On July 23, 1843, housekeeper Nancy Montgomery and master Thomas Kinnell were killed at their mansion in the town of Ridgemont Hill in Western Canada. Nancy was also Kinnel's mistress and was pregnant before her death.
The maid Grace Max and the servant James McDermott prepared to flee to the United States after committing the crime, and were caught by the police at the hotel where they stayed, and the two were tried as accomplices, McDermott was sentenced to death and died on the gallows, but Grace was spared death under the "protection" of lawyers and doctors.
This is a real murder in history.
A century and a half after the crime, Margaret Atwood used this historical mystery as a basis for a literary reconstruction in the novel Alias Grace.
Atwood weaves the traps and nets of narrative from the case file, stitching together the mid-19th century Canadian social history style paintings from the case file pieces, "the resin of imagination flows into the crevices of historical events", and the legends of "Deadly Women" such as "Peony flowers break out of gray pebbles".
Reading both true and illusory stories, we feel as if we were loaded into the train that escaped the rails and rampaged to the night of murder and creation; in a boat in the rapids, crashing into "reversal" icebergs and "foreshadowing" reefs, listening to siren's songs in the dangerous shoals of "Big Little Lies".
01 A murder case that was publicized in advance
"There is no doubt about the death of a beautiful woman
Is the most poetic title in the world..."
—Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Creation
The killing of a beautiful woman by a beautiful woman is a more evocative topic.
Is there a silent accusation or a silent revenge in the female killer's blue eyes? Is the unspoken story a hidden truth or an elaborate lie?
Grace provided at least three different sets of confessions for the Montgomery Kinnell case, in one version where she was coerced by a maid, in another as an accomplice, or as a mastermind but lost her sober personality and memory.
Portraits of Grace Max and James McDermottler, reprinted from Toronto's Star and Codex newspaper
The murder, which was wrapped up in "sexuality, violence, and inferiority to the lower classes," attracted newspapers from Canada to the United States and Britain. Eyes were on Grace, a 16-year-old girl who was jailed.
"She was of medium build, slender and graceful... Her eyes never look you in the eye. She looked higher than her current lowly status. ”
In Life in the Clearings versus the Bush (1853), Susanna Moodie described this as the "female killer" in her eyes.
It was from this book that Atwood first learned about Grace's story. Moody sees Grace as the culprit in the book, writing that she encourages her boyfriend to kill Nancy out of jealousy.
For this kind of "false rumors", Atwood borrowed the words of the characters in the book to comment that Mrs. Moody's "imagination is a bit stylized, and there is a tendency to exaggerate", "like to add branches and leaves, make up fairy tales", out of love for "Orphans of the Mist" and Scottish Gothic romance novels, rendering the unconclusive murder into a stimulating soap opera.
Moody's also describes Grace's Kingston Provincial Correctional Institution and the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital in this documentary literature, when people visited these places like a zoo, and Grace became a kind of "star figure".
Kingston Prison in 1901. The prison was commissioned in 1835 and closed in 2013 and is now a National Historic Site of Canada
"I'm a famous female murderer," Grace describes herself in the book, "and the title of female murderer has a smell — there's a musky smell... The word rustled like a taffeta skirt brushing the ground. ”
From the "evil girl" Clytemstra in the ancient Greek tragedy to the "little pervert" in the popular film and television drama "Kill Eve", the image of the female killer who is beautiful and innocent on the outside and dark and twisted on the inside has always received special attention in popular culture.
Historically, from the "public execution" of female prisoners to the concentrated display of female killers in Madame Tussauds's "House of Terror", the horror and charm of female killers coexist.
Grace's "name" as a "famous female killer" is also the reason why many people come for her. MacKenzie lawyer spares no effort, even at the expense of concealing the facts, reversing black and white to defend Grace, in order to be able to become famous in the eye-catching case; the warden's wife seems to have compassion to accept Grace to the house as a daydrey, in fact, she is also showing off to guests in Grace's name, and is a "ghoul" who collects the information of female prisoners in clipbooks and selectively gives alms.
Other "gentlemen" who lend a helping hand to Grace are interested in the fragrant atmosphere behind the "female killer". Pastor Wellinger, who organized the Solidarity Corps, "fell in love" with Grace with a despicable heart, imagining that the saved Grace was "doubly grateful to the savior, to her knees," and that "the deep gratitude of her own wife would undoubtedly become the superior commodity of Wellinger's spiritual exchange." ”
Even Jamie Walsh, who is willing to marry Grace 30 years later, enjoys the thrill of being a savior in the tragic stories Grace tells time and time again.
