Abstract
Part of the reason why Mary Harron’s miniseries Alias Grace holds such a fascination for the viewer has to do the way in which the narrative unfolds, never fully reaching either a definitive truth or any form of closure. In the literal sense then, it is rather a mystery about murders and the hermetic personality of the “celebrated murderess” Susanna Moodie alluded to in Life in the Clearings than a formulaic murder mystery.
Grace’s baffling and enigmatic figure takes center stage in this intricate web of open-ended narratives, but her figure also observes from a distance the complex structure of these multi-layered tales and their sometimes contradictory strands. As the original core of all the narratives, Grace is therefore framed as the mistress-weaver who toys with concealed, superimposed discourses only partly revealing “[herself] behind [herself] concealed” (E. Dickinson, “One need not be a chamber to be haunted”).
The manipulative autobiographical pact she makes with Doctor Jordan unfolds as some ongoing game in which actress Sarah Gadon’s masquerading body and narrative quilt forever reformat the truth—if there is any.
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Notes
- 1.
Its blood-curdling tessitura has achieved a cult status over the years. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYDxxHrlmUg.
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Paquet-Deyris, AM. (2021). The Unreliable Female (Narrator) in Mary Harron’s Miniseries Alias Grace. In: Wells-Lassagne, S., McMahon, F. (eds) Adapting Margaret Atwood. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73686-6_7
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