History Versus Herstory: A Study Of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Abstract

The aim of feminist narratives is to construct a particularly urgent and demanding address to the reader, who is asked to pay attention to the text, extending beyond the depiction of particular events and characters to make a claim for the reconstruction of historical knowledge. These narratives, in particular, educate women readers to achieve social transformation through consciousness-raising. These feminist narratives seek to illuminate women’s hidden lives, scrutinizing the impact of political events and cultural changes on traumatised women. These narratives espouse a strong feminist consciousness, examining the cultural construction of gender and sexuality and critiquing the patriarchal suppression of women’s rights in both the public and private spheres. Narrativization further acts as an important political tool by revealing past sufferings to the community in which it occurred. The aim of feminist narratives is to make women’s herstory visible, give meaning to it, and ultimately create frameworks. Women being already voiceless within a given culture or society and with the additional burden of experiencing psychological trauma, which by its nature is the ‘unspeakable’, undergo a strong conflict in which the challenge to express herself becomes more important. Hence, finding a means to communicate the experience is of vital importance to the person who has sustained oppression. Therefore, narrative acts both as a source of communication and a means to subvert the already existing history that present a male dominated truth about women.