In the novel, Dr. Banarim, who once diagnosed Grace, compares Grace to a Siren and advises Dr. Simon to seal her ears with wax because she is a "brilliant actress, a liar who lies." As the conversation between the two deepens in the sewing room, Dr. Simon also feels that he has pulled up a mermaid after casting a net, "singing a sweet and dangerous song." ”
Grace's "alias" suggests "duality" in her. She is both a seductive female killer and a weak person who is "insulted and damaged".
As a child, Grace had to learn to be a female celebrity in the middle of a difficult family, and the 9 children in the family should be thrown into the river like "a bag of kittens" in the eyes of the alcoholic father; the first family emigrant experienced her mother's illness in a dirty environment on the ferry; the first time she went out to make a living and made friends with her adolescent best friend Mary Whitney, but the short happy time ended with Mary's abortion and death...
In the process of changing employers again and again, Grace became the "prey" of the hosts, they seemed to take turns peeking at Grace inside the door through the keyhole, and as long as the door was opened, it was the woman who had to bear all the blame.
Grace was described in the trial transcript as "mentally inferior" and "went mad" into another woman during hypnosis, as if Mary Whitney's soul had broken into Grace's body to act.
Mary, who "alias Grace", is the most sober, calmly dissecting Dr. Simon, who thinks that her intelligence is superior, and debunks his heart to satisfy the voyeurism in the name of rescue. "Mad Woman" is Grace's repressed alternative, more authentic self.
Under the "gaze" of men, it seems that madness also becomes an impossible paradox – "Women who are abandoned after being seduced should go mad; but if they don't go crazy, but turn around and seduce men, the reason they do so is that they go crazy." ”
For other "crazy women" who are as sober as Grace, "crazy" is their protective umbrella, Grace hopes to get away with madness, and the women in the madhouse hide in to escape other atrocities.
2 Riddles of the triangular quilt face
"The bed is actually a dangerous place, we are born in bed, which is the first danger; women also give birth to children in bed; finally, the bed is where we sleep, we dream in bed, and the bed is often the place where we die." 」
The fifteen chapters of Alias Grace are titled after the popular Baina quilt pattern of the time. In Grace's story, women are so obsessed with sewing their own quilts because they want the bed to be the most conspicuous place in the home.
These quilts on the bed bear witness to love, pain, humiliation, and death. Grace's mother was buried in the sea with only a worn-out sheet on her body; Mary Whitney was tricked by the young master into becoming pregnant out of wedlock, and died a brutal abortion on a blood-stained sheet. In Grace's nightmare, the blood-stained sheets turn into headless angels, like a row of white crows heralding doom.
The quilt pattern of each chapter also corresponds to Grace's growth process, embarking on a "bumpy road", the helpless Grace is the "kitten in the corner", and the "broken dish" is the doom of the mother and the end of family life. "Lady on the Lake" corresponds to the abandoned woman who is dying in Scott's poem, and under the "collapsed beam" is a series of crimes.
In the environment of female "aphasia", the riddle of the face is still the unique "code" of female voice. When Dr. Simon takes notes on Grace, she feels that the quill is writing on her own body, that it is butterflies flying on her face, that grace is only "written" material under the writing of this subject of male desire. The wording that Lawyer Mackenzie taught Grace was not her own voice, she said, "I stand in the dock and can be a doll made of cloth... I was locked up in the doll's body, unable to make my true voice. ”
In sewing the quilt, Grace summoned the friendly voice of the "Female Alliance" with an expression unique to the women of the time—in sewing the "Tree of Paradise", Grace took a piece from Mary Whitney's petticoat, Nancy's skirt and her own prison coat, "embroidering the three triangles together... The three of us would be together. Perhaps Grace's "revenge" to Nancy is to seek "justice" for Mary, but the same women who have suffered injustice have finally taken the same camp in the picture of heaven.
On another level, Atwood's flexible use of documentary literature, historical materials, poetry, newspapers, oil poems, letters and other genres of "collage" writing itself is also stitching "quilt" in itself. The alias Grace is another possibility to open up the Grace case, and it is also the confession and cry of all women in the name of Grace; the alias "grace" is to pierce the despicable name of "grace"; the alias "grace" is more redemption and reconciliation that they have not been able to wait for.
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