Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood is once of Canada’s best known literary composers. She is best known for her ability as an author of novels such as Alias Grace, Bodily Harm, Hairball, Rape Fantasies, and the highly acclaimed The Handmaid’s Tale, which was later made into a movie. These works establish her as a feminist writer, raising issues of women in literature, the difficulties associated with being female and the role of women in society.

Paul Newman once said, “People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked” (74). There is no such thing as the perfect relationship, however, being involved in a healthy relationship is essential for a person to feel valued, safe, and happy. Unfortunately, in the situation of Kelly Sundberg’s personal essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” and Kate Chopin’s short story “The Story of An Hour,” include extreme examples of unhealthy relationships. The essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” shares painful experiences of Sundberg’s physical and emotional abusive relationship with her husband Caleb, while “The Story of an Hour,” shares a rare reaction of a married woman, Louise Mallard, who explores her emotions cautiously when hearing about the death of her husband. Each woman faces their own prison created by their husbands. The two marriages represent the figurative meaning of doors being locked in a marriage. Both pieces of literature convey the theme of confinement by using the literary devices of foreshadowing, imagery, and conflict.

Once Grace goes missing her parents seem tired, and out of strength. Their mother “dropped her arm as if it were too heavy to lift”. She would later go and “start something and stop it and start something else”. Their father also believes it’s his fault for letting the girls go off to hide the last time. These characters are emotionally lost, but they are on a whole different level from

The secondary argument is that use of grace, as Flannery O’Connor sees it, is inapplicable within the context of the story. As evidenced in the article, O’Conner sees the Grandmother as a vessel of grace who, by extending her arm to the Misfit, in turn extends a grace which ultimately touches his soul. She speaks of this action “ [turning] him into the prophet he was meant to become”(O’Connor qtd on Bandy 6). However, as Bandy indicates, “there is no ‘later on’ in fiction” (6), making O’Connor’s comments trivial at best. The article references that grace must

The short story, "My Last Duchess," by critically acclaimed, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, is an intriguing and thought-provoking work of prose. Though it ties considerably to the famous work by the same name, written by Robert Browning, it also brings its own ideas, and symbols to the table. The most prominent symbolic link within this story is the representation between the characterization of Miss Bessie--the high school english teacher--and the narrator 's ideas, thoughts, and fears about life. The term life -- for the purposes of this essay -- is defined as the existence of an individual person and their course through the world. In “My Last Duchess,” the narrator 's life is symbolically represented through Miss Bessie by the character traits of a positive reputation, overcoming obstacles, and the solitary nature of people.

As a woman, the narrator must be protected and controlled and kept away from harm. This seemed to be the natural mindset in the 19th century, that women need to have guidance in what they do, what decisions they make, and what they say. John calls her a “little goose”(95) and his “little girl”(236), referring her to a child, someone who needs special attention and control. His need for control over her is proven when she admits that her husband is “careful and loving and hardly lets me stir without special direction”(49). John has mentally restrained the speaker’s mind, she is forced to hide her anxieties, fears and be submissive, to preserve the happiness of their marriage. When the narrator attempts to speak up, she is bogged down and made guilty of her actions. Her husband makes her feel guilty for asking, he says, “‘I beg of you, for my sake and for our child’s sake, as well as your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind!’”(225-226). By making her feel guilty for her illness, John has trapped her mentally from speaking up about it, convincing her that she must be more careful about her actions. Men often impose the hardships placed upon women during this era. They are often the people reassuring them of their “womanly” duties, and guiding them

I started reading Graceling as a novel study, but the more I read the more I wanted to know!

"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."—Flannery O'Connor.

