Alias Grace
May. 24th, 2018 07:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI suspect that Alias Grace is Netflix’s answer to Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale: in response to an acclaimed series based on a Margaret Atwood novel of future feminist dystopia, they’ve adapted a Margaret Atwood novel about that other feminist dystopia: the past.
Or, at least, for an Irish-born servant girl with no connections, no means, and no luck, mid-nineteenth century Ontario comes very close to it. Grace Marks hasn’t caught a break since the day she was born: her father is an abusive drunk, her mother died at sea when the family immigrated to Canada, and the happiest time of her life are the months after she takes her first job in service, when she shares a room with a spirited servant girl, Mary Whitney.
Until Mary Whitney falls pregnant by the son of the house, who refuses to acknowledge the child, and dies in a botched back alley abortion.
After that Grace’s life spirals downhill till she lands where we find her at the start of the series: locked in a penitentiary, convicted of murdering a later employer and his housekeeper. There are doubts about her guilt, however - she claims that she has no memory of the murders - so a group of philanthropists have hired a doctor, a specialist the nascent field of psychology, in hope that his findings will help win her a pardon.
This, then, is the frame story: Grace is telling her life story to Dr. Simon Jordan. He hopes to win her trust through his sympathetic interest in her story, which may cause her to drop this pretense of amnesia and at last tell the truth - or possibly allow her to break through the amnesia that has hitherto veiled her memory - or… something. It’s the 1850s and psychology is still wild and wooly terrain.
I was a little afraid that he was going to be yet another abusive man, and I just didn’t think I could take another when Grace’s life is already littered with them. But although he entertains some romantic fantasies about Grace he never makes an actual move - and as Grace says, if we could be executed for thoughts, we would all be hanged.
It’s Grace, however, who is the star of the show: Grace and the long, long thoughts that she’s thought in prison. She’s uneducated but clever, and with the things she does know - about quilts, and the Bible, and housework - she’s got a strikingly unusual way of looking at the world, and it’s always fascinating to see what she’ll say next.
I also loved Grace’s friendship with saucy Mary Whitney, whom Grace often quotes (or claims to quote) when she wants to say something that is not exactly modest or proper - but nonetheless true.
(I don’t know how much of this is the screenplay and how much comes direct from Margaret Atwood, but this is an excellent example of historical fiction where the social justice message that has been successfully translated into the language of the time, which is something I love when it’s done well and can’t abide when it’s been done badly or, worse, not even attempted.)
As a murder mystery, it’s not satisfying - purposefully so, I hasten to add; it’s not meant to be a satisfying murder mystery. Was Grace a willing accomplice, indeed the instigator of the whole murderous scheme as McDermott suggests, or a bystander too accustomed to McDermott’s idle boasting to take his threats to murder their employers seriously until he actually did it - at which point she was too frightened to try to stop him? Dr. Jordan never finds out. Grace herself may not know.
There was also one part of the ending that I thought was gratuitously unkind. Possibly to offset the fact that Grace gets a happier ending than anyone had any right to expect, they inflict a horrible war wound on Dr. Jordan. It’s not clear exactly what happened, but he’s bedridden and barely even able to speak. And he’s not based on a real person, so they don’t have even the paltry excuse of “But that’s what really happened!” No. They just wanted to add an extra twist of the knife. WHY.
But on the other hand Grace does get a surprisingly happy ending. In real life she just sort of disappeared after leaving the penitentiary, and it seems unlikely that she ended up the wife of a solidly respectable farmer like she does in the miniseries. If Dr. Jordan’s paralysis is the price we have to pay… well, I guess that’s how it’s gotta be.
In short - I think I’m going to have to read the book. Once I’ve had some time to recover from the miniseries.
Or, at least, for an Irish-born servant girl with no connections, no means, and no luck, mid-nineteenth century Ontario comes very close to it. Grace Marks hasn’t caught a break since the day she was born: her father is an abusive drunk, her mother died at sea when the family immigrated to Canada, and the happiest time of her life are the months after she takes her first job in service, when she shares a room with a spirited servant girl, Mary Whitney.
Until Mary Whitney falls pregnant by the son of the house, who refuses to acknowledge the child, and dies in a botched back alley abortion.
After that Grace’s life spirals downhill till she lands where we find her at the start of the series: locked in a penitentiary, convicted of murdering a later employer and his housekeeper. There are doubts about her guilt, however - she claims that she has no memory of the murders - so a group of philanthropists have hired a doctor, a specialist the nascent field of psychology, in hope that his findings will help win her a pardon.
This, then, is the frame story: Grace is telling her life story to Dr. Simon Jordan. He hopes to win her trust through his sympathetic interest in her story, which may cause her to drop this pretense of amnesia and at last tell the truth - or possibly allow her to break through the amnesia that has hitherto veiled her memory - or… something. It’s the 1850s and psychology is still wild and wooly terrain.
I was a little afraid that he was going to be yet another abusive man, and I just didn’t think I could take another when Grace’s life is already littered with them. But although he entertains some romantic fantasies about Grace he never makes an actual move - and as Grace says, if we could be executed for thoughts, we would all be hanged.
It’s Grace, however, who is the star of the show: Grace and the long, long thoughts that she’s thought in prison. She’s uneducated but clever, and with the things she does know - about quilts, and the Bible, and housework - she’s got a strikingly unusual way of looking at the world, and it’s always fascinating to see what she’ll say next.
I also loved Grace’s friendship with saucy Mary Whitney, whom Grace often quotes (or claims to quote) when she wants to say something that is not exactly modest or proper - but nonetheless true.
(I don’t know how much of this is the screenplay and how much comes direct from Margaret Atwood, but this is an excellent example of historical fiction where the social justice message that has been successfully translated into the language of the time, which is something I love when it’s done well and can’t abide when it’s been done badly or, worse, not even attempted.)
As a murder mystery, it’s not satisfying - purposefully so, I hasten to add; it’s not meant to be a satisfying murder mystery. Was Grace a willing accomplice, indeed the instigator of the whole murderous scheme as McDermott suggests, or a bystander too accustomed to McDermott’s idle boasting to take his threats to murder their employers seriously until he actually did it - at which point she was too frightened to try to stop him? Dr. Jordan never finds out. Grace herself may not know.
There was also one part of the ending that I thought was gratuitously unkind. Possibly to offset the fact that Grace gets a happier ending than anyone had any right to expect, they inflict a horrible war wound on Dr. Jordan. It’s not clear exactly what happened, but he’s bedridden and barely even able to speak. And he’s not based on a real person, so they don’t have even the paltry excuse of “But that’s what really happened!” No. They just wanted to add an extra twist of the knife. WHY.
But on the other hand Grace does get a surprisingly happy ending. In real life she just sort of disappeared after leaving the penitentiary, and it seems unlikely that she ended up the wife of a solidly respectable farmer like she does in the miniseries. If Dr. Jordan’s paralysis is the price we have to pay… well, I guess that’s how it’s gotta be.
In short - I think I’m going to have to read the book. Once I’ve had some time to recover from the miniseries.
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Date: 2018-05-24 11:36 pm (UTC)