Reporting Clauses as Quilt Metaphors in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace: The Visible Stitches of a Split Character
This paper investigates the use of reported speech (RS) and reporting clauses (RC) in the novel Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996) from a linguistic and stylistic perspective in the context of discourse analysis. Alias Grace is a multiple viewpoint novel. The author uses the technique of dual (“s...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ranam, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
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Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines
2024
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | This paper investigates the use of reported speech (RS) and reporting clauses (RC) in the novel Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996) from a linguistic and stylistic perspective in the context of discourse analysis. Alias Grace is a multiple viewpoint novel. The author uses the technique of dual (“split”) narrative: first-person and third-person narrators alternate chapters to construct the story of Grace Marks, a young Irish immigrant convicted of murder, and her interactions with Simon Jordan, a doctor interested in mental illnesses. The proportion of final, medial and front RCs varies significantly from one chapter to another and sometimes even within a single chapter. These variations create a “quilt pattern” reminiscent of the patchwork quilts that Grace sews throughout the novel. The paper focuses on first-person chapters, where the narrator is Grace herself. She gives precise and unlikely detail of past conversations but the frontiers between different types of RS can nevertheless be blurred in the absence of quotation marks, hence the extensive use of RCs.RCs of DS in final and medial positions—within or after the quote—are mostly found in written communication and can be used, in the context of fiction, as a means of creating the illusion of oral speech in writing (Salvan 2005). Paradoxically, oral “real life” conversations typically require that reported speakers be mentioned first, with a higher frequency of reporting clauses in front position (she said, “I will”) or of indirect speech (She said that she would). In the novel’s first-person chapters, reporting clauses in medial, final and front positions as well as direct and in indirect speech alternate in a way that reveals Grace’s split personality even before it starts showing in what she actually recounts, RCs being the visible stitches of her split character. |
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