patchwork | SINGILLATIM

PLAYER INFO

Player Name: bobby
• Player Contact:

crowders or PM
• Player Age: 27
• Permissions: here

CHARACTER INFO

• Character Name: Grace Marks
• Character Age: 31
• Character Canon: Alias Grace
• Canon Point: After the seance, upon learning Dr Jordan won't be coming back to interview her anymore

• Character History:

Full history here, but here's a very truncated summary:

Grace, born in 1828 in Ireland, migrated to Canada with her family as a child. After her mother’s death during the sea voyage, Grace and her siblings suffered under their abusive father. As soon as she’s old enough to seek work elsewhere, Grace becomes a house servant for an alderman where she meets another servant, Mary Whitney, who is outspoken and politically radical. They become close friends. Mary becomes pregnant by the alderman’s son, who denies responsibility. Fearing job loss due to the pregnancy, Mary chooses an illegal abortion. Grace awakens the morning after the abortion to find that Mary died of blood loss in the night. Overwhelmed by grief, Grace is haunted by a belief that she failed to release Mary’s soul by not opening a window.

Shortly after Mary's death, Grace encounters Nancy Montgomery, a housekeeper. Nancy offers Grace a well-paying job at her place of work, a farm owned by Thomas Kinnear. Despite warnings from another maid, Grace accepts the position, partially due to Nancy’s resemblance to Mary, but also due to her desire to escape the memories of the alderman’s house and the leering of the alderman’s son. Initially enjoying her time at Kinnear’s farm, Grace soon begins to miss her old job due to the presence of the volatile and aggressive stablehand James McDermott, and Nancy’s strict rules and flighty temperament. Once Grace realizes that Kinnear and Nancy are romantically involved, she becomes more uncomfortable with the situation, losing all respect for Nancy.

While Kinnear is away, Nancy spitefully fires both McDermott and Grace. In response, McDermott murders Nancy and shoots Kinnear upon his return. The extent of Grace’s involvement in the murders is unclear – McDermott claims later in his confession that she coerced him. By contrast, what Grace recalls is that McDermott strangled Nancy after hitting her and throwing her down into the cellar. Grace has no memories of anything that happened after this until Kinnear’s return, when she witnessed McDermott shoot him. McDermott dismembers Nancy’s body, and he and Grace flee towards America, with McDermott attempting to assault her. They’re arrested at a boarding house and brought back to Canada for the trial.

Grace and McDermott are both sentenced to death. McDermott is hanged first, and with his last words he blames Grace, shouting that she had not only masterminded the entire plot, but that she had strangled Nancy to death herself. After McDermott’s hanging, Grace’s sentence is commuted to life imprisonment in Kingston Penitentiary.

Fifteen years into Grace’s sentence, sympathetic individuals seek to prove her innocence. They invite Dr Simon Jordan, a young American psychologist, to interview her. Dr Jordan attempts to uncover the truth behind her bouts of amnesia and the murders. Over several interview sessions, Grace shares her story with him, along with her prison experiences, including time in an abusive insane asylum that left her with an extreme fear of doctors.

Under hypnosis by a mesmerist, Grace adopts Mary Whitney’s persona. She confesses to an audience that she manipulated McDermott and Kinnear, claiming she (Mary) personally killed Nancy, and clarifying that Grace had no part in it. It is unclear whether this is a legitimate possession, spurred by Grace’s fear about Mary’s soul not being able to get out of the window, or something with roots in mental illness. After waking, Grace is oblivious to the events, thinking she merely fell asleep. The mesmerist suggests dual personalities in Grace (indicative of dissociative identity disorder), while Dr Jordan is frustrated and declines to report on Grace due to uncertainty about her honesty.

At no point does Grace or the narrative give a clear story of what exactly happened regarding the murders. In fact, Grace has an intense amount of control over the story she tells Dr Jordan (of which many of the previous details in this summary have been a part). While she gives him some information to appease his expectations, she recognises that what he desires to hear doesn’t necessarily align with the truth, maintaining a keen awareness of this dynamic.

• Character Personality:

+ Clever: Grace is exceedingly intelligent, not only because she’s eloquent and quick on the uptake, but because she knows how to deploy silence to her advantage. At the time of the murders, she may well have been a naïve young girl who tripped into a situation she couldn’t get out of, but by the time Dr Jordan comes to speak to her, she has spent fifteen years in a penitentiary, with some of that in an insane asylum. She knows exactly how to make her way in the world, adapting her mannerisms and the content of her speech specifically to who she’s talking to. Regardless of the extent to which Grace herself is personally guilty for the murders of Nancy and Kinnear, she knows that appealing to elements of Dr Jordan’s nature may lead to a pardon and her release from the penitentiary. She plays on her sexual desirability and her victimhood to endear Dr Jordan to her, keeping certain thoughts to herself and pressing very hard on elements of her past trauma in other instances, which ensures that he views her primarily as a victim. It is her position in the world as a working-class woman, and the things she has seen other working-class women like Mary Whitney endure, that allows her to use this trauma and inequality to her advantage.

