Authors: Margaret Atwood
But I am really here, in my own house, in my own chair, sitting on the verandah. I open and shut my eyes and pinch myself, but it remains true.
Now here is another thing I have told no one.
I’d just had my forty-fifth birthday when I was let out of the Penitentiary, and in less than a month I will be forty-six, and I’d thought I was well past the time for child-bearing. But unless I am much mistaken, I am now three months gone; either that or it is the change of life. It is hard to believe, but there has been one miracle in my life already, so why should I be surprised if there is another one? Such things are told of in the Bible; and perhaps God has taken it into his mind to make up a little for all I was put through at a younger age. But then it might as easily be a tumour, such as killed my poor mother at last; for although there is a heaviness, I’ve had no sickness in the mornings. It is strange to know you carry within yourself either a life or a death, but not to know which one. Though all could be resolved by consulting a doctor, I am most reluctant to take such a step; so I suppose time alone must tell.
While I am sitting out on the verandah in the afternoons, I sew away at the quilt I am making. Although I’ve made many quilts in my day, this is the first one I have ever done for myself. It is a Tree of Paradise; but I am changing the pattern a little to suit my own ideas.
I’ve thought a good deal about you and your apple, Sir, and the riddle you once made, the very first time that we met. I didn’t understand you then, but it must have been that you were trying to teach me something, and perhaps by now I have guessed it. The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong.
The pattern of this quilt is called the Tree of Paradise, and whoever named that pattern said better than she knew, as the Bible does not say Tree. It says there were two different trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge; but I believe there was only the one, and that the Fruit of Life and the Fruit of Good and Evil were the same. And if you ate of it you would die, but if you didn’t eat of it you would die also; although if you did eat of it, you would be less bone-ignorant by the time you got around to your death.
Such an arrangement would appear to be more the way life is.
I am telling this to no one but you, as I am aware it is not the approved reading.
On my Tree of Paradise, I intend to put a border of snakes entwined; they will look like vines or just a cable pattern to others, as I will make the eyes very small, but they will be snakes to me; as without a snake or two, the main part of the story would be missing. Some who use this pattern make several trees, four or more in a square or circle, but I am making just one large tree, on a background of white. The Tree itself is of triangles, in two colours, dark for the leaves and a lighter colour for the fruits; I am using purple for the leaves and red for the fruits. They have many bright colours now, with the chemical dyes that have come in, and I think it will turn out very pretty.
But three of the triangles in my Tree will be different. One will be white, from the petticoat I still have that was Mary Whitney’s; one
will be faded yellowish, from the prison nightdress I begged as a keepsake when I left there. And the third will be a pale cotton, a pink and white floral, cut from the dress of Nancy’s that she had on the first day I was at Mr. Kinnear’s, and that I wore on the ferry to Lewiston, when I was running away.
I will embroider around each one of them with red feather-stitching, to blend them in as a part of the pattern.
And so we will all be together.
Alias Grace
is a work of fiction, although it is based on reality. Its central figure, Grace Marks, was one of the most notorious Canadian women of the 1840s, having been convicted of murder at the age of sixteen.
The Kinnear-Montgomery murders took place on July 23, 1843, and were extensively reported not only in Canadian newspapers but in those of the United States and Britain. The details were sensational: Grace Marks was uncommonly pretty and also extremely young; Kinnear’s housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, had previously given birth to an illegitimate child and was Thomas Kinnear’s mistress; at her autopsy she was found to be pregnant. Grace and her fellow-servant James McDermott had run away to the United States together and were assumed by the press to be lovers. The combination of sex, violence, and the deplorable insubordination of the lower classes was most attractive to the journalists of the day.
The trial was held in early November. Only the Kinnear murder was tried: since both of the accused were condemned to death, a trial for the Montgomery murder was considered unnecessary. McDermott was hanged in front of a huge crowd on November 21; but opinion about Grace was divided from the start, and due to the efforts of her lawyer, Kenneth MacKenzie, and a group of respectable gentleman petitioners – who pleaded her youth, the
weakness of her sex, and her supposed witlessness – her sentence was commuted to life, and she entered the Provincial Penitentiary in Kingston on November 19, 1843.
