Innocent, Infamous and Inflammatory: A Feminist Exploration of the Curious Case of Grace Marks in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace PDF Free Download
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Innocent, Infamous and Inflammatory: A
Feminist Exploration of the Curious Case of Grace
Marks in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
Author: Najma
Abstract
Subverting the dominant narratives of history, feminist historical fiction attempts to question the patriarchal
accounts of the past and highlight the issues of the women. The present paper discusses how the dominant
narratives of the past were deeply oppressive and biased. The paper explores Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
against the backdrop of the historical double murder of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery in which
Grace Marks was convicted. The paper discusses how Atwood makes use of her imaginative acumen to give
voice to the hitherto muted and powerless character of Grace Marks. The paper highlights how Atwood’s
narrative gives agency and empowers the female subject. Furthermore, the paper discusses the notion of truth
and falsehood in the trial of Grace Marks and how the past needs to be explored and retold from the perspective
of the marginalized. Atwood’s use of storytelling technique, therefore, becomes not only a way of exploring
the consciousness of the silenced women but also a method through which past and the present can be
juxtaposed.
Keywords
feminism, history, memory, power, re-vision, truth
Feminist historical fiction focuses to bring into limelight the atrocities inflicted upon women, the gender
inequality and the curtailment of their rights. This inequality is a recurring motif of feminist literature.
However, feminist historical fiction engages with an already existing body of work and seeks to redeem the
wrongs present in it. The perpetual suppression of women and the chauvinistic beliefs are some evils that
feminist texts expose and redress. For instance, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is a fictionalization of
historical events surrounding the scandalous double murder of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery.
Grace Marks is convicted of the crime and is sentenced to life imprisonment. Unlike other novelists, Atwood’s
narrative is embedded in ambiguity, suspicion and distrust. She foregrounds the idea that her punishment was
perpetrated by aggressive patriarchy. Atwood follows the case of the historical Grace Marks very closely. The
novel is not only a rejoinder to Susana Moodie’s account of historical Grace Marks but also a response to her
younger self that attempted a description of Grace for television for the Canadian Broadcasting Company in
the early 1970s. This portrayal of Grace was largely influenced by her uncritical reading of Susanah Moodie’s
account.
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For Alias Grace, Atwood makes assiduous use of newspaper reports, confessions and letters and plays upon
ideas. Juxtaposing facts and opinions, Atwood meticulously brings to the fore the idea that the hardships of
Grace Marks were a direct result of her being a woman and belonging to the lower strata of the society. This
rewriting of the female history is a central tenet of early second-wave feminism. In A Literature of Their Own,
Showalter argues:
The interest in establishing a more reliable critical vocabulary and a more accurate and systematic literary
history for women writers is part of a larger interdisciplinary effort by psychologists, sociologists, social
historians, and art historians to reconstruct the political, social, and cultural experience of women. (8)
Atwood’s novel Alias Grace attempts to give voice and credibility to the feminine subject which was silenced
by patriarchal ideology and insidious power structures. Subtle biases against women that are present in
traditional literature are addressed and destabilized by feminist literature like Alias Grace. The staunch
patriarchal set-up that legitimizes misogyny is subsequently challenged and debased.
In Alias Grace, Atwood incorporates numerous factual and fictional documents in such a way that the novel
stands out from the rest of her works. In doing so she consciously attempts to undercut the belief in the
possibility of an immutable or a verifiable truth. Jennifer Murray sees Alias Grace as a case of historiographic
metafiction, demonstrating “theoretical self-awareness through the undissimulated piecing together of
information from historical documents, thereby drawing attention to its modes of construction and
representation” (66). Alias Grace is based on the notorious episode in Canadian history which saw the double
murder of Thomas Kinnear and his servant Nancy Montgomery in Richmond Hill in 1843. Atwood employs
Grace Marks, an Irish woman as the first-person narrator. She is convicted for assisting James McDermott,
another servant, in committing the murders. McDermott was Charged and hanged while Marks’ punishment
was scaled down to twenty-nine years life imprisonment in the Kingston Penitentiary.
In the novel, the past is revisited through Grace’s memories, and thereby hints at the ordering and structuring
principle that lends not only coherence but also a beginning, a middle and an end to the historical account. In
an article entitled “Quilting as Narrative Art: Metafictional Construction in Alias Grace,”, Sharon Rose Wilson
points out the peculiarity of Alias Grace:
Alias Grace is about history, money, class, gender, ethnicity, psychoanalysis, legend, and myth. It is also about
spiritualism, magic acts, master-servant narratives…. Resembling folklore itself…it deconstructs not only
orally transmitted and published stories that we may assume are facts, but also national and social myth, gender
roles, constructions of personal identity, and readers’ expectations of novels and reality p 81 bloom
In her typical style, Atwood’s begins her afterword with the postulation of how reality and fiction are not to
be coalesced. She declares that Alias Grace is a work of fiction, but it has its basis in reality. She also
comments on how Grace’s skill to “polarize opinion”, and the attitude of the contemporary society towards
Grace suggested that the history of women needs to be rewritten. For the nineteenth-century Canadian society,
she was “a female fiend, a temptress, the real instigator and murderer, and a silenced, unwilling victim
(Atwood 507). This kind of representation came largely from the custodians of culture in the nineteenth-
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century Canada. Grace is marginalized on multiple levels. She is treated badly because she is a woman and
therefore “the masculine speaking subject, Simon Jordan, creating the silenced female object Grace” (Tolan
227).
