person, and sometimes blend into one another without quotation marks to indicate what is said out loud and what is not. This creates uncertainty at times, echoing the doctor's uncertainty about Grace's truthfulness, and the reader's uncertainty about her guilt. Dr. Jordan's thoughts and actions are told by an omniscient third-person narrator, allowing the reader to see the contradictions between his words, sometimes even his thoughts, and his actions, as does the inclusion of his correspondence in the book. Similarly, other people's letters and quotations from newspapers, letters, poems, and other textual sources echo the patchwork quilting metaphor in that the author used many sources from various perspectives to piece together the whole story. The portrayal of Grace Marks through a postmodern narrative has been viewed as a deliberate contrast with her faithful reproduction of the details of Victorian domestic life, or as a deliberate defense against Grace's objectification. The idea that a gentleman in Victorian Canada would sit in a sewing room day after day listening to the life story of a female servant (no matter how pretty or well-mannered or notorious she might be) is of course, incongruous. However, as Margaret Atwood herself pointed out, "In a Victorian novel, Grace would say, "Now it all comes back to me"; but as Alias Grace is not a Victorian novel, she does not say that, and, if she did, would we—any longer—believe her?" Main themes Women's history Atwood has often used images of sewing and other domestic arts in her novels, illustrating women's creativity, constrained as it was, historically, to domestic objects. Names of quilt patterns are used as titles of the 15 book sections in Alias Grace, making parallels between Grace's interest in quilts and the meanings of their patterns and Grace's storytelling, her creation of a domestic history, in which Dr. Jordan hopes to discern patterns. Grace tells her life story to the doctor as a chronology, but, as she does, she reflects on what she tells him like it was a patchwork of experiences. Each patch is destined to fill a particular place in the quilt, and they must all be created before the quilt can be assembled, much as historical research, and especially research on women in history, requires examination of many disparate sources in order to construct a chronological account. Identity Modern readers may not be satisfied with the idea that Mary, alias Grace, was