Haunting Physicality: Corpses, Cannibalism, and Carnality in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

'Out of the gravel there are peonies growing. They come up through the loose grey pebbles, their buds testing the air like snails' eyes, then swelling and opening, huge dark-red flowers all shining and glossy like satin. Then they burst and fall to the ground' (Atwood, 5). Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace opens with this image of organic infiltration, which combines the realms of plant and animal, and functions as an ominous introduction to the novel's central concern with transgressive physicality. This concern haunts the novel's characters and coexists with the male protagonist's obsessive desire to see and gain access to interiors, corporeal and forbidden. The flowers, with their red satin glossiness, on the verge of climactic explosion, highlight the carnality of the infiltration and, more generally, the text's preoccupation with fleshly bodies.

In the novel, this preoccupation repeatedly intrudes via imagery and dreams that reduce the individual to the terrifying sameness of grotesque physicality. The repressed corporeality of the lusting, wounded, carnal body haunts the text and its characters, threatening to undermine the boundaries and structures that govern the novel's Victorian-era society. The novel is haunted by the possibility of the self being lost, its autonomy damaged by infiltration and convergence, its humanity annihilated by a reduction to mere flesh. To demonstrate the haunting quality of the text's concern with bodies, my paper begins with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of haunting and the uncanny, stressing the shared concept of boundary transgression, which is fundamental to my own interpretation of the intrusive, inevitable return of the abject. To analyse the text's confrontations with the harrowing sameness of corporeality that threatens the subject, this essay focuses, in particular, on two characters, the servant Mary Whitney and Dr Simon Jordan. Mary Whitney's refusal to conceal her body and her knowledge of other bodies leads to her absolute abjection as corpse. In contrast, Simon Jordan's loss of subjectivity results from his obsessive preoccupation with the female mind and body.

In Atwood's novel, haunting involves a Gothic return of the repressed,¹ that which Victorian-era culture insists on denying, namely the corporeal self. In Alias Grace, the corporeality of the subject is 'unsaid and unseen' (Jackson, 4), a silence and absence that returns from banishment to plague the characters in a kind of inverted haunting in which the body² itself becomes the distressing spectre. Though it is the human body, both male and female, that becomes abject, this confrontation with the alien corporeal self is repeatedly associated with the feminine; male experiences of uncanny bodies typically result from consorting with the opposite sex. Haunting in Alias Grace is often tied to the marginalization and oppression of women and the lower classes, in part by uniting the maternal body and the corpse into a singular abject entity. So powerful is this haunting in the novel that mere association with the oppressed can plunge even characters of the privileged classes into their own corporeal crises. In particular, the privileged Dr Simon Jordan becomes haunted by physicality as a result of his exposure to Grace Marks, convicted 'murderess.'

Throughout the novel the failure to repress the body appropriately has serious consequences. Confronting physicality often means a confrontation with the grotesque, with frightening and destabilizing sameness. In Bakhtin's terms, the 'artistic logic of the grotesque image ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences (sprouts, buds) and orifices, only that which leads beyond the body's limited space or into the body's depths' (317–18). This notion of the grotesque body, 'a body in the act of becoming' (317), open and overgrown, a body in exchange with the world, also provides a foundation for Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject in Powers of Horror. According to Kristeva, the border between the 'I' and 'that which I am not,' necessary for our constitution as subjects, is threatened by the abject, since, by drawing attention to such a border, it makes the border's violation possible...