Alias Grace Literary Elements

Historical fiction

After migrating from Ireland, Grace Marks spent the early years of her life in Toronto before moving to Kingston, Ontario. The Kinnear Montgomery murders took place just six years after the Rebellion of 1837, during a period in which the upper classes were particularly sensitive to any hint of insubordination among poorer people.

The narrative structure of the text is highly complex. Grace narrates her version of events in the first-person, both directly to us as readers and to Simon during their therapy sessions. We soon learn that Grace seeks to omit certain details and embellish others when describing events to Simon. This, together with conflicting reports from other characters and evidence of mental illness, invites readers to question the extent to which any of Grace's narrative is trustworthy. Simon's point of view is narrated in the third person by an anonymous third person narrator. Further perspectives and voices are provided in the various letters included in the text and the quotations from newspapers, poems and other literary sources which begin each chapter..

The timescale of the novel, which begins with Grace in prison and already imprisoned for murder, ensures a bleak overall mood and a strong sense of foreboding. Grace's restrained, excessively deferential tone reveals the social constraints and rigid hierarchies of the world in which she is living.

From one point of view, Grace Marks can be seen as both protagonist and antagonist, with the innocent, naïve and socially conformist Grace struggling her subversive and murderous alter ego, Mary Whitney. From another point of view the elusive, inscrutable Grace is the antagonist and ultimate undoing of Simon Jordan, a protagonist with whom readers are invited to identify as he seeks to interpret and decipher the events of the text.

One of the central conflicts which emerges is that between the evasive Grace and the various religious, judicial and medical authority figures who try (and fail) to interpret her throughout the text. The struggle between the different social classes is also a recurrent concern, with working class figures such as McDermott and Mary Whitney increasingly unwilling to accept their assigned lot in life.

The climactic moment of the novel, when the voice of Mary Whitney emerges to confess to Nancy's murder, is actually something of an anticlimax inasmuch as it defies narrative expectations and opens up more questions than it answers. Considering the central role of Simon in the novel, readers would probably expect him to be the one to make this breakthrough. Instead he remains on the sidelines, barely suppressing his disapproval. The mysterious identity of Jerome DuPont /Jeremiah the Pedlar calls into doubt the proceedings as a whole and the motivations behind them.

There are two main instances of foreshadowing in the text. Firstly, when Grace's mother dies, one of the passengers on the ship complains that there are no windows through which her soul can escape. When Mary Whitney dies, Grace does not open the window and she is convinced that this is why Mary's soul stays on to trouble her. The second is when Mary and Grace toss apple peel over their shoulders to find the first letters of their future husbands' names. Mary's peel breaks, foreshadowing her early death and blighted hopes.

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Each chapter of the book begins with a selection of poetical, journalistic and literary texts related to the murders. These add to the complex patchwork of points of view which characterizes the novel as a whole. Grace frequently cites biblical texts, although she tends to interpret them in a rather subjective, superstitious manner. The novel also contains formal allusions to established literary genres, such as the gothic novel, detective fiction and nineteenth century classic fiction in general. The use of these conventions serves to set up expectations (of narrative closure, of a clear dichotomy between good and evil, etc.), which are repeatedly frustrated.

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The central paradox of the narrative is that, although it appears to follow a clear chronological trajectory leading towards a moment of climactic revelation (the hypnosis incident), the text's central figure, Grace, is perhaps even more of a mystery at the end of the novel than she is at its beginning

Parallels between the deaths of Grace's mother, Mary Whitney and Nancy reveal the ongoing injustice faced by working class women. Mary and Nancy are both pregnant, and the young Grace initially interprets her mother's abdominal swelling as a pregnancy. All three women are Each chapter of the book begins with a selection of poetical, journalistic and literary texts related to the murders. These add to the complex patchwork of points of view which characterizes the novel as a whole. Grace frequently cites biblical texts, although she tends to interpret them in a rather subjective, superstitious manner. by men and consigned to windowless rooms after death in a clear metaphor for female entrapment. The central parallelism of the novel, however is that between the trajectories of Grace and Simon's lives. At the beginning of the novel, there is a clear hierarchy between them, with Grace a mentally ill, "fallen woman"and a prisoner a free, professionally successful male authority figure. However, as Simon struggles to uncover Grace's secrets, his own life comes to look increasingly like hers. He becomes involved in a socially scandalous affair with his landlady who tries to embroil him in a plot to murder her alcoholic and abusive husband. At the end of the novel, like Grace, he has lost his memory. Moreover, his mother has taken advantage of the situation to trap him into the marriage and conventional life which he has spent the novel strenuously seeking to flee. While Grace is free at the end of the text, Simon has effectively become a prisoner.

The female womb is used to represent the mysterious destinies of the three main female characters in the text: Grace's mother, Mary Whitney, Nancy and Grace herself. After Grace's mother dies of a tumour which Grace initially mistakes for a pregnancy, the womb acquires a mysterious double potential for new life and death. Mary Whitney dies after a botched abortion and Nancy is murdered while she is pregnant. At the end of the novel, Grace suspects that she herself is pregnant.

Grace and Simon might be said to personify the relationship between the text and the reader. The text, like Grace, remains perennially ambiguous and mysterious, whilst the reader, like Simon, seek to harness and possess its meaning.