Marilyn Rose
As Laura Marcus notes in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, “Detective fiction has played and continues to play a complex and curious role in relation to the broader field of literature.” In its doubleness—as it presents both an “absent story” concerning an unsolved crime, and a “second story,” which is the narrative of an investigation that will lay bare the facts of the first—the detective genre is remarkably versatile and open to experiment. In the tension, for example, between the absent narrative, the mystery surrounding a crime, and the investigative narrative, with its emphasis on assembling clues and solving a conundrum, the detective story exhibits a capacity for self-reflexivity or meta-literariness that draws attention to the reading process itself and its underlying epistemological desires (245).
As such, the detective genre particularly invites postmodern play, the construction of narratives in which the quest for certainty that underlies the classic detective paradigm can be questioned and (most probably) found wanting. Heta Pyrhonen goes so far as to say that detective fiction “serves as a kind of laboratory for testing various critical hypotheses and methodologies” of all kinds (quoted in Marcus 245). Hence it is not surprising that the roster of contemporary writers who employ the crime fiction formula for purposes of interrogation and subversion is lengthy, and includes writers as varied as Jorge Luis Borges, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Josef Skvorecky, Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, and Paul Auster. It is within this context, and this lustrous company, that Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) invites—and rewards—critical scrutiny.
One of Canada’s most renowned writers, Margaret Atwood is also famously heterodox. Since 1961, she has published fourteen novels, seven short-story collections, seventeen poetry collections, eight books for children, ten book-length works of non-fiction, three edited anthologies, and countless essays and shorter opinion pieces that have appeared in print and electronic media of all kinds. Her works have been translated into at least twenty-one languages, and she is familiar to international audiences from radio and television appearances and the lecture circuit in Canada and abroad.
From a literary point of view, however, what is probably most remarkable is Atwood’s interest in genre—not only in terms of the range and variety of forms she employs, but also in the ways in which she frequently exploits generic modes and conventions, at times fusing or otherwise turning genres on their heads in service to what I see as an intellectual agenda that lies at the core of each of her writerly productions. To read Atwood in any and all of the forms to which she turns her prodigious mind (and hand) is to be asked to consider, and to reconsider, challenging propositions that are imbedded in even the most apparently straightforward of her works.
Alias Grace is one such tour de force. Atwood has famously, and coyly, observed that Alias Grace is “not a murder mystery, but a mystery about a murder,” adding that “in a murder mystery, you have to come up with the solution, or the readers will rise up against you. You can’t just end it by saying, ‘Well, I don’t know’” (quoted in Basbanes). Clearly, by inference, a “mystery about a murder” may be something else. In any case, the comment is but one of the many cryptic ways in which Atwood draws attention to her novel as a crime fiction, but one that will frustrate the expectations of readers used to the comfortable conventions of detective fiction, that most “consolatory” of genres (Evans 159).
Alias Grace fails to comfort or solace, of course, and instead resorts to the use of destabilizing tactics that are themselves wonderfully satisfying even as they call into question the philosophical assurances that are imbedded in formula fiction and help to explain its popularity. On the one hand, Alias Grace stoutly resists categorization, referencing more than one genre and launching competing discourses, as numerous critics have noted.1 At the same time, however, the novel specifically foregrounds the detective genre and interrogates its modes and protocols in direct and challenging ways. Indeed the interplay between “detective fiction” and its putative opposite, “anti-detective” or “metaphysical” detective fiction, constitutes much of the pleasure in reading this text. In the end, moreover, as this essay will argue, Alias Grace not only employs both detective and anti-detective conventions but in postmodern fashion ultimately refuses to guarantee either2—a marker of Atwood’s own elusiveness, her resistance to readerly and critical modes of detection, driven as they are by the will to know, to pin down and categorize, one way or another.
The notion that detective fiction and anti-detective fiction are opposites, the one fundamentally modern and the other a postmodern response to the modern, is well established. As has often been observed, detective fiction is an inherently conservative genre. It focuses on homicide, an act of unspeakable horror that is destabilizing in its attack on the social order and made worse by our not knowing who has committed this act or why. It culminates, typically, in the restoration of social order when the crime is solved through the deductive powers of a detective figure. Transgressors are identified and, with any luck, properly punished. The successful conclusion of the case endorses hegemonic assumptions, according to Christine Ann Evans, reinforcing “the prevalent ideology, … those notions and useful schemata by which our society imagines itself, and with which it masks the real forces at work within it” (161). As such it consoles. There is reassurance in closure, in the way everything “fits in” and “comes out” in the end (Kermode 180), and in the idea that rationality can “solve all” through the application of reason, through “syllogistic order,” which is to say through the dedicated application of “the mind” (Holquist 172–73).
In contrast, so-called anti-detective fiction—in which the detective formula is evoked and employed only to be frustrated by lack of closure, by the failure of logic to solve a particular mystery, and, ultimately, by a denial of knowing and certainty—is assumed to be radically destabilizing and to challenge hegemonic assumptions. A mystery that is not solved, that does not end, that fails to guarantee, is an “anti-mystery,” a sub-genre particularly well suited to exposing the deceptive pleasures and false consolations of positivistic inquiry of all kinds. What Michael Holquist calls the “metaphysical” detective story adopts some of the conventions of the classic detective fiction mode but rejects its telos—so that readers are forced to assemble clues “not [in order] to reach a solution, but to understand the process of understanding” (149). If the point of the classical detective story is the recovery of “a hidden or lost story (that is, the crime), and the process of reconstruction (that is, the detection)” (Huhn 451), that of the postmodernist crime writer is to capsize those expectations as a way of signalling epistemological limits (Holquist 165).
