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