Saving Grace: Mediating Victorian True Crime in the Age of #MeToo

Title
Saving Grace: Mediating Victorian True Crime in the Age of #MeToo
Publication Date
2024
Author(s)
McDonell, Jennifer
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5338-8577
Email: jmcdonel@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:jmcdonel
Editor
Editor(s): Lili Pâquet and Rosemary Williamson
Type of document
Book Chapter
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Routledge
Place of publication
United States of America
Series
Routledge Studies in Crime, Culture and Media
DOI
10.4324/9781003405054-2
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/64984
Abstract

This chapter critiques contemporary “herstory” re-framings of the Grace Marks murder trial (1843) in two true crime adaptations that have been consumed within the zeitgeist of the #Me Too movement: Sarah Polley and Mary Harron’s miniseries Alias Grace (2017) and an episode on Grace Marks in Lucy Worsley’s Lady Killers (BBC Radio 4 2022). Drawing on nineteenth-century legal and medical discourses and a chain of precursor texts, Marks is empathetically reconstructed as a complex, ambiguous, marginalised figure who survives sexual abuse and violence in the family, the judicial system, the penitentiary, and the asylum to secure a post-prison life of reinvention and marriage. Both texts expose a paradox at the heart of pop-feminist, sociocultural recuperations of the colonial female criminal body. The biopolitical governmentality that constitutes and disseminates the knowledge and disciplinary regimes that allow the semi-literate Grace to formulate her subjectivity – through legal testimony, hypnotism, psychoanalytical storying, and quilting – also contribute to her unmaking as a person. Historically situated attention is paid to how identarian intersectionalities of gender, race, and sexuality take shape through the speciesist figurative logic of humanness vis-à-vis animality, a dimension of the contemporary mediation of the case that has so far escaped critique.

Link
Citation
True Crime and Women: Writers, Readers, and Representations, p. 14-33
ISBN
9781003405054
9781032520681
9781032520674
Start page
14
End page
33

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