In the “inverted” or anti-detective story of our time, we are told by its theorists, things “call for” explanation, but “the plot … thicken[s] alarmingly,” there is an excess of clues and information, elements “defy all systems,” and there is only one “serious, obvious” response possible, finally, on the reader’s part—not that of knowing in any final way, but merely “that of being there” (Robbe-Grillet as cited in Holquist 165–66). The metaphysical detective story, Holquist continues, is not concerned with answered questions or neat endings, but is “rather a fresh sheet of paper, on which the reader … must hand-letter his own answers”; “its telos is the lack of telos, its plot consists in the calculated absence of [resolved] plot.” The reader, if he or she is to experience the book, must “do what detectives do,” must collate all the clues provided. But in the end, the assembly of clues will end “in zero, or a circle, the line which has no end” (170–71).
At first glance, Alias Grace would appear to qualify as straight-up detective fiction. Rooted in Canadian history, it explores a real-life historical crime, the true story of the double murder of Thomas Kinnear and his pregnant housekeeper/mistress, Nancy Montgomery, in the basement of Kinnear’s farmhouse in Richmond Hill, Ontario, in 1843. Atwood adheres to all known facts about the case. Grace Marks, an immigrant Irish serving girl barely 16 years of age at the time of the crime, was found guilty of Kinnear’s murder along with her alleged accomplice, James McDermott, who was also in Kinnear’s employ. McDermott was sentenced to death, then publicly hanged a few months after the crime and sentencing, in November 1843. However, Grace Marks, his putative accomplice, escaped that fate. While McDermott’s confession had seriously implicated her, claiming that she had instigated the crime and promised sexual favours in return for the executions she desired, Grace’s own sentence, thanks to the cleverness of her lawyer and a number of well-placed petitioners on her behalf—and given her youth, her impressionability, and her sex—was commuted to life imprisonment.
In the end, as Theresa Goldberg recounts, Grace Marks served more than 30 years in the Kingston Women’s Penitentiary (as well as a short period at the Lunatic Asylum in Toronto), never confessing and always maintaining that she could not remember what happened at the time of the murders. As a model prisoner, some of her time was spent as a servant in the home of the governor of the penitentiary, where her propriety and rectitude were often observed by visitors to his residence, including the official medical visitors dispatched from time to time by her long-standing advocates who tirelessly sought evidence that would lead to her release. In the end, none unlocked the mystery of Grace Marks and the degree of her involvement in the heinous crime, but ultimately her petitioners won the approval of John A. Macdonald, who himself signed a pardon in 1872. After her release, the warden and his daughter transported Grace Marks to a safe house in the United States, after which she escaped into anonymity.
And so the historical puzzle remains. Was Grace Marks a murderess or not? As Goldberg observes,
Grace herself gave three versions of what happened that day in a secluded farmhouse in Richmond Hill.… The scandal sheets reported much, but with little accuracy; the judicial records themselves are slight; there are no photographs, no fingerprints, no DNA samples to help us.… Grace [remains] half flesh and blood, half myth.3
Such a “mystery about a murder,” not surprisingly, proves fertile ground for the wily Atwood, who was not satisfied with her own far less nuanced first take on the Grace Marks story, The Servant Girl, a CBC television play that aired in 1974. In Alias Grace, she re-dramatizes and re-fictionalizes the Grace Marks story, beginning with the creation and insertion of a “detective,” Simon Jordan, into her own record of the crime.
In Alias Grace, Dr. Jordan, a physician with an interest in mental disorders, particularly amnesia and hysteria, is sent by Grace’s supporters to determine what happened at the Kinnear farmhouse and, it is hoped, to exonerate her in the process. He uses all of the methods of the scientist, the positivist who relies on the “little grey cells” that Christie’s Poirot signals as the main tool of those who would solve mysteries. Simon interrogates his suspect assiduously, attempting to establish Grace’s guilt or innocence by breaking her down. During their meetings, she is interviewed in a box, a site familiar to crime story aficionados. In this case, the box is the sewing room at the governor’s mansion, to which she is escorted by goonish prison guards each inquiry day, and from which she is released back into their custody for her return to prison after each interrogation.
Simon’s actions in approaching the case of Grace clearly owe much to the strategies typically employed by literary detectives. He reads pamphlets, studies her portrait, approaches her wearing a deliberately assumed “calm and smiling face,” and presents to her “an image of goodwill” in order to win her trust (59). He questions her gently, bears gifts from the garden that he hopes will uproot her memories, and resists bearing arms (such as the knives physicians carry in their black bags) in her presence. He duly attempts to reconcile narratives—Mrs. Moodie’s, Mr. McDermott’s, and Grace’s own (190)—and visits Grace’s lawyer in Toronto as well as her former residence in Richmond Hill in an attempt to further fill himself in. His language makes it clear that his goal is to get to the “bottom of” things (320): Grace may be “a hard nut to crack” (54), but he will “approach her mind as if it is a locked box” to which he must simply “find the right key” (132).
That Simon’s quest is covertly prurient, however, is perhaps our first clue that the paradigm “detective restores order to universe by solving mystery” is, in Alias Grace, in danger of subversion. Detective fiction is essentially voyeuristic, of course, for it relishes exposing the secret/the private/the covered-up to eager public eyes. But Simon Jordan’s subterranean sexualized desire, as deployed against Grace Marks, is remarkably brutal. He is said to watch Grace sew “as if he was watching her undress, through a chink in the wall” (91). He imagines her as “his territory” (301). He longs to “open her up like an oyster” (133). He sees her as quarry, “a female animal” with “something fox-like and alert” about her, and feels “an answering alertness along his own skin”—the hunter’s own “bristles lifting” (90). His deepest yearning is to see her “at last crack open, revealing her hoarded treasures” (307).
