When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at ail, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by icebergs or swept over the rapids, and ail aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterward that it becomes anything like a story at ail. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else. (298)

A LIAS GRACE BRIMS with references to the act of narration. Susan JLX Sniader Lanser has noted that private narration, in which a nar-J L rator addresses another character in the text, is much more likely to contain "considérable commentary on communication itself' than public narration because "the immediate communicative context of the private narrator" (Narrative 139) is represented in the text. In classic cases of private narration, the narrator is speaking directly to another character, either aloud or, in epistolary novels, in letters. Public narrators, by contrast, either directly or implicitly address "a reader-figure or audience 'outside' the text" (138).

As Grâce Marks narrates her life story to Dr. Simon Jordan from her jail cell, she must carefully modulate what she says because Simon is no casual conversationalist. He has been asked by a clergyman who believes in Grace's innocence to interview her and write a letter to the Governor on her behalf. Though she rarely mentions the underlying purpose of their meetings, she is always mindful of and motivated by it. In her conversations with Simon, Grâce finds an opportunity to participate in shaping her own représentation, power this "celebrated murderess" (22) lacks in court or in the press. Her narration is private; she narrates specifically to Simon, and their relationship shapes what she says. At the same time, she has a broader

3 6 SCL/ÉLC

implied audience which is quite public and which cannot help but shape her discourse. Alias Grâce is based on an actual 1843 Canadian murder case and examines mid-nineteenth-century immigration as well as gender and class relations from a late-twentieth-century perspective.1 Grâce, a lower-class Irish immigrant at the centre of a sensational murder trial, is the subject of others' scrutiny and is figured as a dangerous force to be contained, frequently seen filtered through characters of higher social status like Simon. But Grâce also narrates a good part of her own story. Private and public narration intersect in Grace's taie, which cannot be said to be truly private or public, but which moves along a continuum between these two pôles.

The nineteenth-century notion of gendered public and private spheres is also influential in the novel. Grâce, whose previous life as a household servant remained circumscribed within the domestic and the private realms of most nineteenth-century women's lives, moves squarely into the public sphere when she becomes a household name and an object of collective fascination and horror. However, even before "Grâce Marks" became synonymous with monstrous and uncontrolled criminality, as a member of several subservient classes of people, if not as an individual, she was already in the public sphere, the object of several forms of cultural anxiety, most notably the "Irish Question" (80) and the "Woman Question" (22).2 While Atwood did not invent her name, Grâce is aptly named. The Mark she bears is not the "Mark of Cain" (105), as her aunt suggests in cursing Grace's father, but a question mark. She is the subject of earnest Victorian social questions about ethnicity and gender. Moreover, she is an amnesiac who has forgotten the key to a compelling mystery, a victim of possession who cannot know, or a charlatan who knows ail and will not tell. The private and the public, the hidden and the exposed, ail intertwine in Alias Grâce.

In three realms, narrative transmission, her perception of her ethnie identity, and her adoption of gender rôles, there is a movement away from the public toward the private. This movement does not represent a natural feminine affinity for the private sphere, or a cowed surrender to it, but rather a stratégie, if compromised, move to make the best of available rôles. The private sphere is both stifling and liberating for Grâce, while the public sphere, often attractive for the poor Irish serving girl, ultimately proves too perilous.

Telling It to Yourself or to Someone Else

Not only Ao&s Alias Grâce contain both public and private narration but there is also a notable intermixing of these modes. Simon is represented

MARGARET ATWOOD 37

by a public narrator, who describes his thoughts and actions in the third person for an audience outside the text. Simon serves as a focalizer, or a character to whose thoughts and feelings readers have access (Prince 31-32), in these scenes, the second most common kind of narrative situation in the text, which is also liberally sprinkled with epigraphs, poems, and letters. The most common and most complex narrative situation is Grace's narration. When she speaks she is often narrating her life story to Simon, sometimes for chapters at a time without interruption. These are fairly straightforward cases of private narration, despite Grace's very public secondary audience. However, this narration is interspersed with Grace's observations about Simon's reaction to her story and her description of her activities in prison between their sessions. She always reports her own thoughts and actions in the first person whether she is telling him her story, breaking away from this story to record thoughts she does not report to him, or relaying incidents that occur while he is not present. Presumably she acts as a public narrator in the latter two cases, because her audience is outside the text. Therefore, she is not speaking to a specific character. In many cases, however, what seems like public narration is shifted back into the private realm, or into an intermediate zone by a key phrase, as I will demonstrate.

Grâce several times refers to telling stories to herself, noting that in prison there is "a lot of time to think, and no one to tell your thoughts to; and so you tell them to yourself" (161), and that a story is not a story until "you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else" (298). These statements raise the possibility that her seemingly public narration is not in fact directed outwards at a hypothetical public audience, but exists only as a record of Grace's interior monologue. If she is her own intended audience, narration would remain private because she is a character in the text and speaks only to herself when she is not speaking to Simon. This split between Simon's public narration and Grace's private narration would seem to mirror the Victorian construction of a maie public sphere and a female private sphere. However, such a neat opposition cannot be sustained because of Atwood's use of homodiegetic, heterodiegetic and autodiegetic narrators. A homodiegetic narrator also acts as a character within the text while a heterodiegetic narrator does not. An autodiegetic narrator tells his or her own story, as opposed to an observer narrator (Prince 9, 40-41). Simon is never a public narrator, only a focalizer; he is represented by a public narrator but he is not one himself. He is on occasion a private narrator, in his letters for instance. Meanwhile Grâce, an autodiegetic narrator, has more narrative privilege than Simon. More-

3 8 SCL/ÉLC

over, I will argue that Grace's narration can be considered public, at least in places. Narrative voice not only alternâtes between public and private, but often takes unexpected turns. Thus, the public/private, male/female association is challenged as much as it is upheld in narrative terms.

The novel begins with a sériés of epigraphs, then the following description: "Out of the ground there are peonies growing. They come up through the loose grey pebbles, their buds testing the air like snails' eyes, then swelling and opening, huge dark-red flowers ail shiny and glossy like satin. Then they burst and fall to the ground" (5). Because there is no explanation of narrative context, no frame narrative, no quotation maries to mark this text as spoken dialogue, it appears to be public narration. By the third paragraph, which starts "I tuck my head down while I walk" (5), it is clear the narrator is homodiegetic, while it is not yet clear whether or not she is autodiegetic. The fourth paragraph gives some orienting information about the narrator: "It's 1851. I'il be twenty-four years old next birthday. I've been shut up in here since the âge of sixteen. I am a model prisoner, and give no trouble" (5). Eventually, dues that the scene is a dream, a hallucination or a vision begin to emerge: "I watch the peonies out of the corners of my eyes. I know they shouldn't be here: it's April, and peonies don't bloom in April" (5-6), is followed by "this time it will ail be différent, this time I will run for help... none of it will have happened" (6). After two pages of description, there is some extra spacing and this startling sentence, which ends the chapter: "This is what I told Dr. Jordan, when we came to this part of the taie" (6). Narration that seemed public is rendered private by this explanation. What we have been reading has not been narrated principally for a "reader-construct" (Lanser, Narrative 137), but to another fictional character, to whom we have not yet been introduced. Yet, on the other hand, someone, a public narrator or the implied author, has chosen to begin with this excerpt of Grace's narration, to present it out of order and first. The sentence that alerts us to the fact that the narration is private — "This is what I told Dr. Jordan" — seems to imply that this organizer is Grâce herself, who acts in her arranging capacity as a public narrator, even as she narrates privately. These two pages are public and private at once.

