| Author(s) |
McDonell, Jennifer
|
| Publication Date |
2024
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| Abstract |
<p>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.</p>
|
| Citation |
True Crime and Women: Writers, Readers, and Representations, p. 14-33
|
| ISBN |
9781003405054
9781032520681
9781032520674
|
| Link | |
| Language |
en
|
| Publisher |
Routledge
|
| Series |
Routledge Studies in Crime, Culture and Media
|
| Title |
Saving Grace: Mediating Victorian True Crime in the Age of #MeToo
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| Type of document |
Book Chapter
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| Entity Type |
Publication
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| Name | Size | format | Description | Link |
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