The first part of this essay analyzes Grace's first-person narrative and the ways it both affirms and undermines the traditional realistic code underlying both genres. In Kuester's view, the parodic difference in repetition is "of special importance in the context of the new literatures in English that have to define their own stances in opposition to a strong literary tradition stemming from the British Isles" (22). Martin Kuester, who relies on Hutcheon's theory of parody, claims that "irony is, generally speaking, a structural relationship between two statements, and parody imbeds such an ironical structural relationship in an intertextual (and thus literary) context" (22).
Hutcheon places parody within the greater field of irony as "the ironic use of intertextual references" ( Splitting 146). My understanding of parody in contemporary literary texts is indebted to Linda Hutcheon, who defines it as imitation characterized by ironic inversion or repetition with critical difference ( A Theory 37). In Alias Grace, Atwood parodies the fictional conventions of the historical novel and the detective story, both of which originated in the nineteenth century and are characteristic of the period. This essay focuses on both the effect of the novel's status as a fictionalized account of a "true" story and the portrayal of the psychoanalyst as detective. Using a detective's methods, he attempts to figure out whether Grace actually committed the crime and whether she was insane at the time of the murder. Simon Jordan, a New Englander and puritan "gentleman" who, as an expert on amnesia, tries to discover the truth about Grace during psychoanalytic sessions held in the governor's sewing room. A central character in Atwood's novel, though not a historical figure, is Dr. Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but Grace was initially sent to a lunatic asylum in Toronto after several fits of hysteria or "madness." Though convicted of the crime, Grace pleaded not guilty, and her guilt has never been proved. McDermott was hanged, but Grace (alias Mary Whitney) escaped death thanks to her lawyer's brilliant defense.
Together with the stableman James McDermott, she was convicted of the murder of her employer and his housekeeper/mistress Nancy Montgomery. Margaret Atwood's latest novel Alias Grace, set in mid-nineteenth-century Canada, fictionalizes the "true story" of Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant who, at the age of sixteen, worked as a maid in the household of the gentleman Thomas Kinnear. Intertexts of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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