As much as the novel challenges the historians and the newspaper editors for their lopsided accounts, it also
criticizes the public opinion around Grace Marks case where she herself is unable to understand the conundrum
of her being:
I am an inhuman female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will and in
danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial
murder, that I am fond of animals, that I am very handsome with a brilliant complexion, that I have blue eyes,
that I have green eyes, that I have auburn and also brown hair, that I am tall and also not above the average
height, that I am well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to appear so, that I am brisk and smart
about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that I have the appearance of a
person rather above my humble station, that I am a good girl with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me,
that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. And I wonder, how can
I be all of these different things at once? (Atwood 21-22)
These dialectically opposed images and narratives offer some kind of tension in the text. They are embedded
in the text by way of epigraphs and other intertexts. However, Atwood’s narrative gives a voice to Grace
Marks, which makes up for the missing narrative of the woman. Alias Grace hints at various Victorian effects
in the manner Grace narrates her life story. She does this as she quilts in the sewing room of the Governor’s
house with Simon Jordan as her audience. She is portrayed as “a wonderful seamstress, quite deft and
accomplished” with “an eye for trimmings” (Atwood 22), a portrayal that is appropriate to her for quilting as
well as storytelling capabilities. When Grace says that she sometimes bites the thread off with her teeth, she
attempts the same with storytelling, suggesting the potential gaps in her narrative. Atwood admits that Alias
Grace is “partly about miscommunication and the misreading (and misleading) of others” (qtd. in McWilliams
103). In spite of being imprisoned, Atwood bestows power upon Grace by giving her the choice to speak her
mind and to restraint herself. She is conscious of this power and therefore manipulates her narrative
accordingly. “Indeed, the stories she told ought never to be subjected to the harsh categories of Truth and
Falsehood. They belong in another realm altogether. Perhaps Grace Marks has merely been telling you what
she needs to tell” (Atwood 418).
In her Bronfman Lecture at the University of Ottawa, titled “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian
Historical Fiction”, Atwood acknowledges the trope of storytelling as a potent weapon in the hands of the
protagonist:
In my fiction, Grace, too-whatever else she is-is a storyteller, with strong motives to narrate but also strong
motives to withhold; the only power left to her as a convicted and imprisoned criminal comes from a blend of
these two motives. What is told by her to her audience of one, Dr. Simon Jordan-who is not only a more
educated person than she is but a man, which gave him an automatic edge in the nineteenth century-is selective,
of course. It is dependent on what she remembers; or is it what she says she remembers, which can be quite a
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different thing? And how can her audience tell the difference? Here we are, right back at the end of the
twentieth century, with our own uneasiness about the trustworthiness of memory, the reliability of story, and
the continuity of time. As I have said, we can't help but be contemporary, and Alias Grace, though set in the
mid-nineteenth century, is of course a very contemporary book. 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? (1515)
The problem of history and fiction is at the center of Alias Grace. In the novel, Grace recalls three dissimilar
accounts of the Montgomery murder and James McDermott gives two. Atwood deftly uses fiction where
historical records fall short. Rose Wilson argues that “Grace is ‘alias Grace’ because all of her, and our,
identities are aliases, fictions. Where gaps exist in her or our life narratives, we too are ‘free to invent’ (90).