Atwood ups the ante by sharing Simon’s lewd dreams with us, along with his frequenting of European bawdy houses, his shoddy affair with his pathetic landlady, his mental game of imagining all the women he meets as prostitutes (57), and especially his lecherous thoughts of sweet, innocent Lydia, whose throat and bosom seem to him to be “sculpted of whipped cream” and who, he muses, “should be on the platter instead of the fish” like a Parisian courtesan (193). And all of this is in addition to his highly symbolic, perhaps even demonic, initial act in attempting to tempt a powerless woman, Grace herself, with apples. Simon’s fantasies border on vivisection and necroscopy: he believes that his gaze undoes women and makes them strangely dependent upon him because his knowledge of the female body has been “gained through a descent into the pit”; “he has opened up women’s bodies and peered inside”; he has “touched, incised, plundered, remade” them; he has plumbed their depths in ostensible pursuit of knowledge (82). In one of his more chilling dreams, he imagines having his instruments at the ready and preparing to “lift off [the] skin [of a woman], whoever she is, or was, layer by layer. Strip back her rubbery flesh, peel her open, gut her like a haddock” (351).
Within the detective paradigm, Grace is that familiar crime fiction figure, the “Worthy Opponent” of the “Great Detective”—the most wary, most guarded, most controlled and most slippery of murder suspects, and more than an equal match for her would-be nemesis.4 After more than sixteen years of being tried by powerful men of every stripe, Grace knows the game, which is to tell them only what is to her advantage in a given situation. Simon openly acknowledges her formidability, indicating that “he wants to be convinced … wants her to be vindicated,” but what he needs is “certainty one way or the other, and that is precisely what she is withholding from him” (322). There is never any question that Grace lies to Simon, that she “think[s] up things to say” (68) that will amuse him or confuse him, Scheherazade-fashion,5 as long as she can, and that she will never escort him into the “cellar below” where the truth is hidden (212), no matter how many fruits and root vegetables he brings her. Rather she will tantalize him, as she has always done with men, by dangling before them the carrot of their own deepest desires. How cleverly Grace works Simon Jordan, playing to his unspoken fantasies, at one point by mentioning that she once observed women who “made a living by selling their bodies” and that she “thought if worse came to worst and if starving, [she] could still have something to sell” (152). What could possibly hold his attention more than an invitation to imagine her self-prostitution? Grace is nothing if not utterly shrewd, with her ability to keep her face “still,” her eyes “wide and flat, like an owl’s in torchlight” (26), and with her hard-won knowledge that those of the upper classes like to “collect” things, that no one comes to see her unless “they want something” (38), and that Simon is, at base, one who “thinks all he has to do is give me an apple, and then he can collect me” (41).
Above all there is Grace’s wariness of the thing that surgical Simon most represents: invasion, as in the doctor’s bag full of shining knives that causes her first blackout (29). Her deepest fear is of “being cut open” (30) and of analogous acts, as is reflected in her fear of slits like the one cut in the prison door through which an anonymous “eye” can stare (35). Even when relatively comfortable with Simon, her vigilance never wavers and she reports her deepest fears—of being torn open “like a peach” or, worse, of becoming complicit in that act, of being “too ripe and splitting open of [one’s] own accord,”6 though there is reassurance on her part in knowing that at the heart of a peach there is always unbreachable “stone” (69).
In the end, Simon’s detection fails: he is no match for Grace. He may attempt to excuse himself as a victim of self-dosing with laudanum, taken of necessity for an intestinal disorder, but it is patently clear (and this is the “bottom” that he comes to) that Simon Jordan simply cannot cope with the confessional excess that is Grace Marks: he characterizes her narrative as a “thread he’s been following” (291), but as they near the centre of the maze, wherein some sort of monstrosity resides,7 he admits that
the more she remembers, the more she relates, the more difficulty he himself is having. He can’t seem to keep track of the pieces. It’s as if she’s drawing his energy out of him—using his own mental forces to materialize the figures in her story, as the mediums are said to do in their trances. (291)
Interestingly he ends by imagining himself married and “his dear wife winding him up gradually in coloured silk threads like a cocoon, or like a fly snarled in the web of a spider” (292), a reflection or displacement of the way in which the clever seamstress Grace Marks has sewn him up.8
That Simon’s positivistic detection should end in failure will come as no surprise to Atwood’s readers, however. In a sense, the game has been afoot from the start, given the extratextual and narrative strategies through which Atwood carefully constructs her readers as detectives in pursuit of the truth about a crime—while simultaneously conditioning them to the notion that the case of Grace Marks will be especially resistant to solution. Some argue that all reading is detection and all readers detectives. Dennis Porter, for example, observes that every narrative to some extent depends for success “on its power to generate suspense,” and that this state of expectancy “may be present in verbal forms at all levels, from a sentence to a full-length novel—something that accounts for the urge felt by listeners to complete other people’s dangling sentences” (29). In the case of Alias Grace, however, Atwood’s enticement of her readers into the detective paradigm—into responding like detectives in pursuit of solutions to puzzles—is extraordinary, and begins with the packaging of the narrative, with the “container” that is the book itself.