She continued to be written about over the course of the century, and she continued to polarize opinion. Attitudes towards her reflected contemporary ambiguity about the nature of women: was Grace a female fiend and temptress, the instigator of the crime and the real murderer of Nancy Montgomery, or was she an unwilling victim, forced to keep silent by McDermott’s threats and by fear for her own life? It was no help that she herself gave three different versions of the Montgomery murder, while James McDermott gave two.
I first encountered the story of Grace Marks through Susanna Moodie’s
Life in the Clearings
(1853). Moodie was already known as the author of
Roughing It in the Bush
, a discouraging account of pioneering life in what was then Upper Canada and is now Ontario. Its sequel,
Life in the Clearings
, was intended to show the more civilized side of “Canada West,” as it had by then become, and included admiring descriptions of both the Provincial Penitentiary in Kingston and the Lunatic Asylum in Toronto. Such public institutions were visited like zoos, and, at both, Moodie asked to see the star attraction, Grace Marks.
Moodie’s retelling of the murder is a third-hand account. In it she identifies Grace as the prime mover, driven by love for Thomas Kinnear and jealousy of Nancy, and using the promise of sexual favours to egg McDermott on. McDermott is portrayed as besotted by her and easily manipulated. Moodie can’t resist the potential for literary melodrama, and the cutting of Nancy’s body into four quarters is not only pure invention but pure Harrison Ainsworth. The influence of Dickens’
Oliver Twist –
a favourite of Moodie’s – is evident in the tale of the bloodshot eyes that were said to be haunting Grace Marks.
Shortly after she saw Grace in the penitentiary, Susanna Moodie encountered her in the Lunatic Asylum in Toronto, where she was confined on the violent ward. Moodie’s first-hand observations are generally trustworthy, so if she reports a shrieking, capering Grace, that is no doubt what she saw. However, soon after the publication of Moodie’s book – and just after the appointment of the humane Joseph Workman as Medical Superintendent of the asylum – Grace was considered sane enough to be returned to the penitentiary; where, records show, she was suspected of having become pregnant during her absence. This was a false alarm, but who at the asylum could have been the supposed perpetrator? The wards of the asylum were segregated; the men with the easiest access to the female patients were the doctors.
Over the next two decades, Grace turns up in the penitentiary records from time to time. She was certainly literate, as the warden’s journal depicts her as writing letters. She so impressed a good many respectable persons – clergymen among them – that they worked tirelessly on her behalf and submitted many petitions aimed at securing her release, seeking medical opinion to bolster their case. Two writers state that she was a trusted servant for many years in the home of the “Governor” – probably the governor of the penitentiary – although the admittedly incomplete prison records do not mention this. However, it was the custom of the time in North America to hire out prisoners for day-labour.
In 1872, Grace Marks was finally granted a pardon; records show that she went to New York State, accompanied by the warden and his daughter, to a “home provided.” Later writers claim that she married there, although no proof for this exists; and, after this date, all trace of her vanishes. Whether she was indeed the co-murderer of Nancy Montgomery and the lover of James McDermott is far from clear; nor whether she was ever genuinely “insane,” or only acting that way – as
many did – to secure better conditions for herself. The true character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma.
Thomas Kinnear appears to have come from a lowland Scots family from Kinloch, near Cupar, in Fife, and to have been the younger half-brother of the heir to the estate; although, strangely, a late-nineteenth-century edition of
Burke’s Peerage
lists him as having died about the same time as he turned up in Canada West. The Kinnear house in Richmond Hill remained standing until late in the century and was a point of interest for sightseers. Simon Jordan’s visit to it is based on an account by one of them. The graves of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery are in the Presbyterian churchyard in Richmond Hill, although unmarked. William Harrison, writing in 1908, reports that the wooden pickets around them were taken down, at a time when all wooden markers were removed. Nancy’s rose bush has similarly disappeared.
