Feminist Narratology Revisited

In 1986, in pages of Style, a debate was launched between Susan Lanser and Nelli Diengott on feasibility of a new theory, which Lanser named narratology. Lanser argued that as a textual and structuralist methodology could be very useful to feminist critical inquiry, but only if its principles were fundamentally changed to accommodate materialist issues vital to most feminist critics, including gender of author, psychology of character narrating, and time and place of fiction. In a subsequent issue, Diengott countered that such synthesis, by its own terms, would not be possible because materialist feminism is completely antithetical to as theory; combining two into a single methodology called narratology would cross impenetrable line between narrative poetics and interpretive criticism that in practice strictly observes. The debate was revived by Kathy Mezei a decade later in her Introduction to Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. There she explicitly argues for legitimacy of Lanser's definition over Diengott's opposition, defining narratology as a method of analysis that includes the sexuality and gender of author, narrator, character, and reader (2), elements that transcend narratology's normal structural and textual bounds. In 2002, in Feminist Metafiction and Evolution of British Novel, I argued, in contrast, for a theory of narratology that does not depend on gender of author or qualities of female narrating character as person. My thesis instead focused on structure and discourse of woman's narrating activity on level of text, demonstrating that narratology is feasible as a strict narratological theory and can also be used as critical methodology in that way. Since that time, perhaps because of oxymoronic difficulties inherent in term, narratology has mostly been dropped from critical lexicon and its use in feminist criticism has become almost extinct. The kinds of analyses produced in response to Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, however, suggest relevance of reexamining narratology as a methodological approach and validity of renegotiating its possibilities to include both sides of theoretical debate. Alias Grace is a novel based on real murder of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery in 1843. Each chapter opens with excerpts from actual historical documents relevant to murder case and published around same time as crime. Alongside these excerpts are pieces of canonical English and American poetry, all also written during nineteenth century and all by or on subject of women. The primary narrative, however, is delivered by a fictionalized version of real convicted female killer, Grace Marks, imprisoned for crime and trying to reconstruct, in a mostly linear fashion, events leading up to murder she claims she cannot recall. Also included in narrative text are fictional sections of free indirect discourse attributed to Simon Jordan, male psychiatrist who elicits Grace's first-person story, as well as occasional fictional letter from other official and unofficial sources in connection with his enterprise. Precisely because of this unique structural polyphony of different generic narratives, focus on narration in critical response to this text is almost inevitable; and because primary narrative, one that shapes plot and structurally coordinates all other discourses, is delivered in voice of a woman, complexities of woman's narrating act become central to a number of critical essays on a variety of hermeneutic subjects written in response to book. (1) To date, all critical attention paid directly to complexities of female narration in Alias Grace has concerned itself with credibility of its main narrating character as a person and, consequently, as a story teller. …