Unraveling history

These two quotations, one from Atwood's lecture on her first historical novel, Alias Grace, and the other from The Robber Bride and spoken by her female military historian Antonia Fremont, signal Atwood's interest in postmodern debates over history, which have been going on since the 1960s. Historians, cultural theorists, and literary critics have argued over the traditional claims of history to represent the objective truth about the past, in a context of general skepticism where the “master narratives” of history, religion, and nation have lost much of their authority, so that these “substantial edifices” are in danger of being reduced to “a pile of rubble.” Of course this is not to deny that the real past existed, but simply to point out that any historical account is only a reconstruction from fragments of the past which are available to us, and that any historical narrative is largely governed by the perspective adopted by a particular historian; telling history is always a question of interpretation. Moreover, there has been a shift away from macro-history to micro-history, where the story is told by marginalized voices or eyewitness accounts which were frequently omitted from official historical records. This forces us to acknowledge the fact that official histories only endorse the “truths” of the dominant power groups or as Michel Foucault has argued, “systems of discourse are often synonymous with systems of power.”