Eventually, Simon begins to shape Grace's narration. While he listens and takes notes she feels "as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me" (69). She imagines him writing on her body in a vivid démonstration of his shared authorship in the story he is allegedly merely recording. Simon's influence extends even into scenes in which he is not present. Grâce plans her stories for him, wondering: "What should I tell

MARGARET ATWOOD 3 9

Dr. Jordan about this day?" (295). That this narration takes place in the context of their relationship, that she crafts it specifically for him, moves what might be considered public narration closer to the private pôle of the continuum, even though Grâce is not technically telling this story to another character. When Simon ceases to visit Grâce altogether she continues the story, complété with direct addresses, composing it in her mind as if he were still listening and anticipating his desires: "What should I tell him, when he cornes back? He will want to know about the arrest, and the trial I could say this" (353). When it becomes apparent that Simon is not returning she writes him a letter which she intends to smuggle out of prison, asking him to write the Governor on her behalf. Receiving no reply, Grâce continues to address him mentally for decades, and after her own release from prison and her marriage, she notes, "I've written many letters to you in my head" (441). In fact, the last twenty pages of the book consist of one of these mental letters, describing her new life. Simon, or rather the idea of him, has become a confidante for Grâce: "as I have no close woman friend I can trust, I am telling you about it, and I know you will lceep the confidence" (456), as well as someone with whom she can share an unorthodox Biblical interprétation: "I am telling this to no one but you, as I am aware it is not the approved reading" (459). The focus of these addresses to Simon is no longer on how to tell the story to please or interest him but on how telling the story to him will please or comfort Grâce. She has internalized Simon as an audience, as someone who will hear her, something Grâce is always seeking.3 When he tells her, "I simply wish to know what you yourself can actually remember," she responds, "Nobody has ever cared about that before, Sir" (307). It is a subdued but nonetheless affecting moment.

Internalizing Simon, however, changes Grace's speaking voice. The carefully modulated voice she uses to speak to him, and later to herself while imagining him, is not the angry, bitter voice she uses before she meets Simon. The bitter voice frequently incorporâtes the discourse of others in order to satirize it, as in this imitation of the visitors to the Governor's house where Grâce is hired out:

When I have gone out of the room with the tray, the ladies look at the Governor's wife's scrapbook. Oh imagine, 1 feel quite faint, they say, and You let that woman walk around loose in your house, you must have nerves of iron, my own would never stand it. Oh well one must get used to such things in our situation, we are virtually prisoners ourselves you know, although one must feel pity for such poor

4 0 SCL/ÉLC

benighted creatures .... Although naturally she can be here only during the day, I would not have her in the house at night. ... Oh I don't blâme you, there is only so far one can go in Christian charity, a léopard cannot change its spots and no one could say you have not done your duty and shown a proper feeling. (24)

Or in this prédiction:

I will shrivel, my skin will dry out, ail yellow like old linen; I will turn into a skeleton, I will be found months, years, centuries from now, and they will say Who is this, she must have slipped our minds, Well, sweep ail those bones and rubbish into the corner, but save the buttons, no sense in having them go to waste, there's no help for it now. (35)

Grâce continues to display anger after she meets Simon, and sometimes even directs it at him, but in a much more restrained fashion.4 When he asks her if she feels she has been treated unjustly, she responds mildly, "I don't know what you mean, Sir" (91). The blistering, mocking anger disappears from her tone once she adopts Simon as a permanent narrative audience. Crude or forthright thoughts do emerge in her dialogue after this point, but she always uses the cover of her friend Mary, either imagining what she would say or quoting something she did say. For example, "lady or lady's maid, they both piss and it smells the same, and not like lilacs neither, as Mary Whitney used to say" (216). Mary becomes a crutch to say what Grâce cannot while Simon is listening. Habitually quoting Mary also is a way for Grâce to keep her dead friend alive, to continue their dialogue, to retain her as an interlocutor alongside Simon.

The mixture of public and private voice in Grace's narration is not merely a curiosity, but demonstrates Grace's unfulfilled needs for privacy and intimacy, as well as for what the Governor's wife calls "an enlarged sphere" (82), both literally and figuratively. Lanser argues that as white women characters' voices first emerged in the eighteenth century, private voice in epistolary novels "channelled female voice into forms that contained and defused it" (Fictions 26). Female characters, often male-authored, were not empowered to speak to the world at large, but only within a private relationship. A novel like Jane Eyre (1847), with its bold use of personal voice and direct address to readers, represented a breakthrough. For African-American women authors, Lanser asserts, however, private voice may not be a restriction to escape but "a necessary first location of power" (Fictions 198) for people forced into servitude and denied privacy. To reclaim the private is also to assert power. She points to

MARGARET ATWOOD 41

novels such as Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and The Color Purple (1982), which both rely on a sympathetic listener or letter reader to create a safe place from which to narrate. Grâce stands somewhere in between these positions. She is closer to Jane Eyre, a young, white female servant from a genteel family fallen on hard times who has caught the eye of her prosperous employer. But Grâce is younger, ethnically Other, a lower ranking servant from a poorer family. Mr. Kinnear might seduce her, but he will not marry her, as Grâce has learned from his housekeeper Nancy's example and Mary's before her. The avenues that lead to power for Jane — a wholesome Englishness that contrasts with Rochester's mad wife's decadent Creoleness (see Spivak) — and to a genteel middle-class position of governess, are blocked off for the impoverished Irish maid-ofall-work.5

Grace's life, first as a servant, then as a prisoner, lacks the privilèges of both the private and the public spheres. She is constrained by the private sphere — the Governor's parlour where she is hired out is literally an extension of prison for her — without enjoying any real privacy, either as a prisoner or as public figure. She notes that in prison "nobody ... does you the courtesy of knocking" (35), and she resents being treated as "a fascinating case, as if I was a two-headed calf' (32). She suspects Simon of being "a collector" (41) and another doctor of viewing her as "a sight that must be seen" (244). The reason for tourists' and doctors' interest is her status as an infamous criminal. As Sarah Robertson notes, "the individual Grâce has been subsumed by the public Grâce" (154). Grâce, like her historical counterpart, is the subject of numerous newspaper articles. In the novel (as in real life), the chronicler of mid-nineteenth-century Canadian life, Susanna Moodie, devotes a chapter of Life in the Clearings (1853) to her. Atwood uses quotations from Moodie as epigraphs, and Simon and Grâce both read her account and refer to it. It was Moodie who first described Grâce Marks as a "celebrated murderess" (Moodie 195), a term Grâce repeats many times. Grâce suspects that the salacious nature of the murders plays no small rôle in the public's fascination with her: "They don't care if I killed anyone, I could have eut dozens of throats, it's only what they'd admire in a soldier, they'd scarcely blink. No: was I really a paramour, is their chief concern, and they don't even know themselves whether they want the answer to be no or yes" (27). Simon is also compelled by this question. When Grâce is hypnotized, he immediately asks if Grâce ever "had relations" with James, realizing only as he asks that this is "the one thing he most wants to know" (399). After they are married, Jamie, too, persuades Grâce to tell him the story of what happened at Mr.

4 2 SCL/ÉLC

Kinnear's over and over and "his favourite part...is when poor James McDermott was hauling me ail around the house ... looking for a bed fit for his wicked purposes" (457).

Even before she becomes a celebrity, Grâce experiences intense scrutiny. As a child in a large, poor family she tries to hug herself tight to shrink herself "because there was never enough room for me, at home or anywhere" (33). At Mr. Kinnear's, when her afternoon idyll making daisy chains in the meadow with Jamie is watched by her employer and two other servants, she is angered and reports, "I felt as though my afternoon had not been mine at ail, and not a kind and private thing, but had been spied upon by every one of them ... exactly as if they'd ail been lined up in a row at the door of my chamber, and taking turns at looking through the keyhole" (263).6 Grâce explains that her need for privacy is the reason she withholds information from Simon. When he asks her to relay a dream from the previous night, she does, but only after the page-long dream has been narrated does the reader find that Grâce has only remembered the dream silently, and then responded to Simon, "I can't remember, Sir" (101), adding to herself, "I have little enough of my own, no belongings, no possessions, no privacy to speak of, and I need to keep something for myself' (101). This trick, the withholding that initially looks like compliance, is possible because in Grace's narration, there are no quotation marks, so it is often unclear whether text is spoken or thought until a tag clause appears at the end.7 Grâce guards her privacy through silence, and by playing the part expected of her. "I have a good stupid look I have practised" (38), she confides to the reader, and uses it on Simon during their first meeting. Later, when she trusts him more, she tells him of her use of a similar tactic at Mr. Kinnear's: "I had now been a servant for three years, and could act the part well enough" (224).

