Chapter Four - Of What Is Past, or Passing: Past- and Present-Tense Narration

Summary

Simultaneous Present-Tense Narration and Vertical Past-Tense Embedding

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Since the publication of her first volume of poetry in 1961 and her first novel in 1969, Margaret Atwood (1939–) has become not only “a Canadian cult figure and celebrity,” but also a writer of international renown (Bouson 2010: 1). A wide spectrum of genres is one of the distinguishing features of her output – she is the author of numerous novels, poetry volumes, short story collections, children's literature as well as non-fiction books. Although much better known for her contemporary and dystopian novels, Atwood also has historical fiction to her name. Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin (2000) marked what Alice Ridout calls a “historical turn” in Atwood's writings (2013: 294), before her interests shifted towards an imaginary future. However, despite its past setting, Alias Grace (1996) shares some of its themes with Atwood's other fiction: female identity and its social construction, power politics, questions of Canadian nationalism and Canadian identity (Bouson 2010: 2). This thematic overlap is underlain by Atwood's belief that we have the right to use history for the purposes of the present: “The past no longer belongs only to those who lived in it; the past belongs to those who claim it, and are willing to explore it, and to infuse it with meaning for those alive today. The past belongs to us, because we are the ones who need it” (Atwood 1998: 1516). As Coral Ann Howells observes, the contemporary context of Atwood's historical fiction is manifested in her postmodern scepticism towards the truthfulness of history, and in her critical interrogation of the Canadian past (2000: 150).

In her essay “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction,” Atwood placed her novel within the context of a genre which, in her view, was just emerging in Canada at that time, and claimed that it is the forgotten and the suppressed aspects of history that inspire writers the most: “The lure of the Canadian past, for the writers of my generation, has been partly the lure of the unmentionable – the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo” (Atwood 1998: 1509).