Alias Grace Research Articles

"I am a celebrated murderess": Female Criminality and Multiple Personalities in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

Abstract: Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace illuminates the history and mechanisms of the ties between criminal behavior by women and multiple personalities by contextualizing the representations and perceptions of the female criminal and the criminological and medical discourses during the nineteenth century. Atwood uses the mystery around Grace's crimes as a means for her enigmatic female protagonist to have agency, but only through the veneer of her multiple personalities.

Needlework and Narration: The Case of Margaret Atwood's "Alias Grace"

This article explores the main character in Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (1996) in terms of the semiotics of the textile and its corresponding feminine implications. The main hypotheses enunciated concern, on the one hand, the possibilities of narrativity that this symbol brings about (particularly for dissident discourses) and, on the other hand, the dissipation of the conceptual and representational boundaries of the textual and the textile. Furthermore, this study suggests a revision of the imaginary traditionally associated with the feminine spheres and an approach to these spaces as places of resistance that have arisen in the midst of silencing, captivity, or marginalisation.

The Body that Writes: Gender, Class and the Abject Female Body in Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (2013)

Hannah Kent’s debut novel Burial Rites (2013) is a historical true-crime novel that recovers the story of a female perpetrator, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, sentenced to death for her part in a gruesome double murder in nineteenth-century Iceland. This article reads Kent’s novel, which draws on painstaking research, as a work of feminist revisionism that is part of a genealogy of historical fiction by and about women that seeks to adopt and indeed adapt the true-crime genre for the recovery of historical women’s voices from the margins, the best-known example of which remains Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996). However, while Kent’s work shares many features with Atwood’s work, I contend that what sets Burial Rites apart from its predecessors is the way Kent skillfully handles Agnes’s ambiguous body as text. The article consequently models a reading of Kent’s true-crime feminist historical fiction via Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance to reveal how the novel unpicks the workings of gender, class and sexuality in nineteenth-century Iceland in a bid to retrieve Agnes from historical archival obscurity and restore her as part of feminist historiography. 

Margaret Atwood as a Feminist

Abstract: Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario. When she was seven years old, her family moved to Toronto. Her father, an entomologist and professor of zoology, studied tree-dwelling insects. Atwood's passion for Canada's wilderness is present in most of her writings. Atwood is famous for the outspoken feminism in her books. From her first novel, The Edible Woman, to the dark masterpiece, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which cemented her international reputation, Atwood demonstrated deeply concerned with the constraints society places on women and the facades they adopt in response. . The Handmaid's Tale, which Atwood refuses to call "science fiction", depicts a society in which women are stripped of all rights except those to marry, run a household, and reproduce. After The Handmaid's Tale made Atwood an international celebrity, she wrote a series of novels dealing with relationships between women, including Cat's Eye (1988) and The Robber Bride (1993). In 1992, she published Good Bones, short, witty articles about women's body parts and the limitations that have been placed on them throughout history. Atwood explores the historical role of women in other works including her famous poetry collections, the Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) and her novel Alias Grace (1996). Both recreate the lives of famous feminism women in Canadian history.

I and We: Hannah Arendt, Participatory Plurality, and the Literary Scaffolding of Collective Intentionality

ABSTRACT This article examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to notions of the “We” and tests key Arendtian concepts through relation and juxtaposition with philosophical and literary texts from different periods, thereby complicating discussions of (1) how individuals participate in, shape, and are shaped by various forms of “We”; (2) how, within collective participation, individuals come to care about being themselves; and (3) to what extent literary texts enable and encourage processes of identity construction and (re)configuration. For Arendt, the “place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (2017, 387–88) is “the result of our common labor, the outcome of the human artifice” (2017, 393)—the shared practices and institutions that Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” (2009, 15). In this article, the authors argue that by exploring and critiquing “forms of life” literature can expand the range of activities we recognize as fostering “participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 465). The three literary provocations presented here—Callimachus’s “Hymn to Apollo,” Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace—all interrogate the situated interactions of “I’s” and “We’s” that instantiate the “participatory plurality” of the shared world.

