patchwork | ABOUT.

And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling of being torn open. Not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach. And not even torn open, but too ripe and splitting of its own accord. And inside the peach, there's a stone.

first impressions

personality

history

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Grace Marks

NAME

AGE

22 July 1828

DATE OF BIRTH

Alias Grace (both book and adaptation)

CANON

Sarah Gadon

Summary Grace Marks is a house servant and Irish immigrant to Canada, who was sentenced to life in prison at the age of sixteen for the 1843 murders of her employer, the farmer Thomas Kinnear, and his housemaid Nancy Montgomery, but the question of her guilt is debated. Fifteen years into her sentence at the Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario, Canada, now a ‘celebrated murderess’, she is interviewed by a doctor who wants to determine if she is innocent or guilty.

Appearance Grace is short and slender, with large blue eyes and auburn hair which she usually tucks under a simple white cap befitting her station. At this point, her hair has been cropped very short, but this would not usually be visible as she hides most of it under her cap, and would consider it uncouth and shameful to be seen without it. She has a clear, pale complexion, but her hands belong to a working woman: short nails, dry skin.

Clothing Many long, covering layers, identifying her as a working-class woman of the late 1850s. Natural fabrics, cool and earthy colours.

Demeanor A little inscrutable. Grace is extremely difficult to read: she is paradoxically both open and closed-off at the same time. You get the sense that she has very good control of herself, her expressions, her words: any movements she makes and words she says are deliberate and considered. She is capable of appearing innocent, charming, and cunning, all at once.

Voice Grace has a clear Irish accent (ex.) and a high, soft voice. She speaks very matter-of-factly, with perhaps surprising eloquence.

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?

Judgmental 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 tells her to do certain things.

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.

HISTORY

content warning: child abuse, sexual abuse and assault, (botched) abortion,
violent murder, and mistreatment of the mentally ill in insane asylums.

I. THE FLOWER BASKET

Grace was born in 1828 in Ireland, the third-oldest of nine children, and spent her childhood in fairly severe poverty. When Grace was a young girl, she and her family emigrated by sea to Canada. Her mother died on the journey and was buried at sea, leaving Grace and her siblings to be raised by their father, an alcoholic. She was physically abused by her father, and it is also implied that he had sexual feelings towards her that he attempted to act on. After her father demands that she leave the family home to find work, so she can send money back to support him and her siblings, Grace leaves for greener pastures.

Grace finds work as a house servant at the house of an alderman, where she meets another servant, Mary Whitney. Mary is crass and outspoken, and very radical in her political views. Grace and Mary become very close friends; Mary is particularly protective over Grace, who is deeply fond of Mary in return. Mary becomes pregnant; the father is the alderman’s grown son, who refuses to accept responsibility for the pregnancy. Fearing that she will lose her job and be unable to find work elsewhere if she carries the baby to term, Mary opts for an illegal abortion. Grace accompanies her to the appointment and covers for Mary while she recuperates, but Grace wakes up the next morning to find that Mary has died in the night. Heartbroken and shellshocked over Mary’s death, Grace is preoccupied with the fact that she failed to open the window to let Mary’s soul escape, a superstition that she first heard from a Catholic woman on the boat to Canada, who said it of Grace’s mother. While scrubbing the blood from Mary’s nightgown, Grace faints, and wakes up almost a day later in distress asking for Grace and claiming to be Mary. After fainting again, she wakes up with no memory of this.

Not long after Mary’s death, Grace meets Nancy Montgomery, a housekeeper, who offers her a job with considerably better pay at Thomas Kinnear’s farm. Although Grace is warned by another maid not to take the job, Grace accepts it, in part because Nancy reminds her of Mary, but also because she no longer wants to work in the alderman’s house with the weight of what happened to Mary there, and because the alderman’s son has turned his interests towards her. At the Kinnear farm, Grace also meets the farmhand, James McDermott, a fellow Irishman who is belligerent and crass, and Jamie Walsh, a boy who lives nearby and sometimes helped out on the farm, and who is clearly sweet on Grace. Though Grace initially likes working at the farm, it isn’t long before she begins to miss her previous position, thanks to McDermott’s volatile and aggressive personality and Nancy’s strict rules and flighty temperament.

Grace also becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the situation once she realises that Kinnear and Nancy are in a sexual relationship, losing all respect for Nancy and often acting out of turn when Nancy orders her about. Nancy tells McDermott that she is going to dismiss him at the end of the month, and McDermott confides in Grace that he plans to kill both Nancy and Thomas Kinnear, but Grace tries to talk him down. Grace is also visited by Jeremiah, a travelling peddler she first met at the alderman’s house. He tells her he is going to become a hypnotist and asks her to run away with him, but she turns him down when he declines to marry her and implies that there is a chance he may at any point decide to leave her if his fancies a change.