Death by landscape by Margaret Atwood was an interesting story about an all girls camp located within the wilds of Canada. It is a story about two girls, Lois and Lucy. Lois feels rather plain and unremarkable, and meets Lucy at summer camp. Lucy fascinates Lois, I she is pale, blond, and part American. Although both girls come from roughly the same socioeconomic class, Lucy's life seems a bit grander than anything lowest that ever seen before. Despite these differences, the girls crew close, returning in the summers from the ages of 9-13. Their friendship ended dramatically one fateful day. On a week long excursion, after hiking up a mountain trail, Lucy strolls way to use the bathroom, and she is never seen again. Her body is never found, although many suspect that she jumped off a cliff into a lake below.

Grace is one of the most important themes in Flannery O'Connor's stories. It is the one thing that may help or curse the characters in her stories. God’s grace is often neglected by some characters and they end up with a curse God creates. In the stories, “The Enduring Chill”, “The River”, and “The Lame Shall Enter First”, God’s grace is portrayed as the Christianity religion itself. As one neglects it and some believe in it, Flannery O’Connor is trying to say that God’s grace is real and all you need to do is believe He exists.

In the novels Oryx and Crake and Frankenstein, mental health impacts the main characters and their everyday lives. Each character has been through different life changes that influence their state of mind. To more thoroughly comprehend what each character is going through, this paper analyzes the life changes that occur due to each characters’ mental state.

Though set in entirely dissimilar countries at different points in history, Margaret Atwood’s ‘Alias Grace’ and Hannah Kent’s ‘Burial Rites’ possess significant comparisons. Both for instance, are fictionalized historical novels following the tribulations of a female protagonist convicted of murder and both have been widely acclaimed for their incredible literary style which merges classic poetry, epigraphs, folklore and historical articles with fiction. The most striking parallel between each novel that can be drawn, however, is the way in which authors masterfully craft the stories of untrustworthy, cunning and deceptive criminals to elicit sympathy from their audiences. Readers of the novel and secondary characters alike are gradually pulled into sympathising with ambiguous and untrustworthy female leads, Grace Marks (Alias Grace) and Agnes Magnusdottir (Burial Rites). Despite the heavy suspicions of others and a lack of evidence to support their claims of innocence, these characters present artfully manipulated features of their defence stories to provoke empathy, sympathy and trust from those within the novel, and those reading it.

     Grace’s motives seem to be fairly simple, as they are based mostly on a love interest of Mr. Kinnear. Mr.

Throughout The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood utilizes various elements of fiction to develop and question the concept of power and control in the patriarchal society of Gilead. Offred, the main Handmaid, is the instrument of which Atwood delivers her message about corruption and power. Offred’s vague diction, unreliable characterization, and erratic tone illustrate the distress of this transitional society (Abcarian 1403-1404). In the beginning of Chapter 23, the role of memory in the novel expands, and the readers test the narrator’s creditability. Offred concludes that all of her memories are “reconstructions”, and that she will continue this practice even if she escapes Gilead. She continues to relate fluid memories to forgiveness and forgiveness to an unnaturally complacent and obedient population (Atwood 134-135). Identifying a powerful relationship between memories, forgiveness, and power, Offred suggests that the main source of Gilead’s totalitarian power is the regime’s ability to manipulate its citizens’ will to forgive past transgressions.

Much of Natural Born Quilter focuses on the analyzation of how the novel was triggered and how it evolved from Atwood’s rough sketch into Alias Grace. Atwood talks heavily about the woman who knew the real Grace Marks and who inspired her to write Alias Grace, Susanna Moodie. Moodie’s trips to Grace consisted of many eyewitness accounts of Grace “screaming out of her mind… but people faked…because it was nicer in the asylum (Wiley 5).” However, Moodie stated that Grace may possibly be “deranged…and that accounts for it all (Wiley 5).” When Atwood rummaged through the historical records of Grace Marks, she came to the conclusion that there were “three Graces: the murderer, the clueless ingénue, and the hidden Grace that nobody could discern (Wiley 8).” To be able to understand the real Grace Marks and how she is connected to the Grace Marks that Atwood created facilitates my comprehension of Grace’s mentality, therefore, facilitating my comprehension of the novel as a whole. Wiley also wrote that Atwood “was interested in the process of public opinion and