Displaced: Canadian Mindscapes in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Abstract

Simply put, hyperreality is used to denote something that does not yet exist in the sense of
being undeniably demonstrable. According to Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and
Simulation (1981), hyperreality is a state where reality has been replaced by simulacra,
meaning that what is real and what is fictional is indistinguishable. Equally, hyperreality
starts as soon as one replaces the question of ‘if’ by ‘when’. Therein, in Margaret Atwood’s
Alias Grace, it becomes quite difficult to establish whether or not Grace Marks is innocent,
pure and wrongly accused of the horrible murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his
housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Likewise, Grace's memory (which, strangely enough, is
referred to in terms of its absence rather than its presence since she is supposedly suffering
from amnesia) is some sort of virtual reality, an entire world in itself, where Grace can appear
to be anything she wants to be. By constantly overlapping the Canadian landscape, Grace’s
subconscious enables a window into the world within, one of the past, the present and the
future, some sort of interface between three different psychological entities with their
corresponding and symbolic representations of the landscape.
The present paper looks into the novel from behind the lens of the Canadian
landscape (although scarce in occurrences) as a metonymy of hyperreal mindscapes: doubly
displaced both geographically (she is an Irish immigrant), and mentally (she seems to be
manifesting a form of multiple personality disorder), Grace simultaneously exists in
hyperreal mindscapes, mimicking and replicating, stating and questioning, challenging
readers who are left adrift in a textual world where the boundaries between reality and
representation become blurred.