American and British Studies Annual (Nov 2018)
Hungry for Truth and (Hi)story: Images of Food in Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Abstract
Alias Grace is a historiographic metafiction written by Margaret Atwood in 1996 about Grace Marks, imprisoned for double murder. The style of the novel is a convincing reconstruction of the Victorian historical novel because of authentic descriptions of 19th century Canadian households and domestic life and its regular meals. The food motif is a vivid undercurrent in Alias Grace just as it is in Atwood’s other novels. Images of food intensify the realistic portrait of Canada, however, the food operates on a deeper, symbolic level: images of food, eating, and hunger are often interwoven with the power and class injustice. The analysis shows that hunger is not only physical experience and a hard fact of prisoner’s life but it can be metaphorical, manifested as hunger for truth and story. The article argues that imprisoned Grace controls her hunger to usurp responsibility for her story. It also illustrates that women are constantly associated with food and edibles and thus it points to related issues of cannibalism and power struggles. Although the motifs of food, eating and cannibalism have been discussed by numerous critics including Sarah Sceats, Heidi Darroch, and Sharon Rose Wilson, this article extends their research by exploring Atwood’s strategies of writing and storytelling using food images. The article examines Atwood’s postmodern technique of cooking up the Alias Grace from many historical texts and using genre fiction ingredients.
