Transferences by Maren Scheurer;

Author:Maren Scheurer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

7

“To Keep the Sultan Amused”: Scheherazadian Narration in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Introduction: Puzzle pieces

In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Robber Bride (1993), Roz Grunwald rewrites her life’s story with her psychotherapist:

Together the two of them labour over Roz’s life as if it’s a jigsaw puzzle, a mystery story with a solution at the end. They arrange and rearrange the pieces, trying to get them to come out better. They are hopeful: if Roz can figure out what story she’s in, then they will be able to spot the erroneous turns she took, they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending. They work out a tentative plot. (460)

This vision of a mutual narrative process, a puzzle like a “mystery story,” which must be turned toward a better ending, corresponds perfectly to the basic tenets of narrative therapy. Roz’s goals are pragmatic: “to see if she can improve herself, make herself over into a new woman” (460). Her therapist is “nice” (460), and what she suggests “very reasonable” (461), but the passage is suffused with irony because the powerful emotions that have driven Roz into therapy—hatred, jealousy, and longing—cannot be accommodated in a reasonable plot.1

By contrast, the relationship between Grace Marks and Dr. Simon Jordan in Alias Grace (1996) could be described as a nonrational search for the missing pieces of a life’s puzzle. Atwood’s historical novel set in mid-nineteenth-century Canada tells the story of servant girl Grace, who has allegedly participated in the murder of her employer and his housekeeper and has been imprisoned in Kingston Penitentiary for these crimes.2 A group of rich benefactors is convinced of her innocence and hires Dr. Jordan, a young American neurologist with excellent references, to examine her in the hopes of proving her innocence or preparing for an insanity defense. The stakes are high. For Grace, this is her only hope of getting out of prison; Jordan depends on solving this case to establish himself professionally—and he becomes increasingly infatuated with his patient.

Jordan, along with other doctors in the novel, eventually contemplates the possibility that Grace suffers from multiple personality disorder (MPD). Disguised in its historical setting, Alias Grace capitalizes on the popular debates related to the increase in MPD diagnoses in the United States and Canada between the 1970s and the 1990s. Atwood’s inquiry into identity and storytelling in the novel clearly engages with the concerns raised by this condition, which questioned personality models based on unalterable, unitary, and stable identities and highlighted the cultural constructedness of psychological disorders (Porter, “Introduction” 12–13; Merskey 281). Grace’s alleged psychological disorder, however, is not the only reason why she becomes an unsolvable puzzle. She uses all her narrative skills to make herself impenetrable for the doctor; she develops intricate plots but omits the conclusion, rearranges the brittle pieces of her story to inveigle Jordan and keep him at a distance, strengthening their relationship as much as she destabilizes it.

In this way, Alias Grace keeps bringing up questions about the relational and interrelated construction of identities and narratives.

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