"Perhaps I Will Tell You Lies"

Table of contents

1. Introduction

2. History and Fiction. Recent Concepts by White and Hutcheon

3. "To keep the Sultan amused." Grace's First-Person Narrative

4. "I've been baffled." Third-person Perspectives

5. "The past is made of paper." Historical Documents and Fictional Epigraph

6. Conclusion

Bibliography

"It is not a murder mystery, it is a mystery about murder. [...] 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.'¹

1. Introduction

To introduce Margaret Atwood as one of the most outstanding Canadian female authors would definitely not be an exaggeration. In fact, her works have had a significant influence on contemporary writing by women. Besides poetry and prose texts, her literary work is made up by publications in literary criticism, edition of anthologies, essay collections, and even children's books.² In 1996, Atwood published her first historical novel, her "own attempt to write a piece of fiction set in the past."³ The book had been eagerly anticipated and when it was finally published, only few were disappointed. Just the opposite was true, the novel became an instant bestseller and won international acclaim. It was nominated for the Booker Prize and awarded the Canadian Giller Prize.⁴

By setting the plot of her ninth novel around the cruel murders of the wealthy Canadian landowner Thomas Kinnear and his pregnant housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in 1843, Atwood deals with an issue that has been fascinating her since the publishing of the journals of the Victorian writer Susannah Moodie.⁵ Thus Alias Grace can be seen as "the product of a mature writer who, at the height of her career, returns to a story that has been at the back of her mind since the early days [...]," as her biographer Nathalie Cooke has put it.⁶

This murder case and the following trial had attracted great attention in both the contemporary public and press. Highly controversial discussed was the question to which extend Kinnear's maid-of-all-works, Grace Marks, had been involved in the spectacular crime at Richmond Hill. Together with Grace, the farm hand James McDermott was accused as main defendant of having killed their employers. At the trial they both delivered different versions. Finally, the court found McDermott guilty and he was hanged publicly. Because of her minor age and her sex, Grace Marks' death sentence was transformed into a life imprisonment, which she partly spent in a mental asylum.⁷ Her careful behaviour in prison led to the local Governor's wife's social adoption of her.

Whereas the press declared Grace Marks guilty right after she had been arrested, the question whether she had committed the crime or not has never been finally resolved: Had she been the driving force behind the murders, which she committed out of jealousy of the housekeeper, who was supposed to be her employer's paramour, or had she been the helpless victim of the notorious rowdy McDermott?⁸

The plot of the novel starts in the year 1859, sixteen years after the murders. On request of a reform oriented group, that is pleading for an amnesty for the imprisoned woman, the aspiring American psychologist Dr Simon Jordan a fictive character invented by Atwood visits Grace in her penitentiary cell in Kingston, a small Canadian town north of Toronto. This group places their hope on Jordan so that he, with the aid of the latest scientific insights in the fields of nervous and mental disorders, would be able to evoke Grace's memory of the murder night, the convicted herself prevents to suffer from amnesia, and thus prove her innocence. In their daily afternoon sessions, Grace tells Jordan the eventful story of her life, but without giving a satisfactory answer to the question of her involvement in the double murder. After having blindfold stumbled into an sexual affair with his landlady, Jordan left Kingston head over heels. In the last chapters, Grace continues their conversation in a kind of inner monologue until her release from prison, her marriage and her emigration to the United States in 1872. ⁹

A reviewer once has called Alias Grace"the doctoral dissertation that Atwood did not complete, a tour de force rendition of nineteenth century Canadian social life.'¹⁰ In fact, the authoress had done some proper historical research, and definitely the better part of the novel's attraction "emanates from its basis in the truth, and the sheer impossibility of tracking down that truth.'¹¹ The title itself already alludes to the difficulty of finding out the true identity of the historical person Grace Marks:

"The title signals a disturbing absence of the original behind the name. [...] This novel recognizes that no written [...] history allows either the real women's voice nor the true story of the past to be recovered."¹²)

The traditional modernist view of history depends on a belief in and a pursuit of objectivity. In her novels, Atwood often challenges these modernist views. As a consequence, the reader is rather confronted with different, even contradictory versions of one and the same story. Until its very end the novel refuses to deliver an unambiguous and unmistakable reconstruction of the events at Richmond Hill.¹³ So Alias Grace is not only concerned with history just because the plot is set in the past, but also the issues 'memory', 'historical truth' and the 'reconstruction of historical events' form a thematic constellation that plays a crucial role in the novel. The aim of this paper is supposed to discuss the question of how Atwood deals with the representation of history and historical 'truth' in her novel Alias Grace, thus offering a general questioning of the truthfulness and objectivity of historical accounts.

