women whose circumscribed role of “nurturer” has
traditionally restricted their access to other art forms (125).
The relationship between textile work and literary creativity is announced by the
many metaphors the novel employs from the nomenclature of women’s textile work. Many of
these metaphors signal cunning or deceitful narrative strategies: for example, Grace’s lawyer
uses the metaphor of the text as textile to assert his view that her testimony is suspect by
remarking that “she spun out a yarn for me to as great a length as it would go” (439). Amid
the suspicion raised by Grace’s narrative, Simon mobilises this metaphor to refer to the
“spinning of her story” (451), and associates her sewing with deceit: “she knows she’s
concealing something from him. As she stitches away at her sewing, outwardly calm as a
marble Madonna, she is all the while exerting her passive stubborn strength against him”
(421). Grace is not the only character in the novel whose creativity in terms of the truth is
imaged through the metaphor of women’s textile work. Simon and Verringer discuss the
veracity of Susanna Moodie’s account of Grace and conclude that:
“Mrs. Moodie is a literary lady, and like all such, and indeed like the sex in
general, she is inclined to – ”
“Embroider,” says Simon. (223)
The novel also draws an equivalence between the activities of textile production, and
literary creativity that is expressed in the way Grace’s stories are told in the sewing room of
the Governor’s house, so that while Grace recounts her personal history, she is also stitching
away at a quilt block for the Governor’s wife and her daughters (112, 168), or a dress that
needs mending (280). She is put to work sewing quilts for one daughter’s trousseau,
including such patterns as the Pandora’s Box, and the Log Cabin. Grace’s sewing, and the
talking cure, progress simultaneously, suggesting a parallel between these two activities that
allow her to stitch the events and experiences of her life into a textualised pattern. Her
incessant sewing, as well as the talking cure, help Grace to avoid the chaos of a life without
meaning. The novel, however, suggests another, more ambiguous, function regarding the
activity of quilting, as one that facilitates her psychological withdrawal from the events that
she is narrating. At moments in her narrative, Grace circumvents certain questions Simon
asks by concentrating on her needlework: “keep[ing] silent, and continu[ing] to sew” (187),
so that a gulf emerges in her narrative between events and their representation, growing
wider as Grace contemplates her sewing while narrating stories which perhaps prove too
painful for her to tell. Unsatisfied with many of her answers, Simon is left to wonder “[w]hat
has Grace really been thinking about him, as she sewed and recounted?” (439).
The image of the patchwork emphasises the distinctive sense of creative
improvisation that goes into the process of quilting, including its block-by-block
construction, and the recycled materials from which the fabrics of the quilt blocks are
traditionally derived. According to Rogerson: “[q]uilts are not always made from new fabrics
purchased specifically for the purpose. They can be made using off-cuts from other sewing
projects or pieces from used garments, furnishings or other fabrics” (20). Furthermore, these
recycled materials traditionally carry a history for the quilter as they are derived from their
family and community:
traditional quilts are generally composed of fabric actually used by the
maker’s family and friends . . . Fabrics from pants, blouses, and dresses worn
in the past and associated with random daily events, sometimes significant
(such as weddings, birthings, and funerals), are brought together to form a
pattern. (Wilson 124-25)
The Tree of Paradise quilt is the final quilt that Grace describes in the novel and the
first that she has made for herself. Grace pieces together different fabrics in the ad hoc
manner suggested by Rogerson and Wilson. The pieces of fabric she uses for the pattern have
their own history, and together form a record of their donors:
One will be white, from the petticoat I still have that was Mary Whitney’s; one
will be faded yellowish, from the prison nightdress I begged as a keepsake
when I left there. And the third will be a pale cotton, a pink and white floral,
cut from the dress of Nancy’s that she had on the first day I was at Mr.
Kinnear’s, and that I wore on the ferry to Lewiston, when I was running away.
(534)
Grace embroiders around the edges of these pieces “to blend them in as a part of the pattern,”
so that “we will all be together” (534). She stitches together pieces of each of the women in
order to create a memorial to her dead friends Mary and Nancy that helps her to mourn the
loss of her female community and enables her to recall their lives.
