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Matt Martin Literary Analysis 2/9/10 The Role of Femininity in Alias Grace Grace Marks femininity: exploring the

contemporary gender roles and how Margaret Atwood employs them to further construct and structure her novel Alias Grace.

Rethinking History as Patchwork: The Case of Atwoods Alias Grace Feminist movement in the 1970s caused people to rethink how to relate history. People, once again, elevated the value of the narrative, and viewed it as a representative account of marginalized people in this case women. They began to focus less on portraying a truth and concentrated more on illustrating a wide variety of accounts of the past. In Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood plays upon this notion by abolishing the antiquated notion of authorized and devalued texts. Interestingly, Atwood does not simply invert this hierarchy she makes Graces narrative, Simons studies, Jeremiahs/Dr. Jerome DuPonts hypnotism dubitable. Instead of finding out a singular truth, the reader is presented with a hodgepodge of reports, similar to Grace Marks quilt.

Atwoods novel thus exposes the gendered bases of conceptions of history that retain a grounding in patrilineal and positivist models at the same times as it gives voice to the multiple pieces/texts that make up the cultural and social fabric through which events and persons are inevitably constructed (441). Nevertheless, historical research still tends to assume the accurate access to the past, to the truth, is possible and thus remains dependent in the last instance on a key aspect of positivist epistemology (423). Moreover, as Gianna Pomata points out, the advent of scientific history in the second half of the nineteenth century (25) had a notable gender dimension, in that it led to the disappearance of women from histories until relatively recently (423). With the development of second wave feminism and the womens movement in the 1970s and the concurrent development of the Annales School and Social History, however, feminist scholars began to broach the question of womens absence from histories of the past two centuries (424). Although the field of womens history has developed a variety of trajectories, a common ground shared by most of the scholars involved includes the notions that women are a valid focus of inquiry and that there exists a need for a re-evaluation

of established standards of historical significance (Scott, Womens History 36) (424). Indeed, the establishment of womens history as a field has contributed to the general re-evaluation of historical methodology over the last several decades. What seems clear, however, is that historical narratives remain crucial today (424). Consequently, for most scholars of womens or feminist history, questioning historical methodologies never lapses into relativism: instead, these scholars accept that the only access to the past is through variously mediated texts and that historical narrative can never capture the truth (424). Moreover, Margaret Atwoods Alias Grace participates in the contemporary rethinking of history not only by highlighting textuality and storytelling as inevitable frames through which all events are viewed but also by undermining any clear distinction between different kinds of texts in particular, between texts that western culture traditionally has authorized (such as official documents and published texts) and those it has devalued (such as oral tales). Alias Grace thus explodes the explicit or implicit hierarchy among sources established by scientific history, whereby a preferential position is accorded to seemingly direct informational documents and other texts [] are reduced to elements that are either redundant or merely supplementary (LaCapra 17) (425). The way that the narratives are presented also forms a quilt of sorts. Alternating narratives of Grace and Simon, the use of multiple epigraphs to start each chapter, even the patchwork designs scattered throughout the novel all serve to create a collage of information that resembles Graces quilt.

Alias Graces patchwork form thus operates as a multipronged challenge to conventional history in its implicit rejection not only of linearity and teleology but of their connections to a patrilineal model. At the same time, however, quilt patchwork offers an alternative means of reconceptualizing history as nonlinear, nonteleological, nonpatrilineal (428). That is What I Told Dr. Jordan: Public Constructions and Private Disruptions in Margaret Atwoods Alias Grace In other words, the novel suggests that the public representations of Grace are not opinions reserved for this particular murder case or this particular woman; rather, they are symptomatic of broader Victorian ideas of femininity and sexuality, and Grace becomes a titillating figure through which the public can articulate and consolidate those ideas (84-85). Her incarceration becomes a metaphor for repressive aspects of nineteenthcentury ideologies, and her life story, as she tells it to Dr. Simon Jordan, is in part a story of her negotiating her social identity a female, servant-class, Irish immigrant in a culture in which that identity is devalued (85).