An Embodied Feminist Poethics of Improper Speech in Atwood’s Alias Grace and Christiansë’s Unconfessed

In this paper, I argue that the cross-fertilising entanglements of narrative/literature, theory, and embodiment that constitute Margaret E. Toye’s concept of “narrative as embodied theory” in “Towards a Poethics of Love: Poststructuralist Feminist Ethics and Literary Creation” are especially appropriate to revisionary historical fiction written by women in which silenced histories of trauma are recovered and given voice. I refer to examples from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1998) and Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006) as illustrations of what I term “an embodied feminist poethics of improper speech,” a theoretical and methodological reconfiguration of Toye’s terms.

Alias Grace; Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture; Abortion Politics; Mothering Rhetorics

Alias Grace; Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture; Abortion Politics; Mothering Rhetorics

The Doctor and the Murderess

Grace Marks was a convicted double murderer in nineteenth-century Canada. Her case was well known at the time thanks to its sensationally violent and sexual details. The novel Alias Grace (1997) by Margaret Atwood engages in a discussion about the relationship between fact and fiction, scientific objectivity and power. This article analyses the relationship between Atwood’s fictional Grace Marks and Dr Simon Jordan, an American doctor who visits her in prison hoping to find out the truth about Grace and the murders. Both Grace and Dr Jordan are formed by the existing norms of the time period, norms which govern how men and women of their particular class should act. However, what makes their meetings noteworthy is that Grace Marks possesses knowledge of the norms and expectations and can therefore use them to her advantage, whereas Dr Jordan does not, despite being an educated and professional man. In the end, this leads to Grace’s ability to tell her own story, and Dr Jordan’s failure as a man of science.

Displaced: Canadian Mindscapes in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

Displaced: Canadian Mindscapes in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

『일명 그레이스』에 나타난 역사와 기억의 태피스트리

The purpose of this paper is to examine the weaving of history and memory in Alias Grace in terms of Bakhtin’s polyphonic perspectives. In this paper, I call tapestry interwoven history(warp) and memory(weft) of Grace and polyphony means multi-layered voices and views instead of a mono or single voice. I discuss the polyphonic views which is catagorized into three parts, characters, memory and images. In the polyphony of characters, Grace is objectified as a murderess and narrator of the story at the same time, Dr. Simon is represented differently as a psychiatrist and man. Also, Jeremiah makes over Dr. Jerome DuPontdp. The Polyphony for the memory of Grace is represented as memory, or catathymic amnesia which reaches a climax by Dupontdp’s hypnosis. In trance, Mary Whitney, an alter ego of Grace is revealed. Mary is a real friend and stands for the healer of Grace. At this point, Grace is released from the feeling of quilt for her mother and the murder of Nancy. Red peony and quilts are crucial for polyphonic images. The metaphor for red peony implies the traumatic memories of Grace. Quilts link thematic and aesthetic concerns and structure of the narrator/heroine’s life respectively. (Namseoul University)

Silence and Resistance in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Silence is a concept both praised and criticised when put to practice. The latest trends in society encourage individuals to be their true selves; simultaneously, some are reproached for presenting too much of themselves to the world. In this sense, discretion is arguably closely linked to a performative silence used as a rhetorical tool for self-protection. The question is whether silence and performativity are opposite or complementary terms. The main purpose of this article is to analyse this binary logic from an intersectional perspective. More specifically, to ascertain whether resistance to society’s limitations can be performed through silence or necessarily through performative actions. The case study is Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (1996) set in mid-nineteenth century, puritan Canada. Atwood’s postmodern fictionalization of Grace Marks makes her a conflicted character with a duality that terrorises society. She is, in Hegelian terms, both the Master and the Slave. Grace’s discretion later becomes performative, in the sense that it alters reality and brings something new into existence: her social resistance. This article has led to the conclusion that Grace makes a calculated use of her silence in an attempt to balance the lack of control that she seems to have over the press’s representation of her identity.

