Diasporic Female Subjectivity and Dissent in Margaret Atwood’s Neo-Victorian Novel Alias Grace

This article will critically discuss the issues of diaspora, migration and subversive female individuality in Margaret Atwood’s neo-Victorian novel Alias Grace (1996). The first part will briefly consider the emerging trends of retro-Victorian, post-Victorian and neo-Victorian fictional responses by contemporary authors to revive and reinvent the Victorian world order. It will then consider how Atwood as a Canadian British writer opposes the grand metanarrative of Victorian imperialism through her subtle critique of British colonization and patriarchy in this novel which deals specifically with nineteenth century Canada. As a neo-Victorian novel, it offers a subversive critique of white Victorian mainstream neo-Victorian fictional texts that revive the British Victorian past with an unambiguous sense of nostalgia, antiquarianism and celebration. Atwood in this novel exposes the precarious and problematic lives of diasporic British women in the Victorian imperial context and exposes the dark underbelly of British racism, sexism and imperialism and renders the Victorian world order as self-contradictory, unjust and essentially problematic. Overall, this article will critically engage with marginalized female criminals and their ambivalent diasporic subjectivity in the historical context of nineteenth century Britain and Canada.