The novel is written in the Southern Ontario Gothic style, highlighting the social ills of the time, while exhibiting the corruption and moral hypocrisy of the upper class. Supernatural phenomena, like the ghost of Mary Whitney, fit the Gothic style, as well as the Victorian spiritualist sensibility, justifying the ghost of Mary Whitney's gleefully evil confession.[8] Returning from the dead is a recurring theme in Atwood's novels.[9]
The main narrator is Grace, whose thoughts and speech are in the first 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.[10] Dr. Jordan's thoughts and actions are told by a focalized third-person narrator, as well as his own point of view, 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.[2]
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,[11] or as a deliberate defense against Grace's objectification.[12] 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.[5] 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?"[13]