+ Patient: By this point, after fifteen long years in prison, Grace’s biggest virtue is patience. She’s a very internally active person, always thinking and watching, even if she is saying nothing at all. Just as she spends her time in conversation with Dr Jordan slowly hand-stitching a quilt or darning intricate lace, Grace is extremely methodical in her actions and thoughts: when she’s not talking to Dr Jordan, she’s thinking about what she will tell him, and is happy to wait for things to happen to her. What else can she do, when the rest of her life has been planned out, when as far as she knows, she will spend the rest of her life in prison and even die there?

+ Durable: Regardless of how much of her story is true, there’s no doubt that Grace has endured a lot of hardship in her life: at the very least, she has endured much loss, was raised by a violent man, and has spent the last fifteen years in an extremely unjust prison system where inmates were routinely beaten or otherwise punished for the smallest infractions. Despite how she may seem to others at first look, Grace is extremely durable. She’s capable of withstanding things that might have broken others. Whether Mary Whitney as a secondary personality was a clever invention of hers or a genuine dissociative identity developed from her extensive traumatic experiences, the fact remains that Grace can look after herself.

– Inscrutable: To say the least, Grace is an unreliable narrator. It is extremely unclear how much of her story is the truth, and how much of it was invented by her to appease any number of the men in her life to whom she extensively tailors her words. Does she remember what happened to Nancy? Is her selective amnesia conveniently real or simply a story to put her guilt into question? Did she sexually manipulate McDermott until he was wrapped around her little finger, at which point she persuaded him to kill Nancy and Kinnear? Was the emergency of ‘Mary Whitney’ during Jeremiah’s hypnosis real, or a convincing bit of acting on Grace’s part to make herself appear truly insane, or as Dr Jordan theorised an opportunity for her to speak out of turn with no consequence? Grace never gives clear answers to any of these questions, but the answers themselves are in many ways irrelevant to who she is. What can be discerned about Grace comes entirely from how she sees the world and what she thinks: it is wrong and unfair that women often become the victims of men, but also that there is a way for women to work this situation to their advantage by understanding what men want. As she says of herself, many contradictory things have been written about her – how can she be all of them at once?

– Judgemental: Grace admits at several points to extremely judgemental thoughts about others, including women, even those she loves. At one point she says, ‘I had a rage in my heart for many years against Mary Whitney, and especially against Nancy Montgomery. Against the two of them both for letting themselves be done to death in the way that they did.’ Though she loved Mary, she clearly resents her for allowing the alderman’s son to impregnate and then abandon her; and she feels similarly of Nancy, who was also pregnant by Kinnear. Grace often at least thinks negative things of others, even if she does not say them. She doesn’t necessarily think of herself as superior to anyone, but it’s hard for her to dismiss these judgemental thoughts of others when they crop up. When she learns Nancy is pregnant, she admits that she lost all respect for her, and began to loathe her attitude and general sense of superiority. When her opinion on Nancy sours entirely, Grace occasionally acts childishly, stubbornly storming off when Nancy gives her orders.

– Superstitious: Grace is a practical woman who is nevertheless very much a product of her time. At multiple times in her life she’s shown to adopt certain superstitions as explanations for her circumstances or things that have happened to her, and though she’s not exactly gullible, these superstitions can sometimes get in the way of her practicality. She clearly worries about the treatment of the dead after they have passed on – she spends a long time fretting about her choice to have her mother wrapped in an old and tattered sheet, rather than their best sheet, before she is buried at sea, and believes that the accidental breakage of a family heirloom teapot was in fact her mother’s restless spirit knocking it to the ground; she also quickly adopts the fear of ‘not letting the soul out’ after only hearing the superstition once from an elderly woman, and carries it through her life to the extent that she worries about Mary Whitney’s soul not being able to escape their room. At this point in her life, Grace is much less susceptible to these things, and even dismisses them as little more than ‘queer ideas’, but that doesn’t mean these ideas don’t continue to influence her.

• Character Skills:

• Clothes-making and repair, general sewing
• General cleaning and upkeep of buildings
• Farm work, including milking cows, caring for horses, rearing and plucking chickens, and churning butter

• Character Inventory:

— ITEM ONE: An unfinished quilt.
— ITEM TWO: A sewing kit with a small number of in-progress panels for the quilt (not enough to finish it).
— ITEM THREE: The white neckerchief with embroidered blue flowers that was used to kill Nancy, which she hasn't seen for several years.

• Important Notes: I don’t want to come down too hard on whether I think Grace “did it” or not because I feel like it goes against the root of her character, but in the interests of being totally transparent with the mods, I do want to make it clear that my portrayal of Grace has a legitimate alternate mentality with the voice and mannerisms of Mary Whitney, who acts as a protector for her. I don’t want to offer a firm diagnosis here, but I’m certainly not intending to demonise those with DID by suggesting that their alternates are murderous; the only element of this I want to establish is that Grace’s periods of amnesia are legitimate and are instances where ‘Mary’ has taken over for her in moments of extreme trauma as a kind of dissociation, e.g. the Nancy/Kinnear murders and her time in the insane asylum.

• Writing Samples:

— SAMPLE ONE: Here
— SAMPLE TWO: Here

SINGILLATIM — app.