Alias Grace

When I'm not complaining about inappropriate uses of the adjective "Dickensian," I'm complaining about sex in neo-Victorian literature. Or, to be more precise, about authors who associate representations of sex--speaking and performance thereof--with "the truth" about the Victorians. We speak about these things; they didn't; therefore, we achieve some kind of heightened realism when we uncover the bodies hidden under the corsets and frock coats. It's the sort of ventriloquism that characterizes many of Andrew Davies' television scripts, like the BBC Middlemarch. Now, never mind that it doesn't take a long immersion in Foucault to realize that the Victorians did, in fact, discuss sex quite a bit, even if in more evasive or figurative language than that to which we're accustomed; George Eliot, for example, has always struck me as a remarkably explicit novelist, especially in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, but there's also the frank talk in Jane Eyre, the extensive debates over sexuality and the visual arts (nudes, for example), the lurid insinuations and sometimes flagrant sado-masochism that characterize mainstream anti-Catholic propaganda, and so forth. In other words, while it's true that the Victorians negotiated and represented sexual issues in public* differently than we do, it's a misreading--and a bad one at that--of the available evidence to argue that explicit representations of Victorians having at it can be equated with "telling the truth" about them, or even of subverting their own self-representations.

I don't think the turn to sex constitutes a misrepresentation in bad faith; writers, after all, are not chortling in their beer over having yet another opportunity to one-up their Victorian ancestors. Moreover, my complaint is not meant to be a salvo against the presence of sex in neo-Victorian fiction. Some novelists are simply doing what historical novelists have always done--namely, representing "manners and morals," to use the classic nineteenth-century phrasing. Or they're trying to turn the objects of Victorian sexual discourse into subjects, as it were (e.g., outcast groups like prostitutes or homosexuals), which has also been a traditional function of the historical novel. (Literary as well as political, in the sense that writers may be trying to make a point, but they may also be interested in exploring the artistic and technical possibilities as well: how do you imagine the life of, say, a Victorian woman who spends part of the year as a prostitute and part of the year as a farmworker?) Or they're simply interested in sex as part of life's tapestry, much as they would be interested in it if they were writing about the twentieth century. Rather, I'm complaining about representations of sexuality that are self-congratulatory acts of ventriloquism (see Davies, above) or that make sexuality "the real thing" underlying Victorian hypocrisy because, given our present-day concerns, it somehow must be. (I recall getting rather exasperated with Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, which I otherwise think is a fine achievement, when it became clear that the ultimate sign of the Pip-figure's unworthiness was that he was...gasp! horror!...homosexual. It was too easy.) Perhaps I'm looking for what the South African literary critic Michael Green calls "resistant form": "projects of the present all histories are, but if they are to be 'histories', their most meaningful effect must be the way in which they resist that present, the very politics which produces them, and in so doing force it to question itself."** For Green, a historical novel isn't "historical" unless its account of the past somehow refuses to be neatly assimilated to the author's present-day politics--or prejudices, for that matter; moreover, that refusal rebounds on the author's own position. (This is a more theoretical and somewhat more extensive version of the programmatic accounts of historical fiction on offer from, say, Gore Vidal. Vidal has argued that Mary Renault is a model historical novelist in that her characters--e.g., Bagoas in The Persian Boy--never try to justify themselves according to twentieth-century standards of behavior; Renault, Vidal claims, really does her best to make the reader confront an entirely different moral universe.)

Part of the problem, I'm sure, is that twentieth-century Anglo-America has spent so much time defining itself against the Victorians--or, for that matter, trying to defend the Victorians from ourselves. Since defenses always take on some element of the opposition, it's not surprising that we'd flip from the "all Victorians are hypocrites about sex" approach to the post-Steven Marcus world in which the "Other Victorians" run rampant. Still, in a literary world where metafiction often seems to rule, you'd expect some self-consciousness about rendering the chaos of Victorian sexuality into presentist order.