But just as Grâce desires the physical and mental privacy of an escape from publicity (a greater entry into the private sphere), she also wants to escape from the restricted life of the prison (a greater entry into the public sphere). On one level this desire for release is literal. Grâce wants out of prison. Early in her narration (pre-Simon), she mocks the prison authorities who have sentenced her to solitary confinement: "I'm being left alone to reflect on my sins and misdemeanors, and one does that best in solitude, or such is our expert and considered opinion, Grâce, after long experience with these matters" (34). She longs to go outside. When Simon présents her with an apple, she smells it and thinks, "It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry" (39). Despite this very real desire for literal escape, as a reviewer has attested, the novel as a whole

MARGARET ATWOOD 4 3

examines "the cramped, desolate, private spaces that served as the cauldron for stewing resentments and desires" ("Women on the Verge" 1). Nina Auerbach notes that Grace's imprisonment functions as a symbol of women's imprisonment in domestic rôles as well as immigrants' entrapment in poverty. Auerbach asserts that the prison "is only an extension of the rooms, houses and ships beyond the jail" (1). Consider the following passage, which refers literally to prison, but also to the restriction of ail subordinate classes of people:

Today when I woke up there was a beautiful pink sunrise, with the mist lying over the fields like a soft white cloud of muslin, and the sun shining through the layers of it ail blurred and rosy like a peach gently on fire.

In fact I have no idea what kind of sunrise there was. In prison they make the windows high up, so you cannot climb out of them I suppose, but also so you cannot see out of them either, or at least not onto the outside world. They do not want you looking out, they do not want you thinking the word out, they do not want you looking at the horizon and thinking you might someday drop below it yourself, like the sail of a ship departing or a horse rider vanishing down a far hillside.

(237)

Grace's narrative false start here, which présents her fantasy of the sunrise as fact, is an example of the way she "thinks the word out." Simon, frustrated by the knowledge that Grâce is withholding information from him, surmises that her "strongest prison is of her own construction" (362). There is some truth to this assertion, but with this statement and by dismissing the story of her childhood and immigration as "only the usual poverty and hardships, etc." (133), he ignores the material facts that conspire to trap Grâce, the prisons not of her own construction which define her in the public eye. Two of the most prominent are Irish nationality and female gender. While Grace's Irishness is something she can make private if she chooses, passing by assimilation rather than by outright déniai, gender proves a more difficult border to cross.

Passing Through Air

"When you cross over the border, it is like passing through air, you wouldn't know you'd done it; as the trees on both sides of it are the same" (266), Jeremiah tells Grâce. He is speaking of crossing the U.S./Canada border in order to escape paying customs, but Jeremiah is a seasoned border crosser.8He appears in the text as Dr. Jerome DuPont, "Neuro-

4 4 SCL/ÉLC

hypnotist" (83), Jeremiah Pontelli, peddler, Gerald Ponti, magician, and fînally, in the English translation of his symbolic surname, Gerald Bridges, médium. He identifies himself as an American of French Protestant descent or as an American of Italian descent. Other characters refer to his "trace of a foreign accent" (83) and his "gypsy doings" (155); they identify him as a "Jew peddler" (338), and accuse him of being "a heathenish sort of man" (197) and of having "a low foreign look" (270); but none can pin a specific ethnie identity on him. That he is a Jew or a gypsy are common guesses. Jeremiah has "the air of being able to see more than most could" (265), according to Grâce, or "the deep liquid eyes and intense gaze of a professional charlatan" (83) according to Simon. His hair is usually dark but sometimes red. He wears a "sand-coloured" suit (305). Jeremiah slips through others' définitions of him like sand, escaping where Grâce seems trapped.

Grâce first develops a friendship with Jeremiah when he cornes to peddle his goods at the house where she has her first position. When she begins to sense danger at Mr. Kinnear's, he makes her an offer: to run away with him as a "médical clairvoyant" (267). Jeremiah has previously told Grâce, "You are one of us" (155), puzzling her. One possible meaning is that, like him, she has the ability to escape societal définitions and create her own identity. "You would need a différent name, of course; a French one or something foreign, because people on this side of the océan would find it hard to believe that a woman with the plain name of Grâce had mysterious powers" (268), he coaches her. Grâce is tempted. As she says, in "a new country, friends become old friends very quickly" (264). The escape Jeremiah offers is not only from danger, but from social class and nationality. If she follows his example she can jump the barriers, assume a French name, perform in the parlours of the middle and upper classes as well as in travelling shows for the lower classas, be accepted as a specialist in hypnotism one day and wander the byways of Ontario selling buttons and clothes the next. Ultimately, because he does not mean to marry her, Grâce rejects the offer and shortly thereafter she finds herself in prison. Her imprisonment contrasts starkly with Jeremiah's physical and social mobility. Jeremiah makes another attempt to free Grâce by hypnotizing her for the Governor's wife and her circle of friends who have been working for Grace's release. Grâce feels this attempt represents "a pact" (306) that Jeremiah has made with her, but it does not free her. By the end of the novel, however, Grâce has been freed and when she sees Jeremiah, now Gerald Bridges, "celebrated médium" (455), at a performance, he winks at her and she gives him a discreet wave, which escapes the

MARGARET ATWOOD 4 5

notice of her husband. She reflects, "I would not wish any here to learn my true name; but I know my secrets are safe with Jeremiah, as his are safe with me" (456). For now, like Jeremiah, Grâce is also a name-changer, an "escape artist"9 assimilated into society under a new name, no longer bound by her history as a celebrated murderess, her childhood poverty, or her Irishness.

Grâce indignantly quotes the préfacé to her confession, which reads " both of the accused were from Ireland by their own admission" (103, original emphasis). She protests, "That made it sound like a crime, and I don't know that being from Ireland is a crime; although I have often seen it treated as such. But of course, our family were Protestants, and that is différent" (103). Grace's comments reveal several important points. The phrase "by their own admission" associâtes Irishness with deviance, and simultaneously identifies it with something one could and might want to conceal. (The wording is reminiscent of today's "avowed homosexual.") Anti-Irish prejudice and Grace's lack of positive associations with Ireland or a strong Irish identity make passing an acceptable option for her. She suffers through a miserably poor childhood in the absence of the ethnie solidarity she might feel if that poverty were attributable to English oppression rather than her maternai grandfather's and her father's personal disgrâces.10 Separated almost immediately from any family that might have reinforced her national identity when her mother dies and she goes into service in Canada, Grâce is left without much sense of national origin: "I don't recall the place very well, as I was a child when I left it; only in scraps, like a plate that's been broken. There are always some pieces that would seem to belong to another plate altogether; and then there are the empty spaces, where you cannot fit anything in" (103).

However, Grâce has some ideas about the Irish. Her assertion that Irish Protestants are "différent" (and presumably less worthy of slander) points to one assimilation strategy available to Grâce, stressing her Protestantism over her Irishness. She takes advantage of this strategy almost immediately upon immigrating. The first time words are put in her mouth for her. When the twelve-year-old girl is being interviewed for a position as a scullery maid, the housekeeper conducting the interview wants to know "if I was a Catholic, as those from Ireland generally were; and if so she would have nothing to do with me, as the Catholics were superstitious and rebellious Papists who were ruining the country" (128). Later she needs no encouragement to disassociate herself from Catholics, as seen in her insistence on Protestant différence or in her distaste at seeing James act "so Papist" (332) when he crosses himself. While she does not

4 6 SCL/ÉLC

go as far as her father, who has been involved in anti-Catholic terrorism in Ireland, Grâce is quick to disassociate herself from Catholics when possible."

But disassociation is not always so easy. The Reverend Verringer, one of the petitioners for Grâce, notes to Simon that political factors hinder Grace's chance for release, as the "Tories appear to have confused Grâce with the Irish Question, although she is a Protestant; and to consider the murder of a single Tory gentleman — however worthy the gentleman, and however regrettable the murder — to be the same thing as the insurrection of an entire race" (80). Like Grâce, Verringer makes the distinction between the Catholic and Protestant Irish, although to his disappointment, others are not making it. Grâce is marked as Irish in several ways. Simon notes a "trace of the Northern Irish accent" (133) in her voice. Her red hair is frequently commented upon and holds negative associations for many who do so. Quoting the newspaper descriptions of herself, Grâce notes she has the "Red hair of an ogre" (33), the interviewing housekeeper fears she will be "bad-tempered, as redheaded people frequently were" (128), and prison guards assume she will be sexually available to them because "a little fire ... cornes with the redness of the hair" (240). Not only is Grâce marked as Celtic by the colour of her hair,12 in one instance a specifically Catholic identity is attached to her when her lawyer, sympathizing with Simon's diffîculty in getting to the bottom of Grace's story, nicknames her "Our Lady of the Silences" (373).