Quilting in this instance, is not only a metaphor for the narrative processes of self-
representation: it is also directly a form of narrative itself. The quilt may be seen as an
alternative medium of autobiography that privileges a spatialised model over that of the linear
and teleologically oriented structure offered by verbal narrative. Sherrill E. Grace notes the
use of alternative mediums of autobiography in Atwood’s fiction, in particular the medium of
the canvas in Cat’s Eye as Elaine Risley, the novel’s narrator and an emerging visual artist,
“creates a verbal equivalent of her canvases, of one canvas in particular — ‘Unified Field
Theory’ — which is an autobiography, a self-portrait.” (Grace 200). This painting which,
rather like Grace’s Tree of Paradise quilt, is the last Elaine describes to the reader at the end
of the novel, also carries out a similar autobiographical function to verbal narrative. The
painting “replicates the novel Cat’s Eye and provides us with an alternate image of the
autobiographical ‘I’” (Grace 202). The quilt acts as a kind of canvas for Grace by enabling
her self-representation through a medium which was considered to be a culturally acceptable
recreation for women during the nineteenth century when other mediums of self-expression
such as “paints and canvas” were not available, or were considered to be “unfeminine”
(Rogerson 125).
Grace exploits the design possibilities for her autobiographical quilt, the Tree of
Paradise, by departing from the conventional pattern. Grace places just one tree in the centre
of her quilt, rather than the usual “four or more in a square or circle” (534). The colours
Grace chooses to illustrate the Tree will be red and purple. However, she intends to interrupt
this colour scheme by placing triangles of material from the clothing of Mary, Nancy and
Grace herself, so that the colours “white,” “faded yellowish,” “pink and white” are introduced
to the pattern (534). The border of her quilt will be comprised of snakes that “will look like
vines or just a cable pattern to others” (534), finely sewn so that others will not be able to
recognise them. Much like Grace’s deceptive narrative strategies which are hidden in her
text, the snakes remain hidden from the viewer in the fabric of her textile. Amelia Defalco
claims that quilts in the novel are “functionally a covering . . . emphasiz[ing] patterns of
concealment and revelation” (777). Although referring to the uncanny aspects of the body in
the text, Defalco’s articulation of the quilts as coverings may extend to the rhetorical
strategies of Grace’s narrative in which she moves between concealment and revelation in her
fictive autobiography. The self that Grace projects in her autobiographical narrative, as I have
argued in Chapter Two, is potentially deceptive, as it illustrates an authorial performance in
which she projects a self that outwardly appears to be unshaken by the trauma of her
involvement in the murders. Her propensity to tell stories Schehezerade-like with many
potential concealments and omissions, echoes the symbolism of the quilt as an object that
covers and conceals.
Improvisation, the ability to construct a project with indefinite materials, is a
distinctive feature of the patchwork design of quilts. The patchwork is “an art of eking out, an
art of ingenuity, and conservation” according to Showalter, which reflects the “uncertainty of
woman’s creative or solitary moments” (Sister’s 149). In the random and creative manner of
their construction, there is an equivalence that can be observed between the patchwork quilt
and the activity of bricolage defined by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1966). He
coined this term in the context of mythical thought; however, this concept can be extended to
the patchwork design of the quilt in which materials are recycled and reintegrated creatively,
to form an integrative whole. This design process involves firstly, “‘mak[ing] do with
whatever is at hand’. . . that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite
and is also heterogenous because what is contains bears no relation to the current project”
(Lévi-Strauss 18). With the materials gathered, the bricoleur self-reflexively considers how
to assemble the pieces, “to index the possible answers which the whole set can offer” (Lévi-
Strauss 19). The patchwork, as with the bricolage, is an innovative design process that Grace
employs in the construction of the quilt she makes for herself by creatively improvising from
available materials and assembling them in a carefully considered, and constructed manner.
As I have suggested, this design strategy can be extended from the patchwork to other
aspects of the novel. Grace’s narrative is also set against this approach as quilting in general,
and the Tree of Paradise in particular, come to represent the self-reflexive narrative strategies
that she employs in the construction of her autobiography. Grace contemplates what turn her
story will take, and explores the possible juxtaposition of materials, and how their assembly
will form a whole, when she says:
What should I tell [Simon]. . . . I could pick out this or that for him, some bits
of whole cloth you might say, as when you go through the rag bag looking for
something that will do, to supply a touch of colour. (410)
The “rag bag” of materials at her disposal contains past experiences, limited resources that
are enlarged by her abilities as a narrator/bricoleur, while her search for a “touch of colour”
that will adorn her narrative and make it more interesting for her interlocutor, suggests her
creative, and potentially deceptive, narrative strategy.
Grace is not only a Schehezerade figure, telling stories to forestall death: she is also
an Ariadne figure, whose narrative thread, however, does not show Theseus/Simon the way
out of the labyrinth.11 Rather she leads Simon deeper into the maze of her recollections.