While Kinnear is away in town, Nancy takes the opportunity to terminate the employment of both McDermott and Grace. McDermott tells Grace he is going to make good on his plans to kill Nancy and Kinnear; Grace warns Nancy, but Nancy dismisses her warnings as fanciful. McDermott kills Nancy and shoots Kinnear when he arrives back at the farm – the extent to which Grace is involved in Nancy’s murder is highly debatable, as is whether McDermott came to the idea of murder himself, or if he was persuaded to do it by Grace, which is what McDermott said in his own confession. In the confession she maintains for years after the event, Grace says that, as far as she can recall, McDermott hit Nancy and threw her down the steps into the cellar, where he then strangled her with Grace’s kerchief. She does not remember giving the kerchief to McDermott, only that she knows her kerchief was used to strangle Nancy. Following this, she experienced a period of amnesia until Kinnear arrived home, when she saw McDermott shooting him. McDermott dismembered Nancy’s body and left it in the tub in the basement, and Grace took her dress, and together they tried to flee across the border to America. During their attempted escape, McDermott claimed that Grace had promised her hand in marriage to him, and attempted to rape her, but she managed to escape from him. The two crossed over to America and stopped at a boarding house to stay overnight, where they were found and arrested. During the attempted escape, Grace gave her name as the alias ‘Mary Whitney’.

At the trial, Grace presented a timeline of events which did not include any periods of amnesia. Jamie Walsh testified against Grace, claiming that Grace was in good spirits after the murders when he saw her, that she lied to him about Kinnear and Nancy’s whereabouts, and that he thought she was better dressed than usual and wearing Nancy’s stockings. Partially thanks to Jamie Walsh’s testimony, Grace was initially sentenced to death, and after hearing her sentence, she fainted onto the rails in front of her, leaving a scar on her throat. McDermott was hanged, and his last words blamed Grace, shouting that she had not only masterminded the entire plot, but that she had strangled Nancy to death herself. Grace’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

II. THE PANDORA'S BOX

After fifteen years in Kingston Penitentiary, Grace has become the subject of intense interest, not least by the wife of the governor, who allows her to work in the governor’s household as a servant during the day because of the notoriety she brings and the debate around her innocence. A group of people interested in proving Grace innocent ask a young American doctor, Dr Simon Jordan, to come to the governor’s house and interview her, to attempt to break through her bouts of amnesia and discern the truth of the murders. Grace recounts the above story to Dr Jordan, as well as some of her experiences while in prison, including the more than twelve months she spent in an insane asylum where she developed a fear of doctors as a result of extended abuse. She was, reportedly, pregnant when she left the asylum, though did not carry the child to term, presumably the result of a miscarriage. Grace tells Dr Jordan that the confession she recited during her trial had been dictated by her lawyer, and her memories of the murders are far less clear even than that.

Dr Jordan returns to Toronto to speak to Grace’s lawyer, who tells Dr Jordan that she was probably guilty of the crimes for which she was convicted, and is probably only entertaining Dr Jordan because she is in love with him and enjoys the attention. Dr Jordan returns to Ontario to speak to Grace again, where her hair has been cut short by penitentiary guards as a punishment for talking too much out of turn.

Jeremiah, who has reinvented himself as a mesmerist named Dr DuPont, hypnotises Grace in front of a small crowd, where she takes on the voice and an exaggerated persona of Mary Whitney. Grace-as-Mary tells the gathered audience that she strung along both McDermott and Kinnear by teasing them sexually, and that she murdered Nancy herself, but that Grace is innocent of the crime as it was Mary and not Grace who was in control at the time. After emerging from the hypnotism, Grace shows no awareness of what happened, and believes that she must have simply fallen asleep. Jeremiah theorises that there are two personalities within Grace’s body (i.e., an early diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder/multiple personality disorder), while Dr Jordan is angered by the events and refuses to write his report on Grace because he can’t tell if she is telling the truth or stringing him along too. Dr Jordan leaves for America again, and joins the Union Army, severing contact with Grace entirely.

III. THE TREE OF PARADISE

Eleven years after these events, Grace is given a pardon and released from prison. She is told by the governor’s wife that there is a surprise waiting for her in the form of a gentleman, who turns out to be Jamie Walsh. He asks for her forgiveness for testifying against her and asks her to marry him, and she accepts his proposal. Grace moves into Jamie’s house, and they live there together, with red and white Leghorn chickens, a Jersey cow, a cat named Tabby and a dog named Rex. Grace refuses Jamie’s offer of hiring extra help to look after the house, preferring to do it herself. Their relationship is mostly positive, although Grace is troubled by the way Jamie repeatedly asks her to tell him of the sufferings she endured in the penitentiary and the asylum.

Recalling the long interview sessions with Dr Jordan, Grace admits to the reader that, as with the recounting of her sufferings to Jamie, she may have changed some of the details of her stories while talking to Dr Jordan in order to suit what she thought he wanted to hear. Grace also writes that she is making a quilt in the Tree of Paradise pattern, which features scraps of fabric from the nightdress she wore in Kingston Penitentiary, the red petticoat that Mary Whitney gave her when she first began to menstruate, and the pink dress belonging to Nancy Montgomery that Grace stole while escaping and wore during her trial. She plans to embroider around them and blend them together as part of the pattern, and in this way the three of them will all be together.