Reconstruction of Canadian National Identity: the Re-presentation of Canadian History in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin

Reconstruction of Canadian National Identity: the Re-presentation of Canadian History in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin

Reading with(out) Suspicion: Atwood, Sedgwick and Critical Practice

ABSTRACT This article reads Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) alongside Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of paranoid and reparative readings. Focusing on the dynamic between time and affect in Sedgwick, something that is strikingly missing in contemporary debates about critique and post-critique, I examine the affective, temporal and political registers of paranoid and reparative styles of reading and demonstrate how Sedgwick’s work exceeds the post-critique approaches it informs. I then move to a discussion about the reading positions offered by Alias Grace including suspicious reading and empathetic engagement. Positioning Alias Grace as a parallel text to Sedgwick’s, I argue that revisiting Atwood’s novel in the context of the post-critique movement not only helps to restore the politics informing Sedgwick’s theory but also contributes to the ongoing discussion about the politics of reading.

The Postmodern Multi-Layered Narrative of Existential Feminist Subjectivity: The Case of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Postmodern fiction demonstrates a suspicion about the narrative status of history. Arguably, its project is to reveal the illusion of truth in history because of history's reliance on texts. There is no doubt that historical events occur, but their transmutation into “fact” and their transmission to posterity are limited by their narrativization and textualization. In the Afterword to her novel, Alias Grace (1996) – a fictionalized narrative centering on a real-life person embroiled in a double murder in 1843 – Margaret Atwood reveals her interest in this problem with “history”. She tells the reader, “I have of course fictionalized historical events … as did many commentators on this case who claimed to be writing history”. The purpose of this paper is thus to consider Margaret Atwood’s novel, Alias Grace as a postmodern fiction that seeks to reveal the illusion of truth in history through her use of innovatory narrative techniques. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “double-voiced” is used to examine the permitted, surface-level utterances – and the necessarily conflicting actual narratives – of the two narrators in Atwood’s novel. However, the term is also applied in the broader feminist/theoretical context of the silencing of the female subject more generally. Atwood establishes a fragmented, multiplicity narrative. This arises from the reported and somewhat self-aware observations of the eponymous Grace and a doctor named Simon Jordan. Seemingly, the author’s own authority does not exist. Atwood thus exploits the slippery nature of language that does not have some kind of “truth” imposed upon it. The historical “truth” about Grace Marks is never revealed, not because Atwood is “leaving it to the reader's imagination” but because Atwood plays with the problem of personality as a social construction. Almost invisible as “author”, Atwood nevertheless reveals just how language can be manipulated and made to conform to a certain version of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. However, in Alias Grace, Atwood also recuperates the voice of a supposedly murderous woman by revising the myth of woman’s silence and subjugation. Because her speaking voices are required to practice “double-voicing” to be heard, through presenting the reader with both voices, Atwood recuperates the moments of existential liberation to be heard from emergent voices.

The (Bio) Political Violence in Atwood’s Alias Grace

This research explores the (bio)political violence that sets the subject position and subjugation of the women characters including Grace Marks in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Grace is acquitted as murderess and sent to jail, and to the lunatic asylum to make her docile and succumb to sovereign power. It is biopolitics, the sovereign power over populations that is deployed via social institutions to make her manageable and go docile. Through the state apparatuses the biopolitical governmentality constitutes and disseminates knowledge that helps Grace formulate her subjectivity and subjects to the law. Being a woman, she is discarded, sexually abused, and retained in bare life in the jail. In particular, her resignation to the power marks the inclusive exclusion and political violence over her. This reflect her perennial exclusion from social life. Finally, her servitude, amnesty and wedding epitomizes her oikos and docility under the (bio)political violence.

Dialogue Between Nature and Human in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

This article will portray Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) from an Eco-critical viewpoint. The real concern of eco-criticism is to create an eco-literary discourse to produce an interactive approach between the language of nature and the literary language. Likewise, Gregory Garrard explored a different way between humans and environment in the area of cultural spheres in his article in 2016. Garrard wrote a well-known book, Eco-criticism, in 2004 and explored concepts of this approach like: pollution, wilderness, dwelling, animals, and the earth. This type of awareness in literature is significant because of both the current environmental crisis and possible disasters in the future. As such, nature signifies a metaphor for life in the environment. Apart from that, a rural landscape has a profound impact not only on characters, but also on humans the world over. Meanwhile, Atwood followed a creative path which identifies environmental crisis as a modern problem with eccentric human nature as a key element in global ecological concerns. Hence, the main purpose of the current article is looking for a close relationship between humans and nature in the literature which has been ignored in many criticisms. Finding enough harmony with nature will be a plausible result of it.