I can hear some readers drumming their fingers, since this post quite clearly announces that its subject is Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. I've taken this most roundabout route to the novel because, it seems to me, Atwood really does try to work her way through some of the problems I've discussed above, if not altogether successfully. Alias Grace could be called a "soft" postmodern novel, in the sense that, while it certainly spends a good deal of time reflecting on the impossibility of reconstructing Grace Marks' crime--indeed, it suggests that even the criminal cannot adequately witness to her own actions and motives--and instead calls the reader's attention to the multiple narratives generated by the now-lost event, it doesn't deny the possibility of reconstructing other historical motives. And a number of these motives have to do with (surprise, surprise) sex. The proto-Freudian Dr. Simon Jordan, for example, has hormones in full overdrive; he can't help mentally undressing even the most unattractive woman of his acquaintance. Atwood makes it quite clear that Jordan's difficulties in seeing beyond his haze of desire color even his most "enlightened" interpretations of women and female sexuality more generally, as when he refuses to entertain the possibility that the virginal Lydia might be calculating her arousing effects. More importantly, however, sex is what makes Grace's story sell:

Now Grace, she loved good Thomas Kinnear,
McDermott he loved Grace,
And 'twas these loves as I do tell,
That brought them to disgrace. (11)

In Atwood's patchwork quilt of "popular" narratives circulating about Grace--and the quilt is the novel's most important metaphor for narrative itself--this love triangle (or rectangle, if you include the murdered Nancy Montgomery) takes pride of place as the explanation for the multiple murders. Similarly, Grace's own lawyer, Mr. MacKenzie, argues that her willingness to testify, both to himself and to Jordan, originates in sexual desire (377). Other characters ruthlessly adhere to romance paradigms, sometimes to their own cost--most fatally the case with Mary Whitney, Grace's admired friend and alter ego, who dies after she aborts the child fathered, in all likelihood, by one of her employer's sons. And some of the "well-bred" female characters are surreptitiously (or not so surreptitiously) excited by the titillating aspects of both Grace's story and criminal narratives in general. As my students quickly realized, this is very much a "sex=death" novel--sort of a literary equivalent to one of those teen slasher films, in which all nights on the town find their comeuppance in the form of a masked monster. Grace herself never admits to any sort of erotic feeling; instead, she seems to derive all her pleasure from storytelling itself. In her imagined final letter to Dr. Jordan, she glowingly remembers that "it gave me joy every time I managed to come up with something that would interest you" (457), and she ruefully discovers that her husband, Jamie, uses her horror stories about imprisonment as an aphrodisiac. (By contrast, even in dialogue with herself she represses the possibility that she might have flirted with James McDermott.)

Atwood's novel both denounces the turn to "romance" (or just plain sex) and uneasily flirts with its attractions. It's clear, for example, that romanticized readings of Grace's tragedy cover up other, less comfortable explanations for her motives. As you'd expect from Atwood, for example, the novel staunchly denounces the sexual double standard that destroys so many of the female characters; it also links the double standard to issues of social class (the female servants, for example, are all at the sexual mercy of their employers). Grace's idiosyncratic reading of Christian theology plays some part in her behavior, clearly, as does her traumatized childhood. The romance narratives, however, make Grace's alleged actions a matter of pure passion--a "personal" matter outside of mid-nineteenth century Canadian history. In other words, Atwood is very interested in why sex becomes a convenient alibi. And yet, one can't help noticing that Atwood is also somewhat seduced by the possibility that what's rotten in nineteenth-century Canada is sexual hypocrisy, especially when it comes to the male characters. It's an interesting tension.

*--What Victorians said about sex in private, as far as we can reconstruct it from the documentary evidence, is an entirely different matter. They were far less shockable than we might think.
**--Michael Green, Novel Histories: Past, Present, and Future in South African Fiction (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997), 33. (By the way, if you're interested in historical fiction, you should really give this one a look; it hasn't had much in the way of US distribution, but Green makes some interesting contributions to the theory of the historical novel.)