To begin with, the book’s dust cover is particularly provocative in featuring an image that Atwood herself selected, a portrait not of Grace Marks but of Grace in the guise of Elizabeth Siddal as rendered by her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This particular image of Siddal was selected, Atwood has said, partially because of its considerable resemblance to historical descriptions of Grace Marks, particularly in the matter of her red hair. However, those who follow Atwood’s lead and pursue the historical figure of Elizabeth Siddal will discover more. Siddal was herself something of a chameleon. The subject of many paintings by the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, she was configured as an “ideal woman,” embodying both physical and spiritual beauty—but is also seen to have represented an ambiguous combination of “angelic purity and erotic sexuality” (Adamo 159). Siddal appears in many guises in widely circulated paintings, including as Shakespeare’s Ophelia, as Dante’s Beatrice, and as Regina Cordium, “The Queen of Hearts.” Of greatest relevance to Alias Grace, however, may be the fact that Atwood chose not to use Siddal’s self-portrait (1854), but selected instead one of Rossetti’s versions of her, in “Head of a Girl in a Green Dress” (1850–65). Grace Marks as represented by Elizabeth Siddal as represented by Daniel Rossetti is thus a chameleon from the start.
Grace’s presentation as a historical figure in the guise of another dis/guised literary-historical figure is reinforced by the novel’s title, in which the word “Alias” again suggests the covert, and when connected to the protagonist’s name, “Grace Marks,” invites further interrogation. While Grace Marks’s name is historical and not invented, it suits perfectly the work that Atwood chooses to undertake in this novel, as it suggests the unfixability that characterizes her treatment of this historical figure as the novel unfolds. “Grace” means “gift of god,” yet we note that her therapist, Simon Jordan, is ultimately severed from “faith” in his quest for “Grace” in this novel, which suggests a certain perversity at the level of the gift-giving gods in Atwood’s universe. As for “Marks,” the suggestion of indelible inscription carried by the word “mark” is very quickly undercut by the fact that her surname is plural, which points towards the multiplicity, the Protean nature, the excess of meaning that is this woman in this fiction.
Further, entering the text through the gateway of its epigraphs is equally unsettling. The quotation from William Morris declaring from “The Defence of Guenevere” that “whatever may have happened, God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie” suggests the indeterminacy of knowing: all we have is what “may have” happened and competing versions of the “truth.” The second, from Emily Dickinson’s letters, declaring that “I have no Tribunal,” implies that complex, renegade women simply cannot be assessed by the logic of the law. And the third, from Eugene Marais, in The Soul of the White Ant—in declaring that one cannot tell what light “is,” only what it “is not,” and that the essence of light (“What is light?”) and its motives (“What is the motive of the light?”) would need to be pinned down before truth could be told—indicates the tenuousness, if not the utter impossibility, of grasping and categorizing something that “is,” even if we know what it “is not.”
As well, the table of contents, wherein each of the fifteen sections that comprise the novel is given the name of a quilt pattern, is equally unsettling given all that quilts can represent. Quilt titles may seem appropriate in Alias Grace, since quilting was so much a part of domestic life in rural Ontario in the nineteenth century, and since Grace herself is an accomplished seamstress whose narrative culminates in exegesis related to the marriage quilt she herself has fashioned, a variation upon the “Tree of Life” pattern.9 However, in other ways, the notion of quilts and quilting raises further questions. Naming chapters after quilt patterns suggests that the novel itself will be, in the end, a kind of legible collage. Patchwork is most often based on pattern, wherein patterned blocks, themselves “pieced work,” are arranged to create an overall pattern that is discernible in the quilted object that emerges in the end. Atwood draws attention to this device, noting that the novel “got bigger” than she had intended, so that instead of the nine quilt pattern tiles she planned to use at the beginning, she found she needed “to have more to cover the actual story as it unfolded” (interview with David Wiley).
The word “cover” is telling. Patchwork is connected with quilts and quilts are covers. Covers are warm. They soothe and comfort. To cover something is also to know all there is to know about it. At the same time, though, “covers” cover things up, hide what they conceal, make things inaccessible.10 Is the author guaranteeing an overall pattern, the idea that things will work out and that meaning will be made, or is she suggesting the opposite? The word “actual” is troubling too: is the “actual story” the historical story, or the fabricated narrative that includes a great deal of material that Atwood admits she “felt free to invent” (Author’s Afterword, 467)? As many critics have observed, the very way the novel is constructed mimics piecework, as narrative elements of various kinds are stitched together by a knowing authorial hand. Letters, newspaper accounts, drawings, lists, ballads, memoirs, assorted historical documents, excerpts from nineteenth-century poems, Grace’s monologues, Simon’s confessions, and an “Author’s Afterword” are seemingly plucked from a ragbag of history, myth, and cultural observation that Atwood cannily raids, then assembles and sutures into what appears to be a finished, rounded-off artefact.11 By novel’s end, however, especially given the final twists in the narrative and the puzzling nature of Grace’s own quilt, which serves as the novel’s final or completing “square,” attentive readers can only doubt that rationality will solve all and syllogistic order will prevail.