Grâce is Methodist. Her maternai grandfather was a minister who "had done something unexpected with the church money" (104), lost his position and left his family destitute. Her father was Anglo-Irish, and presumably Anglican, but not religious. As an adult, Grâce attends a Methodist church. While this is an unsurprising choice, given her family background, it is also a very stratégie, assimilationist one. Cecil Houston and William Smyth have noted that in mid-nineteenth-century Canada, Protestant churches, especially the quickly growing Methodist church, served as "forums for ethnie fusion" (169). In these churches, Irish Protestants met and intermarried with Scots, English, and American settlers. While the Anglican religion remained associated with English ethnicity, and Presbyterianism with Scotch héritage, the ethnicity of a Methodist was not as easily traceable. Protestant churches, Houston and Smyth assert, are part of the reason that in Canada, "the Irish have disappeared" (3), despite the immigration of half a million Irish to Canada from 1815 to 1845 and their status as "a pivotai charter group" (8) of Canadian settlement.1 3 Simon notes the political advantages ofMethodism when he

MARGARET ATWOOD 4 7

suspects Reverend Verringer has converted from the Church of England to Methodism because of "the falling political star of the former in this country, and the rising one of the latter" (78). Methodism was safely Protestant, but not too closely associated with England at a time when the Canadian identity was consolidating under the fédération which joined British Canada West and French Canada East.

Aside from church affiliation, marriage is another factor that affects the perception of ethnicity. In fact, if she takes her husband's name, marriage can obscure a woman's ethnicity to outside observers. As girls, Grâce and Mary play a game throwing apple peelings to see what letter they will spell in order to divine the initiais of their future husbands. Grace's peel falls into a J. Mary jokes Grâce will marry Jim, the stableboy, or Jeremiah, and in fact several men whose names start with J — Jeremiah, Simon Jordan, and two others who share Jim's name — are potential sexual partners for Grâce. James McDermott, the Irish Catholic servant who is hung for the murder of Mr. Kinnear, is widely believed to be Grace's lover, and to have been urged by her to commit the murders. Jamie Walsh, the neighbour boy who has a crush on Grâce, testifies against her at the trial, repents and marries her after her release. If a partnership with Jeremiah would have offered Grâce a kind of flexible ethnicity, perceptions of her sexual relations with James reinforce her Irishness in the public eye, to the detriment of her image. Her eventual union with Jamie helps erase her national identity, even though he is probably Irish, and may even be Catholic by birth.

James and Jamie represent two distinct kinds of Irish identity. James represents the criminal, rebellious Irishman Anglo-Canadians so feared. He is a "surly black-browed rascal" (278) according to Mr. Kinnear, and a self-described "scapegrace ... never one to lick the boots of the rich" (226), endowed with a prodigious amount of physical energy. When he expends it in an ethnic-identified way, step-dancing in the barn loft, the noise sounds ominous to Grâce. James is filled with ethnie resentment. Grâce reports that "he hated ail Englishman ... they were ail thieves and whores, and stealers of land, and ground down the poor wherever they went" (257). It is largely because of the perception that Grâce is the paramour of the Catholic, Celtic-identified McDermott that she cannot escape the taint of Irishness during the trial. The association of Irishness with criminality and revolt plays an important part in the pre-trial publicity. As Grace's lawyer notes to Simon, the recently quashed populist Rebellion led by William MacKenzie, who "took the part of the poor Scots and Irish" (372), cast a political shadow over the scandai, though

4 8 SCL/ÉLC

Grâce was ten years old and still in Ireland at the time. Being Irish is enough to make her suspected of being anti-Tory — moreover, her murdered employer was a Tory, and also a Scot, but a lowland Scot, which according to James is "the same thing" (257) as being an Englishman.

Jamie Walsh, the fife-playing youth who makes daisy chains with Grâce, represents a considerably less threatening version of the Irish-Canadian, as his juvenile nickname implies. He is never explicitly named as Irish, but his Irish surname, red hair and freckles ail suggest such an identity. Walsh is not only an Irish name, but for the most part, an Irish Catholic name,14 though Jamie's religion is never mentioned, except to note that after their marriage Jamie attends the Methodist church with Grâce. If Jamie was born Catholic, his conversion to Methodism is notable since relatively few Catholics converted. Also remarkable would be Grace's acceptance of him, given her bias against Catholics. On the other hand, this distaste could be what prompts Jamie to convert, or evidence of Grace's lack of viable options when Jamie proposes.

Whether he is a convert or not, Grâce and Jamie's married life is carefully conformist in order to protect Grace's identity and their privacy. Ironically, marriage to a countryman does not bring Grâce back her lost ethnicity, but rather helps Grâce to assimilate more completely as Jamie is as bent on anonymity as she is. They name their cat Tabby and their dog Rex because "we don't wish to get a réputation in the neighbourhood for being too original" (455). The next sentence announces that they attend the Methodist church, presumably for the same reason. By successfully avoiding détection and by obtaining a house of her own, Grâce gains the privacy she has always lacked, and entry to a more satisfactory version of the domestic sphere than the one she experienced as a servant. While she has greater access to the outside world than she did as a prisoner, her life is still for the most part circumscribed by the private sphere. Grace's chief pleasures are in keeping her own house, in quilting for herself and in her hopes that at forty-six she may be pregnant with her first child. Her marriage to Jamie, a man who is more suited to home life than Jeremiah and more open to assimilation than James, makes this quiet, private life possible. They have heeded this advice from the conduct book The Idéal Woman: "Let the woman's first requisite be a man who is domestic in his tastes, and the man's first object be a woman who can make his home a place of rest for him" (Melendy 47). Grâce is neither the celebrated murderess she was nor the celebrated médium she could have been. Instead she sits on her porch and admires a scene "so peaceful you would think it was a picture" (453). Her passing, both in terms of ethnie assimilation and

MARGARET ATWOOD 4 9

in hiding her identity, is not as flamboyant an escape from définition as Jeremiah's, but it is an escape of sorts, an escape into privacy.

Their Own Limited Sphere

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt writes that Grace's "subordinate rôles as a child, a poor person, a servant and a prisoner have bred in her a bitter sense of irony" (19). This is certainly true, but the reviewer leaves her gender off the list. This proves to be the subordinate identity most difficult for Grâce to escape. By the end oï Alias Grâce, she is not a child, or poor, or a servant or a prisoner, but she is still a woman. She is freer than she was at the beginning of the novel, but she is not altogether free. Whether campaigning like Mrs. Quennell for "an enlarged sphere for women" (82) or cheerfully accepting their "own limited sphere" (429) like Simon's mother, ail the women of Alias Grâce live lives shaped by gender and by the long-lived Victorian concept of public and private spheres belonging respectively to men and to women. The Idéal Woman explains women's rôle in the home as follows:

If it be the man's part to lay the foundations and erect the building, it is woman's to beautify and enshrine music and the kindly arts within them. It is his to build and hers to beautify. It is woman who informs the home with light and life. Her hand it is that decorates and adorns, that culls and twines the flowers and leaves, and lets in "sweetness and light" into the rooms. Her touch is that of the purifying, transforming and beautifying angel in the home, or indeed to be a help-meet in every sense of the word. (Melendy 45-46).

