JULIE GODIN
The colours never came out clear.… There was a misty look to them, as if they were seen through cheesecloth. They didn’t make the people seem more real, rather they became ultra-real: citizens of an odd half-country, lurid yet muted, where realism was beside the point.
—Atwood, The Blind Assassin
THE READER, THE scholar, and the critic know too well the moment, at the end of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, when “historical notes” intrude to operate a drastic repositioning of the narrative, which is suddenly configured as a problematic, mediated, “soi-disant manuscript” that has been shaped from jumbled recordings by a team of historians. Abruptly inserting a qualifying frame of temporal and intellectual distance, the text produces an editor, who addresses a gathering of colleagues to smugly declare his own adherence to a vision of ideological neutrality, and to remind his audience that “the past is a great darkness, filled with echoes” (HT 293). In a startling instant, our plucky handmaid, a covert agent of resistance whose elaborate confession of dissidence has detailed the workings of an immense machine of oppression, evaporates in favour of “L’histoire, cette vieille dame éxaltée et menteuse” (qtd in BA 163).
The instability of historical discourses and the problematic ways in which the ex-centric or dissident subject reaches us, embedded in structures of narration and comprehension, are assembled in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. By incorporating a “juxtaposition … of official and authorized texts”—published histories, newspaper clippings, interviews, confessions, letters, poems—with “more overtly fictionalized” narrative segments (Cormier Michael 421), Alias Grace enacts a democratization of history, a version of what Jacques Rancière calls the “space of an everything speaks” (58). Grace is a young immigrant girl, a maid-of-all-work, a criminal, a prisoner, a patient, an experimental subject. Simultaneously, she is subaltern, assimilated, unremarkable, yet also infamous, extraordinary, deviant, as the novel assembles established explanatory scripts that would “fix” and stabilize her. Do these self-reflexive scripts or “aliases” sustain alterity, or do they instead evacuate the possibility of a dissident voice rising above the din of gathered cultural and literary constructs?
While much has been written about this novel’s presentation of a disruptive, alternative “‘patchwork’ model for representing the past” (Cormier Michael 441),1 I want to reconsider the text’s function as a literary operation that presides over the constitution of the dissident subject, keeping in mind Rancière’s (somewhat cynical) reminder that literature “suppresses and maintains at the same time, it neutralizes by its own means the condition that makes history possible and historical science impossible: the unhappy property that the human being has of being a literary animal” (52).
The word “alias,” which in English points to a deliberate slippage or substitution of names, is used in Latin (alius or alia) to signify “another, other, different.” Alias Grace’s celebrated patchwork structure functions not only to problematize our reception of the “echoes” that reach us as history but also to self-reflexively develop a subject who is always yet another thing.
Grace can be read within the novel’s textured cultural landscape as a romantic figure, but also as a dissatisfied, resentful worker, a hysterical woman, a victim of spectral forces, a manipulative sinner, and a psychological or neurological anomaly.2 The text provides an elaborate compendium of explanatory structures, and Grace, the maid-of-all-work, discloses the extent to which the cultural work of interpretation is to be anticipated and directed by a narrative apparatus that generates its own repertory for the revelation of deviance. In a kind of keepsake book gathering dominant scripts of the female ex-centric, troubled, or delinquent subject in nineteenth-century literary and popular culture, she acknowledges these constructs and the way in which she has been “picked up” by “collectors” (41) and required to provide “a right answer, which is right because it is the one they want, and you can tell by their faces whether you have guessed what it is” (40). Delivered with self-referential nods to the discursive and literary modes that are assembled in her narrative, Grace’s first-person “answer” to the confessional framings of her story serves to catalogue and critique, but also to fulfill the cultural expectations that attend her self-revelation as a nineteenth-century murderess. “Wring your hands in anguish,” she mimics ironically, “describe how the eyes of your victims follow you around the room, burning like red-hot coals … confess, confess. Let me forgive and pity … tell me all” (35).
In her detailed, elaborate narrative, then, does she not enact the workings of normalization as envisaged by Michel Foucault—a normalization that “proceeds by way of confession” (6)? John Caputo and Mark Yount remind us that Foucault’s reading of institutions does not credit power relations with the abolition of the individual but, rather, with the production of subjects whose “exceedingly personal dossiers, elaborate records of … individual life and personal history” are known, precisely because “patients are brought out of the dark chamber of the prison and endowed with the power to speak” (6).
In “The Dangerous Individual,” Foucault traces what he sees as a social and institutional requirement that the accused subject provide not simply an admission of criminal acts, but “confession, self-examination, explanation of oneself, revelation of what one is” (Politics 126). This discourse is necessary to the extent that the accused subject is urged, pushed, if he does not “play the game”:
He is not unlike those condemned persons who have to be carried to the guillotine or the electric chair because they drag their feet. They really ought to walk a little by themselves, if indeed they want to be executed. They really ought to speak a little about themselves, if they want to be judged. (127)
For Alias Grace’s first-person narrator, disclosure provides the structure that contains and carries the subject inexorably: “I must go on with the story. Or the story must go on with me, carrying me inside it, along the tracks it must travel” (298).