Indeed, the narrative itself, as it moves forward in the wake of Simon Jordan’s increasingly evident fall from grace, signals epistemological limits and confirms the reader’s doubt that in the end all will make sense, or that the assemblage of clues will end in more than the zero, the circle, or the line that has no end, in Holquist’s terms (170). For even as Simon, the American specialist, is about to retreat to his home in Boston,12 an alternate “detective” appears in his place—an anti-detective, I would argue, in the person of Dr. Jerome Dupont, a “Neurohypnotist” (83) who is engaged to hypnotize Grace Marks as a way of eliciting from her the truth about her role in the crime of which she has been found guilty. Dr. Dupont inspires mistrust from the start. His identity is fluid and his aliases multiple. Appearing in the novel first as Jeremiah Pontelli, the peddler, then later as Gerald Ponti, a magician, and later as Gerald Bridges, a medium, he slips in and out of identities at will and with ease. While claiming to be an American of French or Italian descent, his ethnicity is indefinable, and he is read at various times as “foreign” (83), a “gypsy” (154), and a Jew (338). He is a man of deep secrets, seductive powers, and remarkable social mobility.13 He completely lacks professional credentials and depends upon art and craft more than reason and science, and Simon is undoubtedly correct in seeing in him “the deep liquid eyes and intense gaze of a professional charlatan” (83). Indeed, whatever his name or alias, Jeremiah is primarily an actor, a performer, an entertainer, and a dissembler. His examination of Grace is a performance designed to meet the expectations of a particular audience—the governor’s wife and her friends, who are advocates for Grace’s release—and thereby to assist her cause. He coaxes from her a remarkable performance (whether in the sense of acting or of performing identity, in Judith Butler’s sense),14 as Grace “channels” her deceased friend Mary Whitney and thereby plays into certain notions of dissociation and “double consciousness” that were thought towards the end of the late nineteenth century to characterize female hysterics and amnesiacs.
Grace is certainly complicit to some extent in the drawing-room drama that Jeremiah, as Dr. Dupont, orchestrates. Although she does not signal this to their audience, her relationship with him as Jeremiah the peddler goes back to her earliest days in Canada, and he has served as her tutor in significant ways. Early on, he tells Grace, “You are one of us” (155), although she does not yet know what this means, and he gives her buttons, thereby signalling the importance of “buttoning her lip.” While Grace is still in the employ of the Kinnears, she perceives him as “trying to look into my mind” though “in a kindly way” (265). He communicates with her silently, without recourse to the untrustworthy words that Simon will insist upon, and teaches her a coded gesture: “He put his finger alongside his nose, to signify silence and wisdom” (265). She exercises a degree of caution when speaking to him of the death of her friend Mary, ceasing at the point of her own fainting, but notes that he appears to be “divining” much anyway (265). He tells her about the ease of crossing the U.S. border, “like passing through air” (266), and insists that “laws are made to be broken” (266). He tells her about acting, about theatricality in the context of his going to fairs as a “medical clairvoyant,” and speaks of an earlier partnership he had with a woman who knew the business, which was usually worked in couples (267). He invites her to run away and join his act, and insists that such a scam would be no more a “cheat” than “theatre” is (268). And although she does not take him up on his offer, Grace agrees that adopting a new name, an alias, would pose no difficulty for her (268).
Hence when Grace sees Jeremiah “considerably trimmed as to hair and beard, and got up like a gentleman, in a beautifully cut sand-coloured suit” in the governor’s parlour, she is probably well aware of the role-playing he is likely to require. He gives her their signal from the past to remain silent, then “kept hold of my chin for a moment, to steady me, and give me time to control myself” (305). Nor does he disappear from the narrative after the seance scene. He subsequently sends Grace a bone button, seemingly to tell her, she says, to “keep silent, about certain things we both know of” (428), and when she sees him later, in New York, under yet another alias, George Bridges, Jeremiah winks and tips his hat, and Grace, herself fully in role at this point, mutely waves her perfectly gloved hand “a little” in his direction (456).
It can be argued, of course, that the anti-detective Jeremiah does offer a solution to the mystery of Grace’s guilt or innocence. Under hypnosis in the governor’s parlour, the voice of the dead Mary Whitney emanates from the entranced Grace Marks, and admits to having possessed Grace, in effect, and served as McDermott’s accomplice through her own occupation of Grace’s unconscious and unknowing body. Such a resolution is—on the surface of things—more than a little preposterous. To read Grace as possessed requires irrationality on the part of the reader, a belief in the supernatural, a dependence upon evidence obtained via seance as credible. To read Grace—as the liberal-minded Dr. Verringer, a Methodist social reformer who has taken up Grace’s case, and Jeremiah do in their conversation after the hypnosis—as manifesting a psychological condition known as “double consciousness” or “dedoublement” (Atwood 405–6), or what we might call “multiple personality disorder” seems scientifically naive and logically unsatisfying. Even if Grace’s double consciousness had remained dormant for decades, what would be Mary Whitney’s motives for serving as an accomplice to the murder of Nancy Montgomery, a woman who, like herself, had been impregnated by a man of property brandishing empty promises?15 The detecting reader is driven, it seems to me, to the third possibility, that Grace, under Jeremiah’s tutelage, is role-playing, acting, faking, as a way of dramatizing her innocence by enacting Mary Whitney as the perpetrator of the crime.
Atwood, however, renders it impossible to commit entirely to this third, most logical, possibility. Why would we assume that Grace is knowingly performing under Jeremiah’s direction? There is no evidence that he has had time to coach her in play-acting so as to capture the nuances of a psychological theory she would have been unlikely to have known about, as remarkably well read as she may have been.16 And as numerous critics have observed,17 a “double personality” in the person of Grace Marks (and that pesky plural surname surfaces again) is a possibility, given the evidence of psychosocial repression that characterizes her narrative as a whole. It is clear that Grace has suppressed much and fears its emergence, as is captured in her fears of being split open and plumbed by Simon, and by the persistent dreams of peonies that she tells us haunt her throughout her life.18 That the personality of Grace Marks should “split,” absorbing the raw and vindicated anger of Mary Whitney and assigning “Mary” the task of executing a crime in retaliation for the wrongs done to female servants in households such as the Kinnears’, makes some sense. That the coarser voice of the alter ego, Mary, is nothing like the voice of the more refined and strategic voice of Grace Marks19 suggests to some that the dedoublement is real, and perhaps it is. After all, there is the fact that never, even in her most unguarded moments, has Grace herself confessed to being involved in the murders in any way, but only to not knowing—as is consistent with repression and the disintegration into parallel or multiple personalities.