Some further notes: Details of prison and asylum life are drawn from available records. Most of the words in Dr. Workman’s letter are his own. “Dr. Bannerling” expresses opinions that were attributed to Dr. Workman after his death, but which could not possibly have been his.
The design of the Parkinson residence has a great deal in common with that of Dundurn Castle, in Hamilton, Ontario. Lot Street in Toronto was formerly the name of a portion of Queen Street. The economic history of Loomisville, and its treatment of mill girls, loosely echoes that of Lowell, Massachusetts. The fate of Mary Whitney has a parallel in the medical records of Dr. Langstaff of Richmond Hill. The portraits of Grace Marks and James McDermott on page ten are from their Confessions, published by the Toronto
Star and Transcript
.
The Spiritualist craze in North America began in Upper New York State at the end of the 1840s with the “rappings” of the Fox sisters,
who were originally from Belleville – where Susanna Moodie was by then resident, and where she became a convert to Spiritualism. Although it soon attracted a number of charlatans, the movement spread rapidly and was at its height in the late 1850s, being especially strong in upstate New York and in the Kingston-Belleville area. Spiritualism was the one quasi-religious activity of the times in which women were allowed a position of power – albeit a dubious one, as they themselves were assumed to be mere conduits of the spirit will.
Mesmerism was discredited as a reputable scientific procedure early in the century, but was widely practised by questionable showmen in the 1840s. As James Braid’s “Neuro-hypnotism,” which did away with the idea of a “magnetic fluid,” mesmerism began a return to respectability, and by the 1850s had gained some following among European doctors, although not yet the wide acceptance as a psychiatric technique that it was to achieve in the last decades of the century.
The rapid generation of new theories of mental illness was a characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century, as was the creation of clinics and asylums, both public and private. There was intense curiosity and excitement about phenomena such as memory and amnesia, somnambulism, “hysteria,” trance states, “nervous diseases,” and the import of dreams, among scientists and writers alike. The medical interest in dreams was so widespread that even a country doctor such as Dr. James Langstaff was recording the dreams of his patients. “Dissociation of personality,” or
dédoublement
, was described early in the century; it was being seriously debated in the 1840s, although it achieved a much greater vogue in the last three decades of the century. I have attempted to ground Dr. Simon Jordan’s speculations in contemporary ideas that would have been available to him.
I have of course fictionalized historical events (as did many commentators on this case who claimed to be writing history). I have not
changed any known facts, although the written accounts are so contradictory that few facts emerge as unequivocally “known.” Was Grace milking the cow or gathering chives when Nancy was hit with the axe? Why was Kinnear’s corpse wearing McDermott’s shirt, and where did McDermott get that shirt – from a peddler, or from an army friend? How did the blood-covered book or magazine get into Nancy’s bed? Which of several possible Kenneth MacKenzies was the lawyer in question? When in doubt, I have tried to choose the most likely possibility, while accommodating all possibilities wherever feasible. Where mere hints and outright gaps exist in the records, I have felt free to invent.
I would very much like to thank the following archivists and librarians, who helped to find some of the missing pieces, and without whose professional expertise this novel would not have been possible:
Dave St. Onge, Curator and Archivist, Correctional Service of Canada Museum, Kingston, Ontario; Mary Lloyd, Local History and Genealogy Librarian, Richmond Hill Public Library, Richmond Hill, Ontario; Karen Bergsteinsson, Reference Archivist, Archives of Ontario, Toronto; Heather J. Macmillan, Archivist, Government Archives Division, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa; Betty Jo Moore, Archivist, Archives on the History of Canadian Psychiatry and Mental Heath Services, Queen Street Mental Health Centre, Toronto; Ann-Marie Langlois and Gabrielle Earnshaw, Archivists, Law Society of Upper Canada Archives, Osgoode Hall, Toronto; Karen Teeple, Senior Archivist, and Glenda Williams, Reception, City of Toronto Archives; Ken Wilson, of the United Church Archives, Victoria University, Toronto; and Neil Semple, who is writing a history of Methodism in Canada.