Alias Grace Quilts Analysis

The quilts are playing an important role of metaphor in Alias Grace through the whole story. Each of the quilt pattern represents a part of Grace’s life, and she uses different pieces of cloth from different clothes that were belonged to different people in different period of time to make these quilts too.
In the last chapter of the story, Grace was released from the prison when she was 46 years old. She was able to take her properties that belonged to her when she was caught, which most of these were dresses. However, after 29 year of staying in a case, these dresses were rotted and faded. The dresses represent their owners that Nancy and Mary Whitney were died and they became rotting corpse; Grace became an old woman. Grace believed that

She is making a quilt called Tree of Paradise, which she is going to make it with the cloths she collected like Mary Whitney’s petticoat, Nancy’s white dress and her dress in prison. This is weird that Grace used Nancy’s dress because there was a big possibility that Grace killed Nancy or she helped McDermott to kill Nancy, if not she should hate Nancy, because Nancy treated Grace bad. It is reasonable if Grace makes a quilt with her dress and Mary’s, but not with Nancy’s normally. If I am Grace, I would not put my best friend and the person I hate. However, Mary said Nancy was staying with her and they were good friends, also Mary was in Grace’s body. It is possible that Nancy were staying together with Mary in Grace’s body, so Grace made a quilt that represent the three of the are together. The pattern of that quilt is a tree with snake borders. Compare to the life in prison, although Grace was not rich, her life out of prison was still much better. However, the paradise was surrounded by snakes, which are the symbol of Satan and always attract people to the hell, represents Grace was lured by Mary Whitney or just her desire to kill Nancy and Mr.