In short, the solution provided by Atwood’s anti-detective is provisional at best, since neither reading Grace as duplicitous nor reading Grace as “doubled” can be affirmed, though Jeremiah’s re-enactment through hypnosis is the only answer to the “mystery about a murder” that the novel offers. Nor does wrestling with the puzzle that is Grace Marks end here, for the narrative, now firmly in Grace’s control, continues, and the management of voice, of narrative perspective, emerges as yet another of Atwood’s key strategies, as the novel moves towards its conclusion.
Once Simon hotfoots it from Kingston, abdicating his mission, the narrative falls entirely to Grace’s skilled hands. Prior to this point, Atwood has been careful to alternate, to a significant extent, Simon’s and Grace’s perspectives during their extended cat-and-mouse game, while privileging Grace’s point of view in significant ways. Simon is consistently portrayed through third-person narration, so-called free indirect discourse, and even his dreams are reported at that distance by an omniscient narrator. Grace, on the other hand, is permitted first-person narration—not only when recollecting and telling her story to Simon in direct speech, but also when she is not speaking aloud. She is allowed throughout the novel, as Simon is not, to present her own interiority in her own words, and indeed her primacy is signalled by the fact that the crime narrative proper is launched by, and therefore framed by, her wary voice: “I am sitting on the purple velvet settee in the Governor’s parlour” (21); “It’s not the ladies expected today, it’s a doctor”; and “Where there’s a doctor it’s always a bad sign.… It means a death is close” (27).
By section 14 of Alias Grace (which is ironically entitled “The Letter X,” a sign connected to illiteracy), with Simon eliminated, Grace is able to leave her “mark(s)” not only in thinking or by speaking, but also in writing—by setting down in letters to Jeremiah and to Simon himself her own final disposition of the narrative. The girl in the witness box, whose “true voice could not get out” (295), now has the stage to herself, the final word in finishing off her story. Her letter to Jeremiah dated September 25, 1861, is one among several other letters to and from other individuals in that chapter. But the granting of equal status to Grace’s remarkably literate letter within such a company of correspondence should be noted, as should its reminders that Jeremiah is a shape-changing charlatan, that Grace has been his accomplice at least once, and that his latest wizardry, the “Future Told in Letters of Fire” is a grand trick and a great draw.
By the final chapter (which appears under the rubric of “The Tree of Paradise”), in her letter to Simon, Grace has the stage utterly to herself. History verifies that Grace Marks was pardoned and transported to the United States. However, we cannot know whether the reunion with Jamie Walsh, their marriage, the prosperity that ensues, and the possible late-life pregnancy are more than tantalizing fictional details spun by Grace as a means of continuing to astound and torment the once-powerful doctor who had wanted to break her down, to possess her by knowing. We know that Grace tells tales and does so to captivate and capture. She once spoke to keep the doctor on a string:
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)
She now claims to placate her husband with similarly trumped-up narratives about her past life that will suit his guilt-ridden agenda (457), and we are told that she always wears perfectly fitting gloves to town—a further suggestion, perhaps, that she is still covering up (456).
Nor can we confirm the meaning of (let alone the existence of, since we have only Grace’s word for it) that final quilt, the first that Grace has made for herself, her personal marriage quilt. She interprets it for us. She says that she has used a pattern called “The Tree of Paradise,” which she sees as a telescoping of biblical figures, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. She goes on to report her embellishment of that pattern. She has sewn into its border “snakes entwined,” which cannot be excluded because they are “the main part of the story” (459–60). For Grace’s listeners at this point, Atwood’s reader-detectives, the inclusion of biblical emblems of evil that are also clearly representations of phalluses, and their containment within the boundaries of a quilt’s border, underscores Grace Marks’ overall strategy throughout her tale—her goal of containment whenever faced with threatening and potentially penetrating incursions of male power and agency. When she tells us that she has included in the body of her pattern three triangles—a scrap from Mary’s white petticoat, a piece of Nancy’s floral dress that she herself wore on the ferry to Lewiston, and a piece of her own prison nightdress—and has “blend[ed] them in” by feather-stitching each in red (460), she signals the way in which she configures herself and her servant sisters as a triumphant trinity in the end,20 symbolically protected (camouflaged, in fact, via that red feather-stitching) in the quilt pattern’s field, even as those snakes are permanently imprisoned within its borders.
What signifies here, it seems to me, is that the ending can be read—as is typical of virtually every episode in Alias Grace—in competing ways. Either Grace is continuing her strategies of evasion and control to the end by offering an ending that may or may not be true, in the interests of controlling her readers, Ariadne-like, through the ever-tightening skeins of an unverifiable narrative that, as Simon says, defies “keep[ing] track of the pieces” (291) and saps us of the energy that we rely upon in making sense of the world. Or, as others would argue, the ending of Grace’s narrative can be taken at face value: hers is a romantic story that culminates in marriage, a comfortable economic status, a position as mistress of her own home, a possible late-life pregnancy, and the opportunity to create a quilt that celebrates both her vanquishing of hegemonic forces of masculine control and the sisterhood that she—as vindicated servant girl—now commands.