For this purpose it seems to be appropriate to touch on briefly the narrative construction of the novel. The prominent role reconstruction of history plays in the novel, becomes already apparent in the fact that the better part of the plot is set nearly two decades after the events that are to be reconstructed, so that any occupation with the murders in the novel itself must be a retrospective one.¹⁴

Not one single narrator, but a "plethora of voices" unfold the story in a multiperspective narrative situation.¹⁵ After having introduced the most influential recent theoretical concepts on the relationship of historical and literary writing, each narrative perspective is to be discussed in more detail in the following chapters to find out how they all work together in a kind of "narrative patchwork."¹⁶

2. History and Fiction: Recent Concepts by White and Hutcheon

Margaret Atwood has concerned herself with the representation of history in fictional works and contributed to the general discourse with some of her publications.¹⁷ Essentially, any current essay on this topic must mention two scholars that delivered concepts that have evoked controversy in the last two or three decades: The American historian Hayden White and the Canadian academic Linda Hutcheon.

Concerning the relation of history and fiction, the literary theorist Northrop Frye has once remarked, "In a sense the historical is the opposite of the mythical, and to tell the historian that what gives shape to his book is a myth would sound to him vaguely insulting."¹⁸ This strict separation of historical and fictional writing is supposed to be product of modern times, "prior to the French Revolution, historiography was conventionally regarded as a literary art."¹⁹ It was due to the pursuit of reason, that historical fact was from now on generally identified with objective 'truth' and fiction was identified with the opposite. The quasi logical demand was the unconditional demystification of history, which strongly formed concepts of modern historiography.²⁰

Hayden White deserves the credit of having initiated the discourse on postmodern approaches in historical theory. He aimed at examining "the extent in which the discourse of the historian and that of the imaginative writing overlap, resemble or correspond with each other."²¹ White states that historical events themselves were "value-neutral", they have no further meaning of their own.²² Rather Winter, 2006, p. 63. he concentrates on the similarities of producing a piece of art and historiography.

Both can be regarded as verbal constructions of external circumstances:

"[...] the facts do not speak for themselves, but [...] the historian speaks for them, speaks on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole. [...] Here the historian must utilize the same tropological strategies, the same modalities of representing relationships in words, that the poet or novelist uses."²³

As a consequence, for White historiography is necessarily narrative and is presented with the help of the narrative strategies (tropes) generally known from their usage in literature. This "emplotment" of historical facts does not only add a deeper meaning to historical events (e.g. one event is tragic, another one is ironic, etc.), but the reader is made familiar with things and issues that keyword 'historical otherness' has become strange to her or him ("refamilarization").²⁴

As an example for a more recent concept, the Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon coined the term 'historiographic metafiction' to describe the genre of the postmodernist historical novel, "those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages."²⁵ Hutcheon agrees with White that today's separation between literary and historical studies is a product of the 19th century, particularly Leopold von Ranke's historiography has contributed to this fact. But in recent years this clear distinction has been challenged:

"However, it is this very separation of the literary and the historical that is now being challenged in postmodern theory and art, and recent critical readings of both history and fiction have focused more on what the two modes of writing share than on how they differ [here Hutcheon presumably refers to White's theories, FU]. They have both seen to derive their force more from verisimilitude than from any objective truth. [...]."²⁶

[...]

¹ Margaret Atwood, qtd. in Gina Wisker, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. A Reader's Guide, New York: Continuum, 2002, p. 25.