Nine-year-old Grâce, in charge of her younger siblings and taking care of a house inhabited by a continually sick and pregnant mother and an alcoholic, underemployed father, may not succeed in purifying, transforming, and beautifying the home to the extent Mary Melendy envisioned. She does, however, understand from a very early âge that the domestic sphere, whether in her own home or those of others, is her realm, never questioning this fate or even wishing it could be otherwise. The third of her parents' nine surviving children, she sees her older sister go into service and her older brother go to sea while she is quite young. When she is almost thirteen she begins her own career as a domestic servant. It never occurs to Grâce to even fantasize about following her brother's example instead of her sister's. She knows and accepts that poor boys leave home to take jobs that may be arduous and ill-paying but which at least lead them into the wider world, while poor girls go from their own

5 0 SCL/ÉLC

homes to the houses of others and perform much the same domestic work they have already been carrying out from an early âge. Grâce inherits responsibility for the ever-increasing number of younger siblings at the âge of nine, then passes it on to the next youngest sister, who is nine and a half, when she goes into service herself. There is a deep sense of inevitability in this pattern. Her submissive mother, trapped into an abusive marriage by her first, illegitimate pregnancy, does not give Grâce much to hope for in adult life:

She'd begun life under Aunt Pauline's thumb and continued the same way, only my father's thumb was added to it. Aunt Pauline was always telling her to stand up to my father, and my father would tell her to stand up to Aunt Pauline, and between the two of them they squashed her flat. She was a timid créature, hesitating and weak and delicate, which used to anger me. I wanted her to be stronger so I would not have to be so strong myself. (104-05)

This is a portrait of female weakness, but it is also one of female strength. Aunt Pauline has a force of will Grace's mother does not, as does Grâce herself.

Grâce senses the corrosive effect entrapment within the family sphere has on her mother, even to the point of misunderstanding a common turn of phrase:

When I was quite young, six or seven, I put my hand on my mother's belly, which was ail round and tight, and I said What is in there, another mouth to feed,. and my mother smiled sadly and said Yes I fear so, and I had a picture of an enormous mouth, on a head like the flying àngel heads on the gravestones, but with teeth and ail, eating away at my mother from the'inside, and I began to cry because I thought it would kill hèr. ( 107)

Grace's mother does eventually die, eaten from within by a tumour in her utérus on the ship from Ireland. Grace's childhood, such as it was, ends here. But Grâce learns from her mother's negative example. She has a power of cunning résistance and withholding that her mother lacks, as demonstrated in her conversations with Simon. She is something of a trickster figure.15 The Eve, Pandora, and Scheherazade motifs running through the novel ail underscore Grace's rôle as a transgressor. She is able to take advantage of the rôles available to her, even when they are severely limited, as she admits when she tells Simon she knows how to "act the part" of a servant. The rôle of murderess, which moves Grâce out of the

MARGARET ATWOOD 51

private domain into the public eye, is a surprise and more of a challenge. Early in the novel she muses:

Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word — musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.

Murderer is merely brutal. It's like a hammer, or a lump of métal. I would rather be a murderess than a murderer, if those are the only choices. (22-23)

In her more frank, pre-Simon voice, Grâce is trying on the rôle that has been handed to her, trying to find some good in it, something she can use. There is of course a very practical advantage to being a murderess rather than a murderer. James is the one hanged. Grace's youth and gender allow her lawyer to argue she is "little better than a halfwit; and very soft and pliable, and easily imposed upon" (361) by the murderous McDermott, and to win her the clemency of a life sentence. Several options are open to Grâce as a convicted murderess. She is sometimes tempted to act the brutal madwoman, reasoning that "If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided with one" (33); and she does in fact spend several years in a lunatic asylum. By the time the book opens, however, Grâce is committed to being the "model prisoner" in hopes of pardon and release. This is a rôle, she notes, that takes unseen strength to carry off, like hanging off a cliff. Tom LeClair sees Grâce fitting herself into feminine rôles Simon will understand by using the literary conventions of local colour and romance. Prone to fainting, or feigning this trait, she encourages Simon's self-described tendency to see her as "the heroine of a sentimental novel" (58) by describing the "genteel swooning" LeClair points out "was not expected of an Irish serving girl" (26). At the same time, she steers him away from believing she is merely playing the lady by making an argument for her own candidness. She asserts, "I have no reason not to be frank with you, Sir,.... A lady might conceal things, as she has her réputation to lose; but I am beyond that. ... I was never a lady, Sir, and I've already lost whatever réputation I ever had" (90). By indicating she is beyond caring about her réputation and has forsworn ail hope of release, Grâce attempts to minimize any doubt Simon might have about the veracity of her story.

The story Grâce tells Simon revolves around three women, ail of them seduced and come to disastrous ends, ail having failed one of the cardinal rules of Idéal Womanhood, to contain one's sexuality within the domestic, marital relationship. Though Grâce herself does not get pregnant out

5 2 SCL/ÉLC

of wedlock, these illegitimate pregnancies shape her life.16 The cultural narrative of the fallen girl is a powerful force in her life. Aunt Pauline tells Grâce her mother's story to warn her that "too many young women were caught in that fashion" (105). Their hasty marriage traps both of Grace's parents and their children into a life of unhappiness and poverty. After her mother dies, betrayed in death as in life by the female reproductive system, Grâce finds a new mother-figure in Mary Whitney, with whom she works in the laundry at Grace's first domestic position.

Mary is three years older than Grâce, also an orphan, part friend, part mother to the girl who has known little of friendship or mothering. "Mary took me under her wing from the very first" (151), Grâce reports, and "comforted me better than my own mother could have done, for she was always too busy or tired or ill" (164). Mary provides Grâce with her first opportunity to tell her story, to be listened to and to have her grief validated. Mary teaches Grâce how to be a servant, not only how to do laundry, but also how to be "respectful and demure" to her employers while behind their backs "she made jokes about them and imitated their faces and walks and ways" (150). It is a lesson Grâce learns well, though being more restrained than Mary, she does not fully apply her acerbic wit to her superiors until she is a prisoner, and then only in her own mind. Mary gives Grâce new ways of looking at her position which undermine the dominance of master over servant: "In the end, she said, we had the better of them, because we washed their dirty linen and therefore we knew a great deal about them; but they did not wash ours, and knew nothing about us at ail" (158). This, like Mary's habit of stealing candie stubs to extend the lighted portion of her day, is a réclamation of the privacy and private time that are so scarce for servants.

As Richard Eder notes, Maiy also initiâtes Grâce into female sexuality, explaining menstruation to the terrified girl when she reaches her menarche and repeating warnings similar to Aunt Pauline's: "Grâce, you will be a beauty, soon you will turn the men's heads ... but you must be very careful what you ask, and you must never do anything for them until they have performed what they promised; and if there's a ring, there must be a parson to go with it" (164-65). Maiy also gives Grâce an idea of what sort of future she can reasonably hope for. She tells her they will save money from their wages for their dowries. Mary's vision is of Grâce as "mistress of a tidy farmhouse, and independent" (158). For herself she imagines she will

marry a nice young farmer whose land was already cleared and a good house built; and if she could not get one of those, she would settle for

MARGARET ATWOOD 53

one with a log house, and they would build a better house later. She even knew what kind of hens and cows they would have — she wanted white and red Leghorns, and a Jersey cow for the cream and cheese, which she said there was nothing better. (166)

If the level of détail about the house and the farm animais is greater than that about the husband, this is not surprising because girls like Grâce and Mary are in training to excel in the domestic realm. Their hopes centre around transferring familiar domestic labour from an employer's home to their own. In Mary's idéal scénario, as in Melendy's, it is her husband's task "to build" the house before she arrives and hers "to beautify" it with the prettiest chickens and the best cheese and cream. The most obvious alternative to this rôle, that they continue as servants, is not attractive. Mary assures Grâce they will not — "being a servant was not a thing we were born to. ... on this side of the océan folks rose in the world by hard work, not by who their grandfather was" (157-58). Two other cultural rôles for women who fail to become the Idéal Woman surface as well, when Mary tells Grâce that wrapped in a sheet after a bath she looks "very comical, just like a madwoman" (152) and takes her down to the red-light district to "see the women who made a living by selling their bodies" (152). Wife, maid, madwoman and prostitute/criminal are the cultural rôles open to Mary and Grâce. They can be domestic and "independent" as mistresses of their own homes, domestic for pay in the homes of others, or exist dangerously outside of domesticity, out of their minds or outside the law, their sexuality threateningly unregulated. Grâce inhabits ail four female rôles within her lifetime, beginning as a servant, thrust into the national spotlight as a celebrated murderess and suspected paramour, descending into (or feigning) madness, recovering and ending as a quiet, moderately prosperous wife. What makes her remarkable is her ability to move through these rôles, between the private and the public sphere, to emerge from madness and sexual scandai and turn these common narrative ends into a mere interludes in her life, phases she can move beyond.