What Atwood does in Alias Grace, I would argue, is exploit the anti-detective model surpassingly well. She makes a mockery of a particular kind of detective in the figure of Simon Jordan, one who happens to be a positivist, a pioneering man of science—the science of inquiry into the human mind, a science with potential applications in the direction of mind control. Grace’s elusiveness, both to nineteenth-century physician Simon Jordan and to twentieth-century academic readers trained to clinically decode narrative, is a victory for the underprivileged everywhere who refuse to consent to their own splaying and displaying for the pleasure of hegemonic taxonomists and collectors of all kinds. However, at the same time, Atwood deftly offers, to those who prefer closure, certainty and narrative guarantees, a romantic detective fiction in which servant girl Grace Marks is liberated by a co-conspirator in the class wars, the shape-changing Jeremiah, through an artistic performance that plays into the semi-intellectual assumptions of bourgeois observers about madwomen, those hysterics and amnesiacs whose social rage can be explained away by mental illness in the form of dissociative personality disorders. Grace’s rewards—escape, marriage, freedom in speech and artistic expression—offer solution to a mystery and a restoration of conservative social order, for those who wish to occupy the space of popular detective narrative.
In any case the cultivated tension in Alias Grace between detective fiction and its antithesis, the anti-detective paradigm, is far more significant than the notion of generic play suggests: it raises profound philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge and particularly the power of positivistic inquiry to solve politically saturated contemporary issues. Instrumental in raising such questions and preventing easy answers to them is Atwood’s cleverness in deploying strategies of detection and evasion in this novel. Hilde Staels has argued that in the anti-detective novel “the design is more important than the story events” (436). Marie-Thérèse Blanc goes further in arguing that “Grace Marks’s actual guilt or innocence is … irrelevant here” (123), but rather that readers must act as judges, “ponder[ing] not the fate of Grace Marks but, rather, the nature of the narrative construction she offers” (105). I agree, but would emphasize the authorial hand to a greater extent. In the end, the question is not whether or not Grace Marks is guilty, but whether we come to understand the complexity of the narrative manipulation on the part of Margaret Atwood, which has ensured that we will never know “the truth,” though we are perfectly free to read the novel as conservatively or as experimentally as we wish.
1 Hilde Staels, for example, explores several “intertexts” or generic codes that underlie Alias Grace, which she sees as a postmodern parody of both the historical novel and detective fiction, genres that “originated in the nineteenth century and are characteristic of the period.” She points as well to the novel’s use of “the fantastic literary mode,” which “disturbs Grace’s realistic representations,” and its references to psychological discourses such as Kristeva’s “view of the modern subject as a subject in crisis” (427–29). This last is taken up as well by Amelia Defalco in her study of the novel’s exploration of carnality and the psychological damaged rendered by infiltration and the threat of infiltration, which is to say the threat of reduction to “mere flesh” (772). Marie-Thérèse Blanc reads the novel as a “trial narrative” and Roxanne Rimstead as a narrative of class that explores the status of female domestics, as does Sandra Kumamoto Stanley in “The Eroticism of Class and the Enigma of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak categorizes the novel as a “critique of imperialism,” while others (including Stephanie Lovelady and Lorna Hutchison) see it as a metafictional exploration of voice, particularly the so-called middle voice and its use in hybrid public/private narration.
2 Alias Grace is, of course, a postmodern novel in many ways more than I can tell in this short essay, and Atwood herself makes slyly self-referential comments within the novel to remind us we are in the arena of postmodern discourse. At one point, a character in the novel, Dr. Verringer, alludes dismissively to Susannah Moodie, Grace Marks’s first literary biographer, describing “Mrs. Moodie” as a “literary lady,” who, “like all such, and indeed the sex in general,” is inclined to “embroider” (191). At another point, Grace thinks about the future, and there is self-referential irony in Atwood’s having Grace wonder “what would become of me” and comfort herself “that in a hundred years I would be dead and at peace, and in my grave ...” (342). As well, Atwood tells us outright that Grace Marks cannot be fully read through her traces. In Grace’s words, “It’s as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as being innocent” (342).
3 I am interested in Goldberg’s insistence that there are elements of “political expediency” in the treatment of Grace Marks and James McDermott, in that the reaction to the crime itself (and the rowdiness of the crowds that observed McDermott’s hanging) would have been exacerbated by the experience a few years earlier of William Lyon Mackenzie’s failed rebellion of 1837, in which “have-nots” (like Grace and McDermott) attacked “men of property” like Thomas Kinnear. In addition, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald is likely to have signed Grace’s pardon for political reasons, presumably to mollify her well-placed supporters and to put an end to their tiresome public campaign.
4 To some extent, though imprisoned and therefore apparently constrained and powerless, Grace also bears considerable resemblance to that familiar stock figure who so often appears in detective fiction, the femme fatale, a mysterious and seductive woman whose irresistible charms lead men into dangerous and deadly situations. Clearly Grace enchants Simon in ways that exploit his repressed sexual desires, which ends in his undoing at her hands.