Foucault, who, as we know, turned much of his attention to the excavation of what he called “singular lives,” endeavoured to anthologize such “existences” and, in the case of his La vie des hommes infâmes, to create “une sorte d’herbier,” (237)3 a book of preserved yet long-extinguished deviances:
I have looked for obscure lives … without the privileges of birth, fortune, holiness, heroism or genius; [I have wanted that there be] in their mishaps, their passions, in these loves and hatreds something grey and ordinary to the gaze that usually considers what is worthy of being told; [I have wanted] that yet they be marked by a certain ardour, that they be animated by a violence, an energy, an excess in malevolence, villainy, baseness, stubbornness or ill-fate that will have given them, in the eyes of their entourage … a kind of awesome or pitiful greatness. (240)
In the archives of imprisonment that Foucault presents, haphazardly found documents formulate the points of contact at which these ex-centric, delinquent lives encounter the workings of a power apparatus that would enumerate, describe, and classify them. Would there be any remains of these violent and singular subjects, asks Foucault, if they had not at some point encountered and provoked the machinery of control? Do we not find in the “brief and strident” language that circulates between the forces of power and the most “inessential” lives the only monument, the only memorial that might carry word of these lives across time to us (241)?
Alias Grace is structured much in keeping with Foucault’s observations of the extent to which the “singular life” is reduced to flashpoints across the grids and structures that contain and construct the subject. The novel establishes a structure by which Grace’s “confessional” narrative is situated within a textual rendering of its own reception according to a series of cultural scripts: we note, for instance, a literary script of beautiful, enigmatic suffering, a popular “law and order” script of fascination and outrage, and a psychoanalytic script of hysteria. Each dominant “brief and strident” memorial to the historical subject “Grace Marks” is externally or paratextually4 featured in an epigraph or other “keepsake,” but also “internally” incorporated into a narrative homage to Victorian culture. The text thus demonstrates a further layering of discursive functions, by enacting and ironizing the application of constructs it has captured. When, for example, the novel refers to nineteenth century romance, it incorporates literary markers of the genre, even while the subject narrates her construction as an iconic reminder of romantic convention, and her own participation in proffering the stylistic and generic hallmarks of romance. “If I laughed out loud … it would spoil their romantic notion of me,” asserts Grace, who self-consciously attributes her use of overblown descriptive formulas to the influence of Sir Walter Scott. Strikingly, in recounting a moment of closeness with Mary, the fellow servant whose death will precipitate Grace’s hysteric outbursts, Grace suggestively notes that Mary “wrapped [her] up in a sheet” as she made her way to the attic, and told her she “looked very comical, just like a madwoman” (132). The novel further develops the dominance of a Victorian tradition of sensation and crime novel by playing out the deployment of supernatural/spiritual open-ended discourses against scientific/legal vocabularies of expertise and closure.5
One of these specialized, authoritative discourses, as I have proposed, is clinical psychoanalysis, positioned here as a framing script according to which the troubled, hysterical subject narrates “memories” and dreams proffered specifically for the barely suppressed enjoyment of her therapist. The analyst, Dr. Simon Jordan, is introduced as inhabiting a nightmare parody of classical psychoanalytic clichés. An admirer of Charcot who recalls his own (very Freudian) childhood seduction by his family’s servant girl, Simon is tormented by a sullen maid named Dora,6 whom he figures as resembling a “disappointed baby,” and hostilely describes as having a mind that is “cunning, slippery and evasive. There is no way to corner her. She’s a greased pig” (61). Such layered ironies should warn us against the temptation of reading the product of his “talking cure” without taking into account the mediating and distorting framing structure that shapes it. Grace’s narrative reaches the reader through a play of revelations and withholdings that constitutes a therapeutic “story rich in incident … as a sort of reward” to the analyst (247). As Grace receives validation for voicing her elaborate dreams, the libidinal economy is undeniable:
Dr. Jordan is writing eagerly, as if his hand can scarcely keep up, and I have never seen him so animated before. It does my heart good to feel I can bring a little pleasure into a fellow-being’s life, and I think to myself, I wonder what he will make of all that. (281)
Adding to this distancing mirror-within-a-mirror effect fostered by the novel, the self-revelation of this “awful and pitiful” subject is received, within the text, according to a recognition of the movement by which one “can deceive by feigning to deceive” (73). Slavoj Zizek discusses this kind of double deception as it is exemplified in popular culture, and mentions notably a scene enacted by the Marx Brothers:
Groucho defends his client before the court of law with the following argument in favour of his insanity: “This man looks like an idiot and acts like an idiot—but this should in no way deceive you: He IS an idiot!”…. By “pretending to be something,” by acting as if we “were something,” we assume a certain place in the inter-subjective symbolic network, and it is this external place that defines our true position. If we remain convinced, deep within ourselves, that “we are not really that,” if we preserve an intimate distance toward “the social role we play,” we doubly deceive ourselves … for in the social-symbolic reality things ultimately are precisely what they pretend to be. (74)
Grace narrates the manifestations of what Dr. Jordan expects to be her “hidden” inner subjectivity, by revealing the very indicia of hysteria that he requires, and she offers for his tireless transcription every sign, every literary component of the classification with which she constantly wrestles:7 that of a classic Victorian hysteric. Dr. Jordan states that he cannot “shake the suspicion that… she is lying,” and his response to her is structured as if she were “deceiving by means of truth itself’ (Zizek 73): she looks and acts like a Victorian hysteric, and that should in no way deceive him as to her being, in fact, a Victorian hysteric. Dr. Jordan’s deepest moment of anxiety occurs as he clings to the logic according to which “we effectively become something by pretending we already are that” (73). Perturbed by the spectacle of Grace’s hypnosis, he “knows what he saw and heard, but he may have been shown an illusion, which he cannot prove to have been one” (407).
