MANY OF THE ARTICLES PUBLISHED on Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace since the late 1990 reveal a measure of discomfort with what appears to be the novel's incompatible aims, namely those of providing a postmodernist critique of history within the framework of nineteenth-century literary conventions. I argue that these two aims are reconcilable when the novel is understood as a trial novel that questions the construction of a teleological courtroom narrative (1) deliberately based upon nineteenth-century novel-writing strategies and delivered in large part by a fictional Grace Marks, who acts throughout the novel as her own defence attorney. Critics have noticed contradictory currents in Atwood's writing yet have failed to harmonize them. Hilary Mantel, Burkhard Niederhoff, Alice Palumbo, Barbara Hill Rigney, and Margaret Rogerson, for example, acknowledge the postmodernist sensibility and techniques at play within Alias Grace. Mantel lays emphasis on the novel's fragmentation (4); Niederhoff classifies the novel as an example of historiographic metafiction and concedes that such a genre is "fundamentally sceptical, eroding the distinction between fact and fiction as well as undermining all claims to truth and knowledge" (81); Palumbo characterizes Atwood's work as one which makes it clear that "it is nearly impossible to expect one single 'true story' to emerge from the wealth of alternatives" (85); Rigney similarly states that Atwood's major thesis is "the inherent ambiguity of the nature of truth" (159); and Rogerson recognizes the novel's function as process rather than mere product when she refers to its central quilting metaphor and suggests that in the act of reading and interpretation, the reader him- or herself becomes a quilt maker (9). The same scholars, however, give voice to a certain anxiety when they attempt to make sense of Alias Grace's outcome. Despite the work's skeptical stance toward truth, the matter of whether the character of Grace Marks is guilty or innocent, a temptress or a victim, a liar or a paragon of integrity is one which these critics are unwilling to abandon. Mantel raises the question: "[W]ith her background of deprivation, how likely is it that she had retained any innocence at all? Grace is a deceiver" (4). Niederhoff, in turn, concludes that Atwood is after all less interested in the truth value of historical reconstruction "than in its effects on people's lives" (82). In his reading of the novel, he accepts unequivocally that Grace was involved in the murders as Mary Whitney (80).
