Alias Grace And Canadian
History
Due Thursday, November 30
The
Mission: To use and assess Margaret
Atwood's novel Alias Grace as an historical source.
Recommended Length
4-5 pages double-spaced
(19% of Final Grade)
Introduction:
Alias Grace is Margaret Atwood's 1996
novel based upon a real-life 1843 murder case. Two Irish immigrants, James
McDermott and the sixteen-year-old Grace Marks, were convicted of the gruesome
murder of their employer and his mistress. Grace's sentence was commuted
to life imprisonment, and she would spend the next three decades in the Kingston
Penitentiary and the Toronto Lunatic Asylum. Atwood sets much of her story
in 1859, after Marks has already been incarcerated for several years, and
centres much of the plot around the developing relationship between Marks and a
young doctor, Simon Jordan.
Atwood, a descendant of United Empire
Loyalists, has long been a student of history. "I myself would have been
much more interested in Canadian history," she writes of her youth, "if I had
known that our dull prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, had believed
that the spirit of his mother was inhabiting his dog, which he always consulted
on public policy." Atwood learned of the 1843 trial through her research
on frontierswoman Susanna Moodie, the subject of a 1970 series of award-winning
poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Moodie had visited Grace in
both the penitentiary and the asylum, and had provided an account of these
encounters in her second book, Life in the Clearings (1853).
The Options:
Pick one of the three research options for your essay.
1) The Alias Grace Option:
Write your paper based upon a close reading of Margaret Atwood's novel.
2) The Hybrid Option: Choose
this option if you are writing on a topic which combines an Alias Grace reading
with some supplementary internet of published source material. Demonstrate
in your essay that you have read Atwood's novel.
3) The Substitute Option:
Write an essay that substitutes extensive readings in the primary source
material written by Susanna Moodie and/or her sister Catharine Parr Traill (egs.
Roughing It in the Bush, Life in the Clearings, etc).
Some Possible Topics:
Listed below are some possible topics
for your paper. These are only a few suggestions and you are encouraged to
design your own theme.
-
Alias Grace As Social History
-
Asylums And Penitentiaries In
Nineteenth-Century Canada
-
Birth And Death As Portrayed In
Alias Grace
-
Grace Marks In History And Novel
-
The Historical Novel And The Study
Of History: Alias Grace As A Case Study
-
Learning From The Historical
Documents Included In Alias Grace
-
Nineteenth-Century Medicine As
Portrayed In Alias Grace
-
Nineteenth-Century Religion As
Portrayed In Alias Grace
-
Roughing It In The Bush
-
O Susanna: Margaret Atwood And
Susanna Moodie
-
Servant And Master In
Nineteenth-Century Canada
-
Social Reform And
Nineteenth-Century Canada As Portrayed In Alias Grace
-
Sisters In The Wilderness: Susanna
Moodie And Catharine Parr Traill
-
Toronto As Portrayed In Alias
Grace
-
Victorian Society As Portrayed By
Margaret Atwood
-
The Victorian Woman As Portrayed
In Alias Grace
Some Possible Extra Sources:
Listed below are a few potentially-relevant
supplementary sources:
Discussion Questions:
-
How effective is Alias Grace as history and
how good an historian is Margaret Atwood? How would you compare and
contrast it to a more traditional secondary historical source? What is the
historical novel? What are its possibilities and what are its limits?
-
How would you characterize Victorian gender
relations as portrayed in Alias Grace? How does Grace herself become a
focus for a conflicted assessment of the nature of women on the part of the
Victorians? What did you learn about the lives of 19th century women from
this novel?
-
How does Atwood portray class relations in
the Canada of the 1840s and 1850s? How do servants see their employers and
how, in turn, do the employers view their servants?
-
To what extent are the stories and
testimonies of Grace Marks and Simon Jordan paired together? How does
Atwood use narrative devices here to explore the meaning of the past?
-
How would you compare and contrast Grace
Marks and Angelique?
-
Margaret Atwood: "What does the past tell us?
In an of itself, it tells us nothing. We have to be listening first,
before it will say a word, and, even so, listening means telling, then
re-telling. It's we ourselves who must do such telling, about the past, if
anything is to be said about it; and our audience is one another."
Discuss.
-
Margaret Atwood: "The past no longer
belongs only to those who once lived in it; the past belongs to those who claim
it, and are willing to explore it, and to infuse it with meaning for those alive
today. The past belongs to us, because we are the ones who need it."
-
Why do you think the book is titled Alias
Grace?
:
A comprehensive resource from
Library and Archives Canada.