An Embodied Feminist Poethics of Improper Speech in Atwood’s Alias Grace and Christiansë’s Unconfessed

Jeanne Ellis

doi:10.25159/2412-8457/10349

Authors

Jeanne Ellis University of Stellenbosch

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/2412-8457/10349

Keywords:

Alias Grace, embodied feminist poethics of improper speech, settler colonialism, trauma narrative, Unconfessed

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the cross-fertilising entanglements of narrative/literature, theory, and embodiment that constitute Margaret E. Toye’s concept of “narrative as embodied theory” in “Towards a Poethics of Love: Poststructuralist Feminist Ethics and Literary Creation” are especially appropriate to revisionary historical fiction written by women in which silenced histories of trauma are recovered and given voice. I refer to examples from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1998) and Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006) as illustrations of what I term “an embodied feminist poethics of improper speech,” a theoretical and methodological reconfiguration of Toye’s terms.

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