It follows, then, that the stories this Canadian filmmaker has chosen to tell- Away From Her, Take This Waltz, Stories We Tell and, most recently, Alias Grace (which she wrote and produced), as well as her next adaptation, Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People-are also about women whose identities are in flux, who are knocking against a collective memory they no longer fit, who are searching for who they truly are. Also young and famous and motherless, Polley too had difficulty knowing who she was, difficulty separating herself from the image others had of her and the image she had of herself. At seventeen she read Alias Grace and saw herself in Grace Marks. But what to believe? Are these memories real? Is Grace the person she presents to the world? Does she even know who she is?
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Through the eyes, ears, mouth, mind of Grace and her psychiatrist, through their conversations and correspondences, writer Margaret Atwood forms a picture of Grace’s transformation, over thirty years, from guileless maiden to keen convict.
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And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?Īlias Grace was published in 1996, an almost six-hundred-page factual-fictional account of the life of a real sixteen-year-old Irish-Canadian servant girl. I think of all the things that have been written about me…that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that I have the appearance of a person rather above my humble station, that I am a good girl with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me, that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. Her spartan accoutrement redirects our focus entirely to her countenance as we watch it flicker from one expression to another, floating along the waves of Grace’s narration: Actress Sarah Gadon, as the “celebrity murderess” who may or may not have killed her employer and his housekeeper in 1843, wears little makeup, her hair in a white bonnet, her collar white too, grey-blue top matching grey-blue eyes. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1858, as quoted in Alias GraceĪlias Grace opens on Grace Marks’s reflection. Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence. Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speechless,