5 Along with others, Elizabeth Rose calls Grace a Scheherazade, and sees her as saving her life, symbolically, through tale-telling: “like the quilts she works on as she tells her tale …, her narrative is a fabrication, an embroidery meant to please her listener.” She notes that Grace admits to raiding the ragbag and picking up a bit of colour to please or divert him. Indeed, Rose goes on, Grace “tells Simon the only story that she, a lower class woman, can tell a gentleman. Here is the story required by a patriarchal world in which women are sweet and passionless … and in which servants ‘know their place.’” Furthermore, “Grace’s narrative is [always] constrained by what her listeners require.” When Grace stitches, she employs her skills as a seamstress “to stitch all these bits together into a recognizable pattern,” an identity fashionable “according to the lights of her time” (117–18).
6 There are a number of other indications that Grace’s work in keeping the world at bay—through nothing but the force of her controlled narratives—is difficult, stressful, and at times under threat of collapse. Recurrent peonies, for example, threaten to emerge and bleed through the design of her telling: when incarcerated, with only blank walls to look at, pictures of “red flowers” appear to Grace to be growing there before her very eyes (33). A turkey carpet strikes her as featuring “deep” “red” and “thick strangled tongues” (27), perhaps ready to spill closely guarded beans. She frequently dreams of gloves that would be “smooth and white, and would fit without a wrinkle” (21), a perfect, skin-tight cover-up for the hands. Her dreams hinge upon loss of control, things getting away from her.
7 Staels, among others, notes the reference here to the way that the “labyrinthine or weblike quality of Grace’s narrative evokes Ariadne’s labyrinth and thread” as Grace spins her story and curtails and thereby contains Simon (433).
8 And all of this is not to mention Grace’s other great skill—that of laundering: “it is hard work and roughens the hands, but I like the clean smell afterwards” (64). As with quilts and the threat of stitched narratives being undone by “peonies” or “strangled tongues,” laundry is not without its gothic shadow self: she imagines “the shirts and the nightgowns flapping in the breeze on a sunny day were like large white birds, or angels rejoicing; although without any heads” (159). Nevertheless, “there is a great deal of pleasure to be had in a wash all clean, and blowing in the wind, like pennants at a race, or the sails of a ship; and the sound of it is like the hands of the Heavenly Hosts applauding, though heard from far away. And they do say that cleanliness is next to Godliness …” (225). And also next to innocence, if one has laundered the evidence before the investigators arrive.
9 Atwood herself has been careful to draw attention to the quilt motif in a number of her post-publication interviews about Alias Grace. In her frequently circulated list of “useful books” for further reading, she recommends that readers explore quilt history in Ontario, as if that may offer further clues in decoding her narrative—and some of us have actually gone on that “Wild Goose Chase,” to quote one of the cryptic, clue-like quilt names cited in the novel itself (218)—just as she seems to have intended.
10 Amelia Defalco notes, for example, that a quilt is used to cover the body of Mary Whitney, who has died of a botched abortion after having been seduced by her employer and impregnated by him (776).
11 In discussing quilting metaphors in Alias Grace, Jennifer Murray notes Grace’s own reference to a “ragbag” from which she selects bits and pieces for her own quilting—and her own narrative.
12 Sandra Kumamoto Stanley notes that by the end of the novel, after Simon has returned to the United States and become a military surgeon in the Civil War, we learn that he has suffered a head wound and subsequent amnesia, “an ironic mirror reflection” of the mental state of his patient, Grace Marks (381).
13 Stephanie Lovelady argues that Jeremiah’s work with Grace advances her cause, but that his chief value is as a “border crosser” and “escape artist” who teaches Grace how to elude fixation, particularly in terms of social class (44).
14 Butler speaks of gender as a performative “‘act,’ broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority” (279). In the case of Grace Marks, at this point in the text it is difficult to distinguish between the possibility that she is merely acting out a script of Jeremiah’s devising (a kind of simple and relatively benign and theatrical prevarication), or whether he has evoked from her a performance based upon her deeply held and perhaps deeply buried beliefs, such that her performativity in this scene amounts to the construal and articulation of an instrumental “identity,” one that is socially useful, indeed politic, given their project in influencing this audience.
15 Lovelady sets out the three possibilities that I consider here: “mental illness, possession, and outright deception” (57).
16 Marie-Thérèse Blanc notes that Grace knows the Bible well, has read Sir Walter Scott, and overhears Nancy Montgomery reading Scott’s Lady of the Lake, which she herself has read with Mary Whitney. While this may have familiarized her with “the idea of the romantic heroine,” and “pitiful madwomen,” as Blanc argues, it does not suggest familiarity with psychological discourses related to the scenario created and mediated by Jeremiah (Blanc 118).
17 See Defalco (772), Staels (437), Blanc (121), Lovelady (56), and Kumamoto (382), for example.
18 Defalco, for example, emphasizes the novel’s central concern with transgressive physicality, citing the dream memory of the red peonies as an index of Grace’s fear of “the male protagonist’s obsessive desire to see and gain access to interiors, corporeal and forbidden” (771), and sees the novel as focused on “the uncanny return of the repressed” (782). Staels speaks of the way “Grace is haunted by the image of exploding red peonies in sleep and in waking life until the moment of her ‘liberation’ from a guilt complex in which she has been locked up since the death of her mother, but also since the death of Mary and of Nancy, both of whom were rape victims” (438).
19 Rimstead compares the “brash, cocky wisdom of Mary” to the “demure, calculated innocence of Grace” and sees “Mary’s coarser voice” as Grace’s “mad (both insane and angry) inner self” (60).
20 According to Jennifer Murray, “This Trinity-like construction, whose main intertext [is] the Christian Trinity,” is referred to explicitly by both Grace and Jeremiah/DuPont in the novel and “tends to paradoxically both undermine and reaffirm the notion of the unified individual or the essential self” (79).
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