Alias Grace

Alias Grace is a historical fiction novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. First published in 1996¹ by McClelland & Stewart, it won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The story fictionalizes the notorious 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Canada West. Two servants of the Kinnear household, Grace Marks and James McDermott, were convicted of the crime. McDermott was hanged and Marks was sentenced to life imprisonment. Although the novel is based on factual events, Atwood constructs a narrative with a fictional doctor, Simon Jordan, who researches the case. While Jordan is ostensibly conducting research into criminal behaviour, he slowly becomes personally involved in the Marks story and seeks to reconcile his perception of the mild-mannered woman he sees with the murder of which she has been convicted. Atwood first encountered the story of Marks in Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush by Susanna Moodie. In 1970, Atwood published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a cycle of poems informed by the published works of Moodie. It became a classic of Canadian literature, as it lyrically evokes the experience of life in the wilderness, immigrant life, and colonial times. Subsequently, Atwood wrote the 1974 CBC Television film The Servant Girl about Marks, also based on Susanna Moodie's account.…

Alias Grace is a historical fiction novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. First published in 1996 by McClelland & Stewart, it won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The story fictionalizes the notorious 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Canada West. Two servants of the Kinnear household, Grace Marks and James McDermott, were convicted of the crime. McDermott was hanged and Marks was sentenced to life imprisonment. Although the novel is based on factual events, Atwood constructs a narrative with a fictional doctor, Simon Jordan, who researches the case. While Jordan is ostensibly conducting research into criminal behaviour, he slowly becomes personally involved in the Marks story and seeks to reconcile his perception of the mild-mannered woman he sees with the murder of which she has been convicted. Atwood first encountered the story of Marks in Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush by Susanna Moodie. In 1970, Atwood published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a cycle of poems informed by the published works of Moodie. It became a classic of Canadian literature, as it lyrically evokes the experience of life in the wilderness, immigrant life, and colonial times. Subsequently, Atwood wrote the 1974 CBC Television film The Servant Girl about Marks, also based on Susanna Moodie's account. However, in Alias Grace, Atwood says that she has changed her opinion of Marks, having read more widely and discovered that Moodie had fabricated parts of her third-hand account of the murders.

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 the murderer. Others might view the use of the term "alias" in the title as suggesting that in their search for the truth about Grace Marks, both readers and characters may be frustrated by duplicity. Grace resists being completely comprehended by these men of power, scientific or religious. She belongs instead to the marginal communities of immigrants, servants, and mad people, who are always vulnerable, and often lost—as Grace lost her mother, and Mary Whitney (her only friend). The only simple truths for Grace are about things—quilts, sheets, carpets, petticoats, the laundry of her life; she gains confidence from a needle and thread. As Margaret Atwood says, "The true character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma." It may be noted that the publication of this book corresponds in time with the height of psychiatric interest in "multiple personality disorder" as a legitimate category of illness. This idea goes back to the late 19th century and is associated with the practice of Mesmerism, which evolved into a technique called clinical hypnosis that was often relied upon as a source of "truth" in patients who were otherwise prone to telling the clinician what the clinician wanted to hear. This technique has been largely discredited by the accumulated evidence that trance causes in its subjects increased certainty of the truth of certain memories, whether or not they are in fact true, and that what we remember is often substantially distorted by our own desires. From a psychiatric perspective, Atwood's version of Grace's story is entirely consistent with a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder, including the perplexing fact that the clinician can rarely be certain of the actual events "remembered" by the patient.

Adaptations

In 2012, Sarah Polley announced that she would be adapting Alias Grace into a feature film. This has since evolved into a television miniseries which aired on CBC Television in Canada in October and November 2017, and streams globally on Netflix. In 2016, Ball State University premiered a stage version written by Jennifer Blackmer. The same adaptation was then produced by Rivendell Theatre Ensemble in Chicago, IL, directed by Karen Kessler.

References

External links

Margaret Atwood Profile at Bold Type Exclusive interviews, a book excerpt, and an audio excerpt; plus text of an 1843 letter used as research for the novel. Cover-story interview with Margaret Atwood discussing Alias Grace, originally published in The Minnesota Dailys A&E Magazine, 27 February 1997. Alias Grace at Netflix

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1370465763 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.