Abstract
Implicating epistolary strategies for misconception and doubt is taken further by Margaret Atwood, whose ‘fictional excursion’ into the ‘real Canadian past’ exposes contradictions in the story of an infamous nineteenth-century murderess.3 Neo-Victorian fiction perpetuates the Victorian sensation novel’s parasitical relationship with crime reporting by re-employing and imagining documents that litigate with history. Identified as one of a number of ‘typical neo-Victorian narratives based on true crime’,4 Alias Grace (1996) is a pastiche of Grace Marks’s story which demonstrates that ‘the past is made of paper’, but the historical record is confusing and contradictory.5 The novel pieces epistolary-style narratives into a patterned patchwork of voices that jostle discordantly side by side in search of narrative authority. This includes a secret diary-style voice that fosters ideas of deception and ambiguity to deny resolution for enduring questions of guilt or innocence, thereby illustrating that ‘a murderess is not an everyday thing’.6 Atwood claims that Grace’s story ‘is a real study in how the perception of reality is shaped’; voice and the diverse roles of writer and critic are therefore key preoccupations for Atwood as she debates processes that effectively effaced Grace’s legibility.7 This chapter will consider whether a deviant diary style permits Grace Marks to become primarily an alias for Margaret Atwood to deliver her authorial polemic.
Are you like me? Do you like reading trials?
Wilkie Collins The Law and the Lady (1875)1
The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky Notes from the Underground (1864)2
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Notes
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (London: Penguin, 1998 [1875]), p. 87.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From The Underground (New York: Dover Publications, 1992 [1864]), p. 1.
Margaret Atwood, ‘In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction’, in Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing 1970–2005 (London: Virago, 2006), pp. 209–34 (225).
Marie Luise Kohlke, ‘Editor’s Note’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:1 (2008/2009), pp. i–vii (iii).
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (London: Virago, 2006 [1996]), p. 104. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.
Laura Miller, ‘Blood and Laundry: An Interview with Margaret Atwood’, <http://www.salon.com/jan97/interview970120.html> [accessed 20 June 2008].
In her definition of terminology and contexts of neo-Victorian texts, Andrea Kirchknopf identifies the broad boundaries of the genre as works: ‘set in the age of the British Empire, the geographical locations may also vary between the centre and the colonies or territories of national interest’. Andrea Kirchknopf, ‘(Re)workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology, Contexts’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (2008), pp. 53–80 (54).
John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (eds), Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. xvi.
Mark Llewellyn, ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1 (2008), 164–85 (165).
Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Introduction: Speculations in and on the Neo-Victorian Encounter’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1 (2008), 1–18 (13).
Margaret Atwood, ‘Writing Susanna’ <http://www.owtoad.com/susanna.pdf> [accessed 10 June 2008].
Bernard Duyfhuizen, Narratives of Transmission (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), p. 104.
H. Porter Abbott, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 16, 45.
Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 136.
Valerie Raoul, The French Fictional Journal (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 20.
Magali Cornier Michael, ‘Rethinking History as Patchwork: The Case of Atwood’s Alias Grace’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47 (2001), 421–47 (421).
Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 259–422 (321).
Anne Humpherys, ‘The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel’, in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. by Patrick Bratlinger and William B. Thesing (London: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 442–57 (447).
The book lies, as Palliser explains, ‘at the literal centre of the novel — the middle of the middle section of the middle Chapter of the middle Book of the middle Part’. ‘Author’s Afterword’, to Charles Palliser, The Quincunx: The Inheritance of John Huffam (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 1214.
Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with The Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 126, original emphasis.
Atwood, Negotiating, p. 127, original emphasis. Söderberg’s novel is the subject of two historical fiction revisions: Danny Abse’s The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr. Glas (2003) and Bengt Ohlsson’s Gregorius (2008).
Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 3.
L. E. Usher, Then Came October (York: Harbour Books, 2008), p. 245.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 207.
Ansgar F. Nünning, ‘Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches’, in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (London: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 89–107 (95).
Susanna Moodie, Life in The Clearing Versus The Bush (Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, 1989 [1853]), p. 271.
Charlotte Perkins Oilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (London: Virago, 1998), pp. 34–5.
Hayden White, Tigural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1999), p. 105.
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. by James Strachey (London: Routledge, 1999 [1913]), p. 95.
Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 42.
Earl G. Ingersoll, ‘Engendering Metaflction: Textuality and Closure in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace’, The American Review of Canadian Studies, 31 (2001), 385–401.
Roger Cardinal, ‘Unlocking the Diary’, Comparative Criticism, 12 (1990), 71–87 (71).
See Slavoj Žižek’s book, Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (2002f) for an explanation of the Lacanian concept of point de capiton — a quilting or anchoring point that knots together signified and signifier.
Mark Llewellyn, ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1 (2008), 164–85 (171).
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© 2013 Kym Brindle
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Brindle, K. (2013). A Deviant Device: Diary Dissembling in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace . In: Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007162_5
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