Dying in a state of grace: memory, duality, and uncertainty in Margaret Atwood's<i>Alias Grace</i>

Abstract Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996) is examined in relation to her theorization of death and authorship in Negotiating With the Dead (2002). Broader theories of death, the author, and posthumous narration, as proposed by Roland Barthes, Alice Bennett, and others, are also employed. The novel is further linked to what Atwood herself calls a Jamesian form of ghost story, and is read alongside two stories by Henry James (‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908) and ‘The Middle Years’ (1893)). Elements of both the ghost story genre and the crime genre are shown to be used by Atwood to create a sense of uncertainty in the narrative structure of the novel. It is argued that this sense of uncertainty is part of Atwood's use of a sylleptic narrative structure to achieve an authorial position that keeps Author and scriptor simultaneously in play. Keywords: CrimedeathghostsHenry JamesMargaret Atwoodmemorymultiple personalityneo-VictorianPatricia CornwellRoland Barthes Acknowledgements The author thanks Susan Cahill, Brian Jackson, and Gerardine Meaney for their assistance. Notes Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), hereafter cited as AG. Margaret Atwood, Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), hereafter cited as NWD. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1962; reprint, 1970), p. 16. Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 64. Alice Bennett, ‘Unquiet Spirits: Death Writing in Contemporary Fiction’, Textual Practice, 23.3 (2009), pp. 463–479, p. 472. Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Bennett calls autothanatography ‘the opposite of autobiography’, arguing that the two are ‘intimately connected, with autothanatography figuring as the denied (but longed for) alternative to life writing’ (p. 463). Moreover, ‘In contemporary fictional autothanatographies posthumous voices are used for a fictional investigation of the ideal possibility of total biography and total knowledge, offering a retelling of a life that is apparently perfected by its completeness’ (p. 465). Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Stephen Heath (ed. and trans.), Image-Text-Music (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 142–148, p. 145. Roland Barthes, ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, trans. Lionel Duisit, New Literary History, 6.2 (Winter 1975), pp. 237–272, p. 263. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 196–197. The first-person narration is crucial to the novel: Atwood began the first draft in the third person but soon found that she could proceed only with Grace's voice present as a first-person narration. Mel Gussow, ‘The Alternate Personalities in an Author's Life and Art’, New York Times, December 30 (1996), pp. C9–C10, p. C9. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), pp. 95–96. Of this photograph of a condemned man, Barthes remarks, ‘I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake’ (p. 96; emphasis in original). Atwood's use of the word ‘commit’ hints at the connection of the criminal with the writerly. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 140. Henry James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, in Leon Edel (ed.), The Complete Tales of Henry James (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), 12 vols. Vol 12, pp. 193–232. Henry James, ‘The Middle Years’, in Leon Edel (ed.), The Complete Tales of Henry James (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), 12 vols. Vol 9, pp. 53–76. Leon Edel, Dan H. Laurence, and James Rambeau, A Bibliography of Henry James, 3rd ed., Soho Bibliographies 8 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), pp. 160–161. Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem (London: Little, Brown Warner, 1998). One might suggest a comparison here with Wilkie Collins's 1868 work The Moonstone, the archetypal crime novel of disjointed personality, in which Franklin Blake functions as victim, investigator, and culprit, as well as supposed editor. Hayden White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, Critical Inquiry, 7.1 (1980), pp. 5–27, p. 24. Atwood, discussing the composition of Alias Grace, remarks that ‘each historian picks out the facts he or she chooses to find significant, and every novel, whether historical or not, must limit its own scope’ (‘In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction’, American Historical Review, 103.5 (1998), pp. 1503–1516, p. 1516), hereafter cited as ‘In Search’. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995; reprint, 1998), p. 278, n 13.

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