Feminism and Subjectivity of Narration in Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Alias Grace is a very famous novel written by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. It was first published in 1996 by McClelland and Stewart. A stage version was premiered at Ball State University in 2016. It was written by Jennifer Blackmer. Later on, it was adapted as a miniseries directed by Mary Harron in 2017 which premiered on CBC Television in Canada and streams globally on Netflix. Alias Grace is based on a true-crime murder mystery set in Canada during the 1800s (Victorian Era). Grace reveals how difficult it was to survive in the past being a woman. With, a murder mystery to solve we are also served with subjectivity towards narrator (only one narrator i.e., Grace herself, who is convicted) and femininity (as the convicted person is a female i.e., Grace). The article will look into the various aspects of the subjectivity of narration and feminism in detail.

Disinformation and public representations of identity. A feminist close reading of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

EnglishWhile it may be thought that disinformation and ‘fake news’ are concepts related to contemporary mass media, they are, indeed, much older concerns that have always been part of our society, tracing a media craze path and noticeably blooming nowadays due to the power of the media. This is why it is essential to cultivate critical thinking when approaching journalistic discourses. In this contribution we will employ feminist close reading methods (Lukic and Sanchez, 2011) to examine examples of how newspapers and public opinion can influence and deform a story. We will take Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) as a case study in order to approach to what an extent its main character is influenced by conflictive opinions which finally determine the performance of her identity. Is being aware of public opinion enough to grant this character control over the self-construction of her image? The conclusions of this paper will include some considerations regarding the use of critical tools such as feminist close reading in the classroom. The case of Alias Grace exemplifies the negative effects of disinformation and ultimately illustrates the transformative potential of critical rewritings of official HIStories2”. EnglishSi bien la desinformacion y las noticias falsas se nos presentan como conceptos relacionados con los medios de masas contemporaneos, en realidad no son un problema nuevo. La practica periodistica de la desinformacion siempre ha sido parte de nuestra sociedad y, con mas fuerza actualmente, ha marcado nuestras sociedades mediaticas. Es fundamental, por tanto, desarrollar el pensamiento critico y la capacidad de analisis para transformar dichas sociedades. En este articulo llevaremos a cabo una lectura critica feminista (Lukic y Sanchez, 2011) de la novela Alias Grace (1996) de Margaret Atwood para estudiar hasta que punto la historia tergiversada y las opiniones encontradas puede determinar la vivencia y ejercicio de la identidad del personaje principal, Grace Marks. ?Le basta a Grace estar al tanto de la opinion publica sobre ella para tomar el control de su propia imagen? Las conclusiones de este articulo incluyen observaciones sobre el uso en el aula de herramientas de pensamiento critico como la lectura critica feminista. El caso de Alias Grace ilustra tanto las consecuencias negativas de la desinformacion como la capacidad transformativa de rescribir las “Historias oficiales” 3 desde una perspectiva mas critica.

The quest for a successful book-to-series adaptation in the times of SVOD — using the examples of “The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace” by Margaret Atwood

A fascinating factor of so-called mass culture is the ability to adapt to society and its needs. The same pattern seems to be followed by the film industry, as it has been influenced by other branches of entertainment, television included. These are SVODs (Streaming Video on Demand platforms), which offer a growing number of screen adaptations of literary works. The following paper aims to analyse some criteria upon which book-to-series adaptations might be regarded as successful, using examples from The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace.Produced respectively by Hulu and CBC, both based on books by the Canadian female writer Margaret Atwood, the analysed shows confirm that the audience is more inclined to watch (and read) an intertextual production that often reflects and comments on contemporary political and social reality.

Metaphorical Murder

ABSTRACT Both The Massey Murder, by Charlotte Gray, and Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood, enact a metaphorical examination of how murder reveals both the social attitudes and moral prurience exhibited toward servant women who kill their employers. This essay addresses two real, historical crimes in Toronto, their depiction in a novel and a work of nonfiction, and discusses ideology, class, gender, spectacle, and media coverage in light of their deployment in the subsequent reporting, treatment, trials, and narrative resolutions.