Compared to other accounts on Alias Grace, Atwood has adhered honestly to the practice of historiography,
insofar as she has not altered the established fact. In her article “In Search of Alias Grace” she argues:
I felt that, to be fair, I had to represent all points of view. I devised the following set of guidelines for myself:
when there was a solid fact, I could not alter it; long as I might to have Grace witness James McDermott's
execution, it could not be done, because, worse luck, she was already in the penitentiary on that day. Also,
every major element in the book had to be suggested by something in the writing about Grace and her times,
however dubious such writing might be; but, in the parts left unexplained-the gaps left unfilled-I was free to
invent. Since there were a lot of gaps, there is a lot of invention. Alias Grace is very much a novel rather than
a documentary. (1515)
Apart from Grace’s narrative, the novel also runs on the third person narrative by Dr Simon Jordan, the pre-
Freudian psychoanalyst who attempts to discover the mystery behind Grace’s amnesiac reminiscences of the
murders. The narrative also features a number of inter-textual epigraphs, culled from a varied source such as
media reports of the murder trial, Susanna Moodie’s personal thoughts and recollections upon visiting Grace
in prison and mental asylum. The novel also draws upon other documents. Rose Wilson points out the
constructedness of all texts whether history or fiction:
Alias Grace is a construction based on “reality,” so all our histories and conclusions are exposed as theories,
speculations, the best we can do to build a structure over the abyss after the grounds of our being have been
deconstructed….Although readers will endlessly debate whether Grace really helps kill Thomas Kinnear and
Nancy Montgomery, whether she really has either amnesia or a double personality, and whether she has sex
with Kinnear and James McDermott, again such questions are beside the point, either/ors that overlook the
pluralism of both identity and truth. (90)
As opposed to the traditional approach where the reader follows a certain trajectory of the narrative which
leads to the truth, the novel upholds that there is an “association between the discoverable truth of the Kinnear-
Montgomery murders and the essential “truth” of Grace’s subjectivity” (Tolan 229). Grace, however does not
stick to one account and “also slips away from the reader, who must accept that Grace, as a reinscribed text,
is equally open to interpretation…she in turn presents them with various manifestations of her artificially
constructed character” (Tolan 229).
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She is also marginalized because she is a criminal and also a possible lunatic. When Simon questions her
about religious texts, she deliberately poses to be ignorant. She says, “I know it is the Book of Job… But I
don’t say this. I look at him stupidly. I have a good stupid look which I have practised.” (Atwood 40). Thus,
she destabilizes the relationship between the prisoner and prison guard and, as the narrative moves, “the novel
resembles an empowered rewriting of the ‘Lady of Shalott’…In weaving her life story for her unsuspecting
patron, Simon Jordan, she holds him in thrall so that he comes to crave her narrative” (McWilliams 93). She
consistently creates images with appropriate expressions that suit her various appearances. When she is
released, she notes that “I must act like someone who has been rescued. And so I tried. I am not quite used to
it yet. It calls for a different arrangement of the face” (Atwood 482-483).
Atwood also censures the journalist who sensationalized the case of double murder because it was a
“combination of sex, violence, and the deplorable insubordination of the lower classes” (506). Grace became
a celebrity-criminal and people would throng to catch a glimpse of her. Becker comments on the patchwork
structure of Alias Grace which “pointedly mirror the workings of celebrity, sensationalism, and media hype
in the late twentieth century” (qtd. in Ann Howells 35). Howells also notes that the men who want to release
Grace in some sense, including Dr Jordan, are more interested in knowing the nature of Grace’s sexual
transgressions even when they refuse to let listen to her when she speaks her mind or truly understand her.
These subtle biases against women that are prevalent in the patriarchal society are addressed and destabilized
by feminist literature. The staunch male-controlled set-up that was hitherto unquestionable is subsequently
challenged. Alias Grace, therefore, highlights the nexus between power and storytelling. It exemplifies how a
narrative can be “exploited as a dangerous and divisive force or, alternatively, how it can unleash the
emancipatory pleasure” (McWilliams 95).
In her essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision”, Adrienne Rich argues on the need of revision
not only as a necessary strategy for the feminist texts to point out the gaps and errors in the patriarchal culture
but also as a way of survival:
Re-vision-the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical
direction-is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the
assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for
woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated
society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how
we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped
as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see-and therefore live-afresh. A change in the concept of
sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order re-assert itself in every new
revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not
to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. (18-19)
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Atwood believes that past doesn’t tell us anything, in and of itself. Any involvement with the past requires
listening, which in turn makes telling and retelling mandatory. As opposed to the popular construction of
Grace Marks as a killer and seductress, Atwood builds a problematic image of Grace which isn’t so easy to
pin down. The novel employs views that range from innocent to infamous and move on to inflammatory and
beyond to explore the consciousness of Grace Marks.
References
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace, Rosetta Books, 2003.
Atwood, Margaret. “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction.” The American
Historical Review, University of Chicago Press, Vol. 103, No. 5, Dec., 1998, pp. 1503-1516,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2649966
McWilliams, Ellen. Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman. Routledge, 2016.
Murray, Jennifer, “Historical Figures and Paradoxical Patterns: The Quilting Metaphor in Margaret Atwood’s
Alias Grace.” Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 26, No.1, March 2001, pp. 64-83.
Rich Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English, National Council of
Teachers of English, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 18-30, http://www.jstor.org/stable/375215
Rose Wilson, Sharon. “Quilting as Narrative Art: Metafictional Construction in Alias Grace.” Bloom’s
Modern Critical Views: Margaret Atwood—New Edition, edited by Harold Bloom, Infobase, 2009.
Showalter, Elaine. Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing. London, 1999.
Tolan, Fiona. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. Rodopi, 2007.