Mary is the key to Grace's movement through each of these rôles. As she taught her how to be a maid while she was alive, after her death Mary teaches Grâce how to fill other female rôles. Grâce tells Simon, "without her, it would have been a différent story entirely" (102), and it would have. When Mary, ignoring her own warnings to Grâce, becomes pregnant and dies of a botched abortion, Grâce is orphaned anew. After they play the apple peelings game to determine the identities of their future husbands and Mary's peel breaks three times in a row, foreshadowing her death before marriage, Grâce dreams of her mother's burial at sea, sub-

54 SCL/ÉLC

stituting Mary's dark hair for her mother's auburn hair rippling out of the sheet. The conflation of mother/Mary in the dream indicates that the second loss is as crushing as the first to Grâce.

Grâce finds herself "depressed in spirits" (202) for years after Mary's death. When she meets Nancy Montgomery, a housekeeper whose joking manner reminds her of Mary and who is looking to hire an additional servant, Grâce, now almost sixteen, takes the job. Nancy hires Grâce to provide cover for her affair with Mr. Kinnear, but she is also fearful lest he should turn his libidinous attention to the younger girl. As a resuit, she is alternately kind and sharp with Grâce and Grâce is disillusioned: "I thought we would be like sisters or at least good friends, the two of us working side by side, as I had done with Mary Whitney. Now I knew this was not the way it was going to be" (223). Despite her failure to fill Mary's shoes, Nancy continues to be linked with Mary in Grace's mind, just as Mary was linked with Grace's mother. When Nancy asks Grâce to brush her hair, Grâce remembers how Mary brushed hers. Eventually James tells Grâce that Nancy is Mr. Kinnear's mistress, and soon after she recognizes the symptoms of Nancy's pregnancy. Although there is little love lost between Nancy and Grâce, the news hits Grâce hard. "Oh no, Oh no It cannot be" (279), she thinks, then wonders what Mr. Kinnear will do when he finds out:

Boot her in the ditch. Mariy her. I had no idea, and could not rest easy with either of these futures. I wished Nancy no harm, and did not want her cast out, a waif on the common highway and a prey to wandering scoundrels; but ail the same it would not be fair and just that she should end up a respectable married lady with a ring on her finger, and rich into the bargain. It would not be right at ail. Mary Whitney had done the same as her, and had gone to her death. Why should the one be rewarded and the other punished, for the same sin? (276)

The mother-Mary-Nancy line is firmly established now. The two possibilities, a marriage or none, are the paths Grace's mother and Mary took when they found themselves pregnant. After she is rejected by the father of her child, Mary predicts that "no decent man would marry her, and she would have to go on the streets, and become a sailor's drab, as she would have no other way of feeding herself and the baby" (173). She and Grâce explore the options of hiding the pregnancy and giving the child up for adoption or going to a workhouse, but nothing seems tenable. Having been down this road with Mary, Grâce can only imagine disaster for Nancy if Mr. Kinnear will not marry her. The question is

MARGARET ATWOOD 55

never settled because they are both murdered in short order. Characters who believe Grâce was involved in the murders construe that Grâce must have been jealous of Mr. Kinnear's involvement with Nancy, but by looking to romantic motives for an explanation, they go astray. It is Mary who makes this "a différent story entirely" than what the courts and the press see.

During the hypnotism scene, after Simon identifies the mysterious voice emanating from Grâce as Mary, "Mary" affirms:

I told James to do it. I urged him to. I was there ail along! ... Grâce doesn't know, she's never known!... You mustn't tell her!... Do you want to see her back in the Asylum? I liked it there at first, I could talk out loud there. I could laugh. I could tell what happened. But no one listened to me.... I was not heard.... You're the same, you won't listen to me, you don't believe me, you want it your own way, you won't hear... (402-03)

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have noted that Victorian women writers "almost obsessively create characters who enact their own, covert authorial anger" (77), often in the figure of the madwoman, who is sometimes taken for a ghost. Atwood returns to this trope of nineteenth-century female anger by reintroducing it in the familiar forms of mental illness or spiritual possession. After the hypnotism, Simon, Reverend Verringer and Jeremiah discuss what they have seen. "Two hundred years ago, they would not have been at a loss, ... It would have been a clear case of possession," (405) Verringer asserts. But the men settle instead on a psychological condition known as "double consciousness" (405) or "dédoublement" (406), which closely resembles today's multiple personality disorder, a still controversial condition believed to be brought on by trauma that causes the conscious self to fracture. If we accept the diagnosis, the moment of disassociation is easy to pinpoint. When Mary dies, Grâce hears a voice crying "Let me in" (178), which she believes she has misheard because she thinks Mary's ghost would want to be let out the window, as a fellow steerage passenger told her when her own mother died. Grâce faints soon after:

when I did wake up I did not seem to know where I was, or what had happened; and I kept asking where Grâce had gone. And when they told me I myselfwas Grâce, I would not believe them, but cried, and tried to run out of the house, because I said that Grâce was lost, and had gone into the lake, and I needed to search for her. They told me

5 6 SCL/ÉLC

later they'd feared for my reason, which must have been unsettled by the shock of it ail; and it was no wonder, considering. (180)

Grâce reports hearing another voice shortly after her realization that Nancy is pregnant, which echoes the words of her own response: "I heard a voice whispering: It cannot be. I must have been frightened into a fit, because after that I lost consciousness altogether" (279). As the day of the murders draws closer, Grace's narrative becomes fractured and vague. She loses consciousness over and over, sleepwalks and has vivid dreams which may not be dreams at ail. Presumably during these lost times, "Mary" is seducing James in order to gain his co-operation in the murder and helps him carry it out. "Mary" is in control again while Grâce is in the Asylum. It is also quite likely that "Mary" influences Grace's bitter and sardonic voice early in the novel even after Grâce has regained control and outwardly become "the model prisoner." Even more dramatically than Grâce has internalized Simon as her audience after he is gone, she has internalized Mary as a speaking voice. Sometimes this is clearly conscious, as when she quotes Mary or tries to imitate her: "I try to think of what Mary Whitney would say, and sometimes I can say it" (63). Other times Grâce seems almost but not quite conscious of "Mary"'s presence within her, as when another inmate spills soup on her and she is chastised for protesting, then "I was suddenly very angry and I screamed, I did nothing, I did nothing! It was her, it was her fault!" (32). She is literally speaking of the soup, but on some level she may also be speaking of the murders. Grace's very mind seems divided into public and private zones to which she has varying access. As Hilary Mantel points out, "Grâce can know and not know, she is good at that" (4). She is not only "utterly present and unfathomable" (Eder 2) to readers, but also to herself.

By having Verringer raise the possibility of possession, pointing out that in différent contexts the same set of facts are interpreted quite differently, Atwood is keeping a supernatural explanation open. From a literary perspective there is not nearly as much différence between these two explanations as there would be from a psychological or religious perspective. "Mary" works as easily as a ghost as an alternate personality.17 Her references to speaking to Nancy could be taken as either evidence of the spirits' communication with each other in the afterlife, or the existence of a third personality that manifests itself only to "Mary" and not to Grâce. Positing the existence of three separate personalities adds résonance to Grace's final act of stitching scraps of Mary's petticoat and Nancy's dress into a quilt and declaring she has done this "so we will ail be together" (460).

MARGARET ATWOOD 57

Grâce may have slightly more agency as a multiple personality than as a victim of possession, since the psyché of a multiple presumably splinters in order to shield the original personality from painful knowledge. The splintering is a self-protective move from within, not an invasion from without. A final possibility, and one in which she retains the highest degree of agency, is that Grâce is faking everything. This option is open but improbable since even in her own interior monologue she never admits to the murders or even hints that she has any memory of them. Atwood has explored the theme of the suppressed, unknown self throughout her career, particularly in Surfacing{\Q)lT) and Cat'sEye (1988). That Grâce knows ail and doesn't tell seems unlikely, though she may certainly know more than she tells, or she may wilfully alter the story as she does the song "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" since "I didn't see why I shouldn't make it come out in a better way" (238). It would be wrong, however, to impose any one of these three explanations — mental illness, possession, or outright deception — on Alias Grâce as the authoritative one, because the novel is so committed to ambiguity, multiple narratives, and undecidability.18The novel's end, with Grâce unsure if she is pregnant or if the heaviness in her stomach is a tumour like the one that killed her mother — "a life or a death" (459), is one more example of the withholding of certainty and stable meanings common throughout the novel.19

Rather than choosing between the common female narrative ends of madness, marriage, or death, Alias Grâce calls attention to these limited choices by invoking ail three, relegating madness to a narrative middle and ending at a fork in the road, one path leading to a few more decades of married life for the middle-aged newlywed, the other to an early death.20 Grace's maturation as measured by conventional milestones goes into slow motion in prison. As she notes, in the Penitentiary "some of them stay the same âge ail the time inside themselves; the same âge as when first put in" (380). Physically at least, this happens to Grâce, who is said to look older than her âge at sixteen when she is incarcerated and younger than her âge after almost three decades in jail. According to Janet, Grâce appears to be "almost a girl" (446). However, time has not stood still, and the twenty-nine years represent a real loss. When Grâce associâtes the word "murderess" with a "musky and oppressive" smell "like dead flowers in a vase" (22-23), she invokes a traditional image of maidenhood, flowers, but these blossoms have been left to rot.