When he reflects on the veracity of Grace’s narrative Simon expresses the possibility that her
narrative is a creative form of self-construction because “[a]nyone in her position would
select and rearrange, to give a positive impression” (374). Puzzled by her narrative, he
remains unable to fit the pieces together to form a pattern, and aware of the possibility that
Grace is adapting her story to his expectations because, afterall, “[h]e wants her to be
vindicated” (374).
The patchwork quilt, with its juxtaposition of different pieces, is a cultural object
whose interpretation does not resolve itself in any single definition, a view that Grace
articulates when she contemplates the meaning of the Attic Windows quilt:
it had a great many pieces, and if you looked at it one way it was closed boxes,
and when you looked at it another way the boxes were open, and I suppose the
closed boxes were the attics and the open ones were the windows; and that is
11 Staels suggests that the narrator evokes the image of both Ariadne, and the related figure of Arachne, “the weaver . . . who portrayed Zeus’s seductions and rapes in her tapestry” (433). The Ariadne motif is foregrounded when Dr. Jordan describes the human nervous system as “a thousand Ariadne’s clues, all leading to the brain” (217).
the same with all quilts, you can see them two different ways, by looking at
the dark pieces or else the light. (187)
Her own particular perspective on life emerges from her interpretation of this quilt. As a
woman who has been inscribed by various and contradictory discourses, Grace is in a
privileged position to recognise the ambiguity that characterises such cultural objects. As I
have shown in Chapter One, she is not exempt from the type of interpretation in which two
different conclusions may be derived “by looking at the dark pieces, or else the light,” either
the negative or the positive aspects of character and circumstance. Like Grace, the quilt
patterns resist any single meaning in the novel. Rather they insist on multiplicity by
consisting of both the light and dark elements which are filtered through one’s perspective.
* * * *
In a broader cultural context, the patchwork quilt and the design strategy to which it
refers can illuminate Atwood’s treatment of the problem of historical representation. In
Chapter One I argued that the novel participated in the genre of historiographic metafiction
by both inscribing and subverting the conventions of realist historical representation. Rather
than a straightforward documentary of historical events and persons, the novel’s version of
events problematises historical truth by leading readers to question whether it is possible to
know the past through its textual traces. Atwood’s assembly and juxtaposition of various
historical sources which, alongside the images of patchwork blocks, form the novel’s
epigraphs, illustrate the patchwork project that is narrative representation.
At the level of the novel’s structure, Atwood employs the design process of the
patchwork to shape history and her historical subject into a fragmentary, yet unified pattern. I
take my cue from Magali Cornier Michael who identifies the patchwork motif as a spatialised
model for imaging an alternative conceptulisation of history. She argues that the novel
“presents an intricate patchwork of texts as an ‘other’ means of representing historical events
and persons that rejects the mono-vision of traditional histories and highlights the processes
of framing and arranging pieces in juxtapositions” (421). Through this patchwork assembly
of texts, the novel engages in a deprioritisation of the text’s authority as all historical
documentation becomes “neither/both valid and fiction/fabrication” (Michael 421). Atwood’s
historiographic-metafictional structure both inscribes traditional methods of historical
reconstruction and subverts these methods, by arranging extratextual and textual references
into a series of juxtaposed and never authoritative patterns.
The novel’s chapters are each prefaced by an illustration of a quilt pattern which is
followed by a series of up to four epigraphs. These epigraphs are excerpts from various
historical sources, juxtaposed in each of the novel’s sections to underscore the fragmentary
nature of evidence that will be arranged to form a pattern. There are many perspectives of
Grace’s story represented in these epigraphs (numbering forty-three in total), with each one
asserting their own, equally plausible, version of the Kinnear-Montgomery murders. They
signal the composition of the historical archive as a patchwork of different voices, and
Grace’s voice as a thread in this complex collage. Through her assembly and juxtaposition of
these historical texts, Atwood erodes the possibility of a single authentic narrative arising
from these differing narrative perspectives, giving way to what Cristie March has called an
“authorial mosaic” (66), rather than a single and unified perspective on history. The
patchwork and the ‘mosaic’ each refer to the multi-layered and fragmentary nature of the
historical evidence employed in the novel.