The problems that Grace faces in telling her story to Simon are similar to those that Sidonie Smith ascribes to women autobiographers in the nineteenth century. Smith argues that women writing autobiography in that time period were seen to be transgressing gender boundaries, since autobiography recounts public life, and women were restricted to the private sphere (52). A woman, then, in telling her own story, had to maintain a fine balance between characterizing herself as male, a public persona, and female, a private one. (85). Smith suggests that To write an autobiography form that speaking posture does not become tantamount to liberating woman from the fictions that bind her; indeed, it may embed her even more deeply in them since it promotes identification with the very essentialist ideology that renders womans story a story of silence, powerlessness, self-effacement (53) (85). In refusing to engage in a conventional life story with a stable narrative and the assertion of an authentic self, Grace evades the trap identified by Smith. The novel suggests that quilting provides women with a way discursively to resist powerful and repressive cultural formations of identity (86). Scholars have noted that notions of gender in Canada during the time of the murders were influenced by Britains doctrine of separate spheres, whereby women were expected to confine their activities primarily to the domestic space and to be purveyors of morality and virtue (88). The novel represents Grace Marks as a figure who served as a public, and somewhat titillating, warning: a negative image to highlight the normative definitions of femininity, female sexuality, by extension, class identity (89). That her story is told primarily through her conversation with Simon emphasizes the significance of the discursive spaces in which stories are told and meaning is made. Those conversations occur within a social context that punctuates unequal categories of identity that is, a female, servant-class prisoner talking to a male psychiatrist of a monied family, albeit of somewhat reduced circumstances. They have very different lenses through which to interpret her narrative (92). We see that Grace is astute at handling such negotiations. She has no choice but to meet with Simon, especially if she does not want to be sent to the insane asylum, but inasmuch as she can she controls the conversations between them (93). Refusal to respond to Simons treatment constitutes a form of empowerment for Grace, and the impact of that empowerment is evident in his gradual loss of control or gradual sense of loss of control over his sessions with her (93). The relationship between Grace and Simon is a complex one in which power, manifested here by the one controlling the narrative, shifts back and forth (94).

The novels insistent reminder, through both its form and its content, of the significance of the social and historical contexts in which any narrative is produced serves both to highlight social inequities and by exposing those inequities as socially produced to offer possibilities for oppositional resistance to the status quo (95). Her disruptions come not only through her life story, however, but also through the way in which she politicizes the practice of quilting, transforming it from a highly gendered activity that signified womens place in the domestic sphere into a medium for articulating an eloquent, albeit coded, resistance to the Victorian ideology of gender that has so profoundly shaped and constrained her life (95). Almost exclusively a female activity, quilting, as Margaret Rogerson argues, is a form of female discourse [that] empowers Grace to speak in a language that is not universally accessible (6) (95). Quilting, then, clearly identifies women with the domestic sphere (95). The aesthetic quality of the quilt is here over-ridden by its signification as a kind of war flag, and the bed is a metonymic marker for the Victorian notions of gender (96). Significantly, she recognizes the value of quilting as an ironic protest against the very social ideals that quilts are meant to represent: the home and, concomitantly, feminine identity (97). For Grace, then, the significance of quilts surpasses practical and aesthetic concerns; quilts provide an opportunity for social critique and for clarifying certain aspects of her life story (97). Graces quilt, then, and arguably other womens quilts, offer alternative articulations of resistance to socially imposed categories of identity and power relations (99). Atwoods Grace is never seen to be really free form restrictive ideologies of her day, but she, as artful narrator of her story, finds a way to critique those ideologies, to disrupt public discourses about class and gender, and, in the private discourse of her quilting, to affirm a sense of solidarity with the other women whom she identifies as sharing her struggle against Victorian Canadian sexual mores (99-100). Haunting Physicality: Corpses, Cannibalism, and Carnality in Margaret Atwoods Alias Grace Though it is the human body, both male and female, that becomes abject, this confrontation with the alien corporeal self is repeatedly associated with the feminine; male experiences of uncanny bodies typically result from consorting with the opposite sex (772).

Haunting in Alias Grace is often tied to the marginalization and oppression of women and the lower classes, in part by uniting the maternal body and the corpse into a singular abject entity (772). Confronting physicality often means a confrontation with the grotesque, with frightening and destabilizing sameness (772). Mary Whitney makes explicit the connection between physicality and transgression, explaining to Grace the pattern and structure of manners and taboos in Victorian-era Toronto that work to conceal the bodys presence (774). For example, one must learn to carry a bucket full of filth as if it was a bowl of roses, for the thing these people hated the most was to be reminded that they too had bodies, and their shit tank as much as anyones (189). Marys articulation of the Victorian disavowal of the body sets up the pattern of repression that the narrative undoes; this very exiled physicality uncannily returns to haunt the characters (775). [Mary Whitneys] affair with her employer is yet more evidence of repressed upper-class physicality, a secret which her pregnancy threatens to divulge (775). The unbidden conflation of multiple, gendered carnifications in his mind suggests Simons own disavowed awareness of his participation in a discipline that is apart of patriarchal, Victorian society which reduces female subjects to fleshly objects (776). My own analysis concentrates on the quilt as a cautionary sign of corporeality, which announces the often terrifying bodily transgressions that may take place in a bed (192) (776). As such, the quilt simultaneously conceals and divulges; it is a loud warning and a blanketing presence (777). Grace disavows her own (potential) encounter with the carnified body, effectively preserving herself, and by extension the very possibility of individual, human selves (782).

People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart. What Mary Whitney used to say was, If theres 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 (38).

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