Queering the madwoman: A mad/queer narrative in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and its adaptation

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1997), a neo-Victorian classic biofictional novel about a nineteenth-century murderess, is interpreted in this chapter as a narrative of a madwoman, that is, a narrative which undercuts a possibility of a coherent representation of the self. Her “inability to speak”-fragmentation, instability and incompleteness of her narrative-is what makes it queer; its queerness is based in its refusal to be within the doctor-listener’s/reader’s grasp. Grace’s (mad) story, via its narrative “failure” to offer a linear, coherent account, becomes the epitome of queer subversiveness. The chapter also discusses the television adaptation of Atwood’s novel to examine alternative techniques used in the adaptive medium to express the instabilities and the incoherence of the self, and to diagnose Grace Marks of the television show as a (queer) madwoman.