The relationship between the patchwork quilt as a total structure made up of smaller
quilt blocks is an apt metaphor for Atwood’s critique of realist historical representation. A
quilt, like history, has no pre-existent totality, but consists of smaller pieces that are integral
to it. Each of the novel’s chapters is prefaced by archival material from sources such as
published court proceedings, the published confessions of Grace Marks and her co-accused
James McDermott, newspaper articles, a punishment book from the Kingston Penitentiary,
and a fictionalised account in Susanna Moodie’s Life in the Clearings of Grace’s life after her
arrest. The “Author’s Afterword” at the end of the novel also forms an extratextual reference
which functions to highlight this multi-layered pastiche. The extratextual materials embed the
novel proper into a deeper metafictional layer by referring to a world that appears to exist
outside the historical narrative. At the same time these texts are absorbed into the narrative
itself. Atwood’s metafiction is not structured like Russian dolls, with one story nested within
another; rather, as I demonstrate, each of these texts are leveled out in terms of their
authenticity to form a patchwork construction.
The novel’s epigraphs form paratexts - extratextual references employed in
historiographic metafiction that draw attention to the way in which we know and interpret the
past through discursive practices. According to Hutcheon, paratexts “in historiographic
metafiction move in two directions at once: to remind us of the narrativity (and fictionality)
of the primary text and to assert its factuality and historicity” (Politics 82). They both refer to
a world outside of the text, thereby highlighting the fictionality of the narrative proper, while
also certifying historical facts in the narrative by providing supporting evidence. Their
paradoxical function is evidenced in Alias Grace as Atwood both exploits and subverts
historiographic processes.
Paratexts form part of a complex cross-referencing system used by the historian to
authenticate historical facts and to assure the reader of their credibility. They illustrate a
positivist method of historical reconstruction in which processes of investigation, evidence
gathering, and documentation that comprise historical writing are laid bare. The reader is
made aware of a hierarchy of historical evidence, in which an arbitrary system of selection,
based as it is on the prioritisation of evidence into primary and secondary categories, appears
to be at work. This selection process, belonging to the domain of the historian, is however,
parodically inverted by Atwood, who inscribes within her novel, methods of authentication
used in traditional historiography, to highlight the problem of historical truth.
There is no historical account presented in the novel, whether textual or paratextual,
that is singled out as a totalising frame through which to view the truth of Grace’s past.
Instead, the novel’s paratexts, like the text itself, emphasise a multiplicity of possible
perspectives on the past. This alternative organisation of historical documents is illustrated in
Chapter Fourteen, which is prefaced by three paratexts which at first appear to bear no
relation to one another. The first is an excerpt from “The Warden’s Daybook,” in which the
author faults Grace for her conduct at the Penitentiary and asserts that she is guilty of a
“double or I may say (Bible) Murder” (483). This description of Grace as a sinner is set
against an excerpt from a journalist on the same page who cites her “exemplary conduct
during her whole thirty years incarceration” and points to a growing suspicion that she may in
fact have been wrongly convicted (483). The following page contains a work of non-fiction, a
poem referring to the epistolary contents of the chapter entitled “Letters.” The first two
historical documents quoted in the epigraphs echo the contents of the chapter by
corresponding thematically to that part of the novel. These two narrative accounts of Grace,
from a prison warden and a journalist respectively, closely parallel the tensions between
Verringer and Bannerling, and their correspondence with one another in this chapter. As
mentioned earlier, each man illustrates the contradictory and contingent nature of discourse
pertaining to Grace (see Chapter One). In a similarly way, the journalist and prison warden
play out the interpretive dilemma of ascribing Grace with a definitive character as the
contradictory opinions of these writers echo polarised public opinions on Grace.
According to Michael, the arrangement of the epigraphs at the beginning of the
chapter disrupts the traditional function of an extratextual reference, as they “do not merely
reinforce, inform, or accompany the lengthy “fictional” narratives but rather enter into active,
and, at times, dissonant dialogue with those narratives as well as with each other” (431-32).
Indeed, the patchwork design of the texts that make up the epigraphs does not support a linear
historical view or allow any single meaning to emerge from the pattern as authoritative. The
hierarchy of sources which traditionally frame historiography are undermined by a
deprioritisation of texts in which all historical sources that frame Grace’s story, as well as her
own narrative, become subject to the same scrutiny regarding authenticity and attract the
same scepticism from other characters, as well as from the reader.
This patchwork arrangement also opens up possibilities for historical revision. Grace
is able to defend her own perspective on history as her autobiographical narrative, as well as
her autobiographical quilt, the Tree of Paradise, become valid forms of historical material.
Atwood’s subversion of the hierarchy implicit in traditional historiography enacts a
revaluation of the women’s previously devalued practices and serves to highlight the
potential of women’s work as an active site of historical source material.
