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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