Grace's status as "almost a girl" at forty-five is no doubt partially due to her being unmarried. Prison temporarily halts the marriage plot for her. That she marries immediately upon her release from prison, saying sim-

58 s c l / é l c

ply "I did not have many other choices" (452), points to the near inevitability of marriage as the end of a woman's story. When it seemed she would never be released from prison, Simon thinks, "Her story is over. ... the thing that has defined her. How is she supposed to fill in the rest of the time?" (91). If the marriage plot defined most Victorian women's stories, Atwood seems to be asking, how did they fill in the rest of their time? The forced stasis that delays Grace's marrying until middle âge may not be that much différent than the arrested development of a woman who marries at twenty and suddenly finds her story over. When Grâce observes that the new Governor's daughter Janet, who finds Grace's box of clothing and présents it to her on her release, is "too young to have realized what the effects of twenty-nine years shut up in a box might be" (445), she is referring not only to her rotted clothes, or to her own time in prison, but to Janet's own likely fate. Marriage, Grâce points out once she has married, "is not what most girls imagine when young" (453).

Nonetheless, she makes the best of it. Marrying in her forties without romande illusion, Grâce thinks, "at least the two of us know what kind of bargain we have gotten into" (453). The conclusion of the novel is one of partial satisfaction. Grâce has made a remarkable escape from many of the rôles that seemed to have trapped her, from Irish serving girl, to sexually degenerate criminal, to lunatic. Yet her deliverance is into a somewhat disturbing marriage in which she had little say. Jamie sends for her when she is released from prison and she is brought to him without knowing the identity of the gentlemen who has agreed to provide her a home, or what her rôle in that home is to be. Grâce agréés to the marriage, but afterward always calls Jamie "Mr. Walsh," indicating distance between them. She is "troubled" (456) by Jamie's insistence that she re-live the murders over and over, performing the rôle of McDermott's victim for him. Grace's release from a prison symbolizing women's constriction in domestic rôles leads her into one of those very rôles; it is an improvement, but not a triumph.

Conclusion

Grâce sometimes wonders what would have become of her if she had run away with Jeremiah. She concludes, "my fate would have been very différent. But only God knows whether it would have been better or worse; and I have done ail the running away I have time for in this life" (456). Grâce gains a measure of freedom by conforming, both in terms of assimilation and by creating a conventional, domestically bound life for herself — in other words, by retreating as far as possible in both ethnie and

MARGARET ATWOOD 59

gender terms into the private sphere.21 She also contains the running narrative she keeps of her life within the context of a private relationship by addressing it to Simon, rather than to the public at large.

It is not surprising that she should do so. While Grâce gives evidence throughout the novel of her discomfort with the constriction of the private sphere and the limited, culturally-scripted rôles available to her, she has ample motivation to blend into Canadian society by assimilating and following conventional gender rôles. An already weak Irish identity and her Protestantism make shedding any associations with her Irish origins easy.22 Moreover, Grâce finds comfort and satisfaction in the private sphere, in her intimate friendship with Mary, and in the concrete pleasures of sewing and washing so lyrically described throughout the novel. Grâce is never one to covet maie privilege, accepting gender conventions as given. She does not consciously choose her two public rôles, mad-woman and criminal celebrity, and given the choice, she rejects another public rôle in which she would have been on display as a medicine show performer. Grâce probably feigns her shock— "under their own names? ... I would never be so brazen" (68) — when Simon tells her of the literary magazine female employees of his father's mill put out, but that it is a credible response demonstrates the degree to which women are expected to remain in the private sphere, and Grâce does not veer very far from this expectation, at least not of her own volition. Ail the behaviour that thrusts her into the public sphere, as well as the most public aspects of her narration, come from the altemate personality or ghost, "Mary," who dares what Grâce does not. "Mary" transgresses not only by acting sexually outside of marriage and committing murder, but also by speaking freely — that is, publicly and outside the boundaries of acceptable female speech. That Grâce needs "Mary" to perform these rôles for her is a measure of her dis-satisfaction with contemporary gender configurations.

Late in the novel Grâce quotes the hymn "Amazing Grâce":

Amazing Grâce! How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now I'm found, Was blind but now I see.

I hope I was named after it. I would like to be found. I would like to see. Or to be seen. (379)

The hymn touches on many themes in Grace's life. Its authorship by a slave-ship captain whose conversion led him to turn his ship back to Africa recalls her traumatic sea voyage. The song also calls to mind

60 SCL/ÉLC

Grace's unexpected release from prison, the blindness of her amnesia, and

the extent to which so much o f her story and her self is lost to her. She

expresses a desire to have her true self found, seen by others and to see it

herself. As Auerbach has pointed out, it is only by fulfilling the existing

rôles o f "celebrated murderess, madwoman, victim and démon" that "a

Victorian servant could turn a life of washing and quilting into a rivet

ing public narrative" (3). But Grâce would like to bring what is hidden

and private out into the open in a way which would be more genuine than

the spectacle o f her celebrity. It is an unrealized desire.

NOTES

1 Atwood's ability to recreate the Victorian world is widely praised. See especially Auerbach, Cameron, LeClair, Mantel, and Robertson. (Rubin dissents, claiming that Grace's acceptance of Mary's abortion is anachronistically feminist). Nonetheless, many of the issues treated in Alias Grâce do have continued relevance in the present. The private/public distinction so fundamental to the novel, both in narrative and thematic terms, can be seen as a reflection of inner/outer binaries that have shaped twentieth-century thinking about psychology and literature. Some critics see Alias Grace's form (the novel is long, partly epistolary, leisurely paced and contains multiple viewpoints) as a tribute to Victorian story-telling techniques. See Prose and reviews in Publishers Weekly and Chicago Tribune Books. If some of the social issues such as "the Irish Question" seem quaint as specific white ethnicities have lost much of their meaning in contemporary North American society, others remain quite relevant. The régulation of the sex lives of unmarried young women through sanctions on illegitimacy and abortion has continued, from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anti-prostitution campaigns and rescue home narratives to contemporary welfare reform debate and political skirmishes around access to abortion.

2 This and ail other references to Grâce Marks are to thefictionalGrâce Marks and not the historical Grâce Marks, unless otherwise noted. However, this statement could also be applied to the actual Grâce Marks, which is no doubt why she made such a lasting mark on the Canadian and Atwood's imagination. Atwood has returned to thefigureof Grâce Marks several times, first in her poem "Visit to Toronto With Companions" in The Journals ofSus-anna Moodie (1970) and secondly in a télévision play, The Servant Girl, which aired on the CBCin 1974.

3 As Nina Auerbach notes, despite his manifest failures to understand, Simon is the only one who truly tries to hear Grâce after her arrest.

4Though I don't entirely agree with this characterization, this surface conventionality is what I believe Elspeth Cameron is reacting to when she contrasts Grace's "bland, prim, mealy-mouthed" spoken discourse with her "opulent and intense" (40) inner life.

5 That Rochester's wife, Bertha, is white but questionably so, is from a British colony, and goes mad raises the possibility that Grâce occupies the positions of Jane and Bertha at once.

6 This scene recalls what Nancy Armstrong calls Mr. B.'s "ocular rape" (122) of Pamela through spying, letter reading, and other violations of the servant girl's privacy.

