This chapter begins and ends with the incarceration of a woman in a lunatic asylum: in Cat's Eye (1988) Cordelia, the narrator's childhood friend, is sent to the Dorothy Lyndwick Rest Home, ‘a discreet private looney bin’ (CE 355), and in Alias Grace (1996) Grace, the titular protagonist, is imprisoned in the Toronto Lunatic Asylum. But within the structures of their respective novels, these two characters have more in common than being accredited mad by the societies in which they live. Both may be identified as corresponding with Atwood's interrogation of depicting ‘a woman behaving badly’ in her 1993 lecture, ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behaviour in the Creation of Literature’ (CP 171–2). In Cat's Eye the narrator, Elaine Risley remembers how Cordelia bullied her as a child – ‘I am afraid of Cordelia’ (CE 227) – while in her lecture Atwood questions how to ‘depict the scurvy behaviour often practised by women against each other, or by little girls against other little girls?’ (CP 180). By choosing to write a novel about Grace Marks, Atwood picks ‘one of the most notorious Canadian women of the 1840s, having been convicted of murder at the age of sixteen’ (AG 537), which recalls the title of her lecture since the ‘Spotty- Handed’ refers to ‘spot as in guilt, spot as in blood’ (CP 172). In addition, Cordelia and Grace are elusive characters with identities that shift according to the teller of or listener to their tale. Elaine's memories of Cordelia suggest a confident and cruel child and later an emotionally disturbed teenager who is sent to the asylum by her parents. Although Elaine searches for her in contemporary Toronto, Cordelia fails to appear and in the painting of her a veiled face suggests continued anonymity. Alias Grace abounds with unsuccessful attempts to fix Grace's identity: each chapter is prefaced by contemporary and varied accounts of the murder and imprisonment; as Atwood notes, ‘she [Grace] herself gave three different versions of the Montgomery murder’; and in the fictionalized narrative Grace's voice evades certainties as she seems to offer each listener the story they wish to hear (AG 538). And, both novels conclude with absence, as Elaine fails to find Cordelia and Grace's end is unknown since after she was pardoned in 1872 ‘all trace of her vanishes’ (AG 539).