Alias Grace By Margaret Atwood Sparknotes

Alias Grace caught my eye because I watched another show inspired by one of Margaret Atwood’s novels, called The Handmaid 's Tale. Alias Grace is a short series about a woman murderer, Grace Marks, who is referred to as a murderess. Usually shows depict a man playing the role of a murderer, and that’s what makes this show so different from other murder mysteries. It is set in the 1850s and during this time, women were not taken seriously and their roles were mainly maids and housewives. It was such a big deal that a woman actually murdered someone, or was thought to have murdered someone anyways. There are many pieces of the murder and of Grace’s story through foreshadowing and flashbacks. Grace finds herself in Toronto working in the Kinnear household, as a maid, after her family sailed from Ireland to Canada. Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper end up being murdered, and Grace and her boyfriend, James McDermott, who was also a worker for Kinnear, are blamed. While McDermott gets hanged, Grace gets thirty years in the Kingston Penitentiary. Grace had been imprisoned for fifteen years before the reverend brought Dr. Jordan to Toronto to interview Grace, in hopes

During one flashback, we see the family coming aboard the ship and Grace’s mother sees three crows in a row on one of the sails. She tells Grace that she will not see land again and that the crows mean death. Later in the flashback, sure enough, she dies due to a tumor in her abdomen. Another foreshadowed aspect of the show is about Mary Whitney’s death, Grace’s room mate and fellow maid in the Kinnear house. Eventually, we find out that Grace and James McDermott were planning on running away together after the murder, and on the paper for Grace’s trial in court, she used the name Mary Whitney. Grace tells Dr. Jordan that it was a particular name to her and then goes on to say that Mary was dead by that time so she wouldn’t have minded Grace using her