Patchwork, an art of improvisation, offers an image of self, history, and the narrative
representation of these phenomena as dynamic and full of possibility. It is at once
fragmentary and unifying, a design process that enables deconstruction and construction and
captures the illusive quality of truth which cannot be accessed outside of narrative
representations. The novel suggests an equivalence between women’s textile practices and
literary creativity, not least for the way in which quilting is recognised to be a type of
narrative through which Grace assembles the pieces of her life into a textual whole. Her
identity, like the dark and light patterns of the quilt, is thrown into relief, forming an image
that is open to many interpretive possibilities. The fragmentary nature of historical evidence
refers to a patchwork construction of history in the novel, one in which meaning is dispersed
across a range of historical texts and through time and space. The structure of the novel, made
up as it is of small sections with corresponding paratexts, illustrates an alternate view of
history as a quilt of fragments that resists unity in favour of multiplicity.
Quilting does not resolve the indeterminacy of the novel, but merely amplifies the
aporia at the centre of the text, the vexed question of Grace Marks’ identity. History and
identity are open to many interpretive possibilities. Moreover, they are always provisional,
improvised through a creative and personal process of appraisal and assembly which, as I
have shown, are akin to the project of patchwork quilt- making. Atwood invites the reader to
understand the patchwork as a key to the text itself, and to accept the heterogeneity which the
design process of assembly and juxtaposition evokes.
Conclusion:
Stitching New Patterns
Grace — whoever “Grace” may be, which is exactly what is at stake — is represented by a
compilation of different texts and rhetorical strategies formed by the fabric of narrative. One
of the only certainties offered in the novel is the close imbrication of narrative and
subjectivity and the mediated nature of representations of Grace. Narrative enables either
meaningful or paradoxical patterns of representation to emerge that appear to rely on the
perspective of other characters, and the reader. It is also a site in which Grace’s agentive
powers are most fully realised because it enables her to negotiate her subjectivity through a
series of self-representations in order to assert her own voice amid the contradictory voices
that inscribe her. Narrative textuality is a web that binds Grace, it also, however, allows her to
create new articulations of her self in language which undermine the notion of a homogenous
self. New self-articulations, as I have shown, are apparent in her Tree of Paradise quilt, which
parallels her patchwork project of narrative self-representation.
Atwood invites the reader to accept the ambiguity of Grace, as her own story is pieced
together block-by-block with those of others, in a patchwork of competing and contradictory
versions presented throughout the novel. An earlier poem of Atwood’s entitled “True Stories”
illuminates her perspective on the historical figure of Grace Marks, and her fictional
representation, as she articulates the contingent nature of human experience and the
impossibility of capturing the truth in the singular:
The true story lies
among the other stories,
a mess of colours, like jumbled clothing
thrown off or away,
like hearts on marble, like syllables, like
butchers’ discards.
The true story is vicious
and multiple and untrue
after all. Why do you
need it? Don’t ever
ask for the true story. (Selected 57)
In both the novel, as in the poem, Atwood tells readers that “[t]he true story lies/among the
other stories.” The epistemology of the text as a textile which is un-‘fixed,’ that is, no longer
anchored to realist forms and conventions, suggests possibilities for new models of
interpretation based on multiplicity, discontinuity, and fragmentation. Atwood’s questioning
of realist forms and conventions in the narrative spheres of history and autobiography points
to an alternative orientation for the subject that is no longer fixed or universal. Thus readers
themselves are able to piece together a pattern from the fragmentary evidence in the novel
relating to Grace, a pattern that is, however, always personal, always reliant on contingency.
Whether Grace is a murderer who helped to kill Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery at
their home in Kingston in July 1843, or an innocent victim who suffers from amnesiac lapses
of memory as a result of trauma, or both, becomes a moot point, overlooking the novel’s
innovative challenge to the enterprise of narrative representation.
Alias Grace implores readers to accept that the real “truth” of the protagonist is a
multiple and distorted patchwork of origins which lead to more patches, by way of revealing
the complex mystery of her character. To illustrate the reader’s interpretive dilemma, in an
interview Atwood told David Wiley that she began with nine quilt blocks, or sections to her
novel, and eventually ended up with fifteen (54). She remarks on the scope of her project that
“[i]t got bigger than I intended it to be” so that “I needed to have more [quilt blocks] to cover
the actual story as it unfolded” (Wiley 54). The difficulty experienced by the author in
managing the multiple possibilities of the novel points to a shared dilemma for author and
reader, as the limitless possibilities for constructing and reconstructing Grace’s story based
on evidence known to us is limited only by our ability to imagine alternative patterns. Like
Atwood, the reader too is free to invent order to fill in the gaps of the narrative in terms of
our own personalised patterns of meaning (“Author’s” 542).
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