Alice Grace

Alex (zuotd1202)

Instructor: Scott Drake

ENGL 101W

Section 1

April-4-13

Truth Hidden in Storytelling in Margaret Atwood’s Alice Grace

Margaret Atwood’s Alice Grace is a historical fiction based on the 1843 murder of Thomas Kinnear by his two servants, Grace Marks, who is sentenced to life imprisonment, and James McDermott, who is sentenced to be hanged. The main characters in Alice Grace are Grace and a doctor named Simon Jordan, a psychiatrist who wants to research her mental condition and the truth of the murder case. Throughout the novel, Jordan visits Grace to ask her questions about the murder and her memory of past; consequently, the narrative alternates between Grace’s third-person point of view and Jordan’s first-person perspective and the story Grace’s storytelling to Jordan with Jordan’s inner thoughts, which serve as a form of metanarrative storytelling. At points in the novel, it becomes difficult to tell whether the servant or the psychiatrist detective is speaking and the truth of the murder is never revealed, thus confusing truth with Grace’s mental condition. I will argue in this paper, storytelling is hides the truth.

From the beginning, the narrative shows truth with fiction and complicates the difference between them to show that truth and untruth are simply two versions of events. The novel opens with Grace seemingly in jail for being found guilty of murdering Kinnear but at moments, the events describe Grace in the middle of her servant duties and performing chores and miscellaneous housework for the governor’s wife. When she is incarcerated and when she is talking about the past meld together. Grace’s actions and the version of the truth that she tells Jordan convince him that she is a kind and pretty woman. Dissembling and honesty are difficult to differentiate to the point where the truth no longer matters because it is ultimately inaccessible. Truth is simply what one chooses to believe is true. Later in the novel, she pretends...