In this uneasy sense that the murderess has been revealed to be alias—another, different—(yet continues to elude this), the reader recognizes the lingering question at the heart of this novel. To paraphrase John Caputo’s examination of Foucault’s legacy, if there is no “message from the depths” (247), if the subject is simply produced in various modalities, and nothing but additional constructs are shown to be repressed, lost, or silenced along the way, why worry about the forms that this literary formulation of “Grace Marks” has taken? “If nothing is repressed,” suggests Caputo, “then nothing is to be liberated” (248). The narrating power of the murderess, in this novel, never announces itself as a liberated, or liberating function, but is rendered instead as a framed, crowded, saturated element through which the subject can keep moving. That movement, as we see in Alias Grace and subsequently in The Blind Assassin, disturbs configurations of victimhood and oppression, and complicates our attempts to distinguish the dissident, the normalized, the clandestine, or the authorized. These texts remove the threat of sabotage and the promise of empowerment, but offer an oblique, perverse, and resilient opportunity to shift and reconfigure, to decide, as Atwood does in Murder in the Dark (1983), that
if you like, you can play games with this game. You can say: the murderer is the writer, the detective is the reader, the victim is the book. Or perhaps, the murderer is the writer, the detective is the critic, and the victim is the reader. … In any case, that’s me in the dark. (30)
—University of Ottawa
1. See Cormier Michael: “The novel’s patchwork quilt design functions as … an alternative in its ability to unsettle and move beyond authoritative (patrilineal) discourses and forms and, at the same time, conditionally authorize previously marginalized discourses and forms” (441). On reading the “patchwork” of Alias Grace, see also lennifer Murray and Marie Delord.
2. Hilde Staels goes as far as to provide a case history and diagnosis (“multiple or dissociative identity disorder” [437]) for the novel’s “Grace Marks”: “Grace Marks has a history of repressing painful memories … her fits of hysteria and her traumatic amnesia result from the early loss of her mother and presumably from sexual abuse by her father” (436).
3. The translation of Foucault’s preface to La vie des homes infâmes is my own. I prefer to keep the word “herbier,” which speaks to the preservation of something that was once alive.
4. Cormier Michael discusses the status of paratext in Alias Grace (431–32).
5. I am thinking, for example, of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, in which an eerie, fantastical, irrational element (the “appearing” woman) is transmuted into one cog in an elaborate legal problem of property rights.
6. On Dora in Alias Grace, see Staels (433). On the feminist and critical “cult of Dora,” see Showalter (57–58).
7. For a discussion of the theatricality and variety of hysterical symptoms, see Showalter (Chap. 3). Grace does exhibit precisely the types of reactions and behaviours that would have confirmed a diagnosis: “fits,” amnesia, “visual disturbances,” somnambulism, suggestiveness to hypnosis.
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
———. The Blind Assassin. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000.
———. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985.
———. Murder in the Dark. Toronto: Coach House, 1983.
Caputo, John. “On Not Knowing Who We Are: Madness, Hermeneutics, and the Night of Truth in Foucault.” In Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, edited by John Caputo and Mark Yount, 233–62. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Caputo, John and Mark Yount. “Institutions, Normalization, Power.” In Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, edited by John Caputo and Mark Yount, 3–23. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Cormier Michael, Magali. “Rethinking History as a Patchwork: The Case of Atwood’s Alias Grace.” Modern Fiction Studies 47, no. 2 (2001): 421–47.
Delord, Marie. “A Textual Quilt: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.’ Études canadiennes/Canadian Studies, no. 46 (1999): 111–121.
Foucault, Michel. Dits et Écrits. Vol. 2.1976–1988. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.
———. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.
Murray, Jennifer. “Historical Figures and Paradoxical Pattern: The Quilting Metaphor in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 26, no.l (2001): 65–83.
Rancière, Jacques. The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge. Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1994.
Showalter, Elaine. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Staels, Hilde. “Intertexts of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.’ Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 2 (2000): 427–50.
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991.