² An intensive discussion of Atwood's heterogeneous body of work and its reception can be found in: Karen F. Stein, Margaret Atwood Revisited, New York: Twayne Publ., 1999 and Reingard Nischik (ed.), Margaret Atwood. Works and Impact, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000.

³ Margaret Atwood, In Search of Alias Grace. On Writing Historical Canadian Fiction, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997, p. 28. Atwood herself comments on her extended understanding of the term 'historical novel': "But what exactly do we mean by 'historical novel'? All novels are in a sense 'historical novels', insofar as they have to, they must make reference to a time that is not the time in which the reader is reading the book," p. 13. On the usage, merging and destabilization of the conventions, patterns and expectations of different literary genres in Atwood's novels cf: Coral Ann Howells, "Transgressing Genre. A Generic Approach to Margaret Atwood's Novels," in: Nischik 2000, p. 139-156: "'Atwood signals the fact that conventional patterns [...] are socially constructed, and as such, may be transformed or reconstructed," p. 141.

This paper uses the following edition of Alias Grace, from now on abbreviated as "AG": Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace, London: Virago, 1997.

⁴ Wisker, p. 80f.

⁵ Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susannah Moodie, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970. Atwood: "That was the first version of the story I came across, and being young, and still believing that 'non-fiction' meant 'true', I didn't question it," qtd. in Paul Lee Thomas, Reading, Learning, Teaching Margaret Atwood, New York: Lang, 2007, p. 90.

⁶ Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood. A Biography, Toronto: ECW Press, 1998, p. 323.

⁷ Mary Hartman has examined the Victorian constructions of female criminality and found out that the gender-biased contemporary world view had been denying women an intentional criminal attitude. Female criminals were either regarded as simple-minded persons who committed the crime under the influence of a leading male criminal or as hysterics carried away by strong negative emotions. Consequently, their lawyers usually aimed for presenting their female 'clients' as stupid, misguided and irresponsible maidens, and in fact, the women had good chances to get away with murder. Cf. Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses. A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes, New York: Schocken Books, 1977, p. 261. In the novel Grace's lawyer MacKenzie literally 'designed' a confession matching the role of the simple-minded girl from rural background, and Grace herself appears to be aware of the role she was intended to play: "I have a good stupid look which I have practiced." (AG 42).

⁸ Cooke 1998, p. 321, refers to the accidental, but nevertheless interesting coincidence of the publishing of Alias Grace and the beginning of the murder trials of O.J. Simpson and Paul Bernardo in 1996. In both cases — like in Grace's one — the media had decided that the accused were guilty before they were even tried. "The novels effect then, was to inspire its readers to view contemporary news stories within a broader context."

⁹ AG, p. 512ff.

¹⁰ Stein, p. 105.

¹¹ Wisker, p. 26.

¹² Howells 2000, p. 152.

¹³ Atwood in the author's afterword to Alias Grace, AG, p. 451: "I've not changed any known facts, although the written accounts are so contradictory that few facts emerge as unequivocally 'known."

¹⁴ Gordon Bolling, History in the Making. Metafiktion im neueren anglokanadischen historischen Roman, Heidelberg:

¹⁵ Howells 2000, p. 151.

¹⁶ Cooke, p. 322.

¹⁷ Atwood's already mentioned work "In Search of Alias Grace" can be seen as both a short history of the writing process of Alias Grace and an essay on the general conditions, problems and limits of processing historical events in fictional works.

¹⁸ Qtd. in Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism, 4th ed., London & Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978, p. 82.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 123.

²⁰ White, p. 123f.

²¹ Ibid., p. 121.

²² Ibid., p. 84.

²³ Ibid., p. 125.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 86; defintion of "emplotment", p. 83, "refamiliarization", p. 87.

²⁵ Linda Hutcheon, A Poetic of Postmodernism. History — Theory — Fiction, New York: Routledge, 1988, p. 5.

²⁶ Linda Hutcheon, "Historiographic Metafiction," in: Michael McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel. A Historical Approach, Baltimore & London: John Hopkin's University Press, 2000, p. 830-850, p. 830.