7 In Simon's sections, by contrast, spoken dialogue is clearly differentiated from

MARGARET ATWOOD 61

thought in the conventional way. In fact, in one chapter, which consists solely of Grace's narration without any introductory scene, interruption from him, or supplementary thoughts from her, the presence of quotation marks at the beginning of every paragraph is the only way to know that the point of view is Simon's — that what we have read is what she says as he remembers it, rather than as she does.

"There are frequent references to crossing the U.S./Canada border in the text as well as to Niagara Falls, a natural feature which spans the border. Not only does Jeremiah cross the border, but Simon is an American who cornes to live in Canada and then returns, while Grâce flees to the U.S. with James after the murders and is arrested there and brought back to Canada. These flights across the border echo William Lyon MacKenzie'sflightto the United States after the failure of the 1837 Rebellion in Canada as well as the sériés of unsuccessful raids by the Irish nationalist Fenians who invaded Canada from the United States in 1866.

vCoral Ann Howells discusses other "escape artists" in Atwood's fiction such as Joan in Lady Oracle, Lesje in Life Before Man, Offred in The Handmaid's Taie, and Elaine in Cat's Eye (69, 97).

'"These disgrâces impoverish the formerly middle ciass family and inspire Grace's uncle to pay their passage to Canada in order to be rid of them. Most pre-famine Irish immigrants to Canada were, like Grace's family, Protestant and from families of moderate means. The pattern of more prosperous relatives pre-paying the passage of poorer relatives was a very common one. (See MacKay, and Houston and Smyth.)

11 Noël Ignatiev has argued that Catholic Irish-Americans overcame religious prejudice against them and gained access to mainstream American society, or "became white" by dis-associating themselves politically from African-Americans, their natural class allies. It could be argued that in a Canadian context, Irish Protestants like Grâce gained power by exploiring an existing religious divide in Canada which favoured Protestants over Catholics.

12 Some Irish Protestants are ethnically Celtic, but many are not. The important point is that Grâce is believed to be.

13 Glazer and Moynihan note that in the United States, where Irish immigration was more Catholic than in Canada, Protestant Irish immigrants quickly "ceased being Irish" (240).

14 See baptismal, marriage, and cemetery areas on the Walsh Family Genealogical Home Page. Walsh is a well researched surname and this site is quite comprehensive, providing a history of the name and historical information about thousands of mainly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Walshes in the Irish diaspora worldwide. In cases where religion is noted, an overwhelming majority of Walshes are Catholics, about 90% in the marriage listing section, for example. The historical Jamie Walsh testified at Grâce Marks's trial, but their subséquent marriage is Atwood's invention. Given Atwood's painstaking historical research, it is not unreasonable to assume she has paid attention to the national, ethnie, and religious associations of the surnames of the historical figures she fictionalizes.

15 See Tom LeClair. Coral Ann Howells, writing before Alias Grâce WAS published, also notes the prevalence of tricksters in Atwood's work.

16Though it is more peripheral to the plot, the Governor's daughter Lydia also gets pregnant by a military officer and is forced into a hasty marriage with Reverend Verringer to cover it up.

17 Atwood takes a similarly ambiguous stance toward Elaine's vision or hallucination of the Virgin Mary in Cat's Eye.

lxThis characteristic ambiguity has been the focus of early criticism of Alias Grâce. Cristie March explores the heteroglossia inherent in symbolic objects in the novel, or their power to mean différent things to différent characters. Margaret Rogerson in analysing the quilt Grâce sews for herself at the end of the novel finds it could be "an abject and terrified admission of guilt, an innocent desire to create a mémorial to the only female friendships that

6 2 SCL/ÉLC

she had ever experienced, or a brazen célébration of a crime for which she feels no remorse," in other words, a product of "memory, amnesia or madness" (21).

I y Atwood also thus avoids what she wryly identifies as the common Canadian literary phenomenon of the "Baby Ex Machina," whose appearance at the end of a book gives it more hope than its vision has previously been able to sustain (Survival 207).

211 Of course, as Atwood points out in her experimental short story, "Happy Endings," "The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die," {Good Bones 55-56) or in this case, Grâce and Jamie die, Grâce and Jamie die, Grâce and Jamie die, which of course, their historical counterparts have, at least a century ago.

21 Jane Marcus has noted a similar movement in the writing of many prominent turn-of-the-century women who turned to autobiography as a "deliberate résignation from the public world and patriarchal history... re/signing their private lives into domestic discourse" (114). However, Marcus argues that these women were motivated by a belief that could they retain their famé only through gender-appropriate domestic discourse, whereas Grâce seeks to lose her famé, or rather her infamy, entirely.

2 2 In 1938, Marcus Hansen formulated three generational positions for immigrants. According to Hansen, second génération immigrants seek assimilation while their children try to retum to their ethnie roots. Many theorists of ethnie identity categorize child immigrants as second génération and Grâce fits Hansen's assimilationist second génération position nicely. Authors such as Werner Sollors and Mary Dearborn have rightly critiqued Hansen's schéma for its rigidity, but it remains useful in some circumstances.

WORKS CITED

Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. Publishers Weekly 1 Oct. 1996: 58.

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grâce. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

. Good Bones and Simple Murders. New York: Doubleday, 1994. . The Journals of Susanna Moodie. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. . Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. Auerbach, Nina. "The Housemaid's Taie." Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. Women's

Review of Books Apr. 97: 1 + .

Brookner, Anita. "A Wretch Like Her." Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. Spectator 14 Sept 1996: 36.

Cameron, Elspeth. "Alias Fiction." Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. Canadian Forum Jan./Feb. 1997: 39-42.

Dearborn, Mary V. Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Eder, Richard. "Her Truth is Scheherazade's." Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. Los Angeles Times Book Review 15 Dec. 1996: 2.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto

Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish ofNew York City. 2nd ed. Cambridge: M.I.T. P, 1970. Hansen, M.L. "TheThird Génération in America." 1938. Commentary Nov. 1952: 492-500.

MARGARET ATWOOD 6 3

Houston, Cecil J. and William J. Smyth. Irish Emigration and Canadian Seulement: Patterns, Links and Letters. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990.

Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. Modem Novelists. New York: St. Martin's, 1996. Ignatiev, Noël. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca:

Cornell UP, 1992. . The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. LeClair, Tom. "Guilty Verdict." Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. Nation 9 Dec

1996:25-27.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Did She or Didn't She?: A Taie of Two Murders." Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. New York Times 12 Dec. 1996: Cl9.

MacKay, Donald. FlightFrom Famine: The Comingof the Irish to Canada. Toronto: McClel-land and Stewart, 1990.

Mantel, Hilary. "Murder and Memory." Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. Neiv York Review ofBooks 19 Dec. 96: 4+.

March, Cristie. "Crimson Silks and New Potatoes: The Heteroglossic Power of the Object in Atwood's Alias Grâce." Studies in Canadian Literature 22.2 (1997): 66-82. Marcus, Jane. "Invincible Mediocrity: The Private Selves of Public Women." The Private Self:

Theory and Practice ofAutobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. 114-46.

Melendy, Mary R. The Idéal Woman: For Maidens, Wives, Mothers. N.p.: E.E. Miller, 1915. Moodie, Susanna. Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush. 1853. Toronto: McClelland and

Stewart, 1989.

Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.

Prose, Francine. "Death and the Maid: Margaret Atwood's Latest Novel Revolves Around a Notorious Murder in 19th-century Toronto." Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. New York Times Book Review 29 Dec. 1996: 6.

Robertson, Sarah. Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. Canadian Book Review Annual. 1996. Ed. Joyce M. Wilson. Toronto: Uof Toronto P, 1997. 154.

Rogerson, Margaret. "Reading the Patchworks in Alias Grâce." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33.1 (1998): 5-22.

Rubin, Merle. "Novel Approaches to History." Rev. of Alias Grâce by Margaret Atwood. Wall Street Journal 1 5 Nov. 1 996: A12.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent m American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravotry. " Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 243-61.

Walsh Family Genealogy and History Home Page. Internet. 10 March 2000. http:// homepages.rootsweb.com/-walsh/

"Women on the Verge: Two Novels of Madness and Mayhem." Rev. of Alias Grâce, by Margaret Atwood. Chicago Tribune Books 19 Jan. 1997: 1 + .