Abstract: In 1843, a 16-year-old Canadian housemaid named Grace Marks was tried for the murder of her employer and his mistress. The jury delivered a guilty verdict and the trial made headlines throughout the world. Nevertheless, opinion remained resolutely divided about Marks in terms of considering her a scorned woman who had taken out her rage on two, innocent victims, or an unwitting victim herself, implicated in a crime she was too young to understand. In 1996 Canadian author Margaret Atwood reconstructs Grace’s story in her novel Alias Grace. Our analysis probes the story of Grace Marks as it appears in the Canadian television miniseries Alias Grace, consisting of 6 episodes, directed by Mary Harron and based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, adapted by Sarah Polley. The series premiered on CBC on 25 September 2017 and also appeared on Netflix on 3 November 2017. We apply a qualitative (corpus-driven) and qualitative (discourse analytical) approach to examine mood and modal verbs for what they can reveal about the language of truth, memory and madness in the language of the miniseries. Findings reveal that epistemic modal verbs highly correlate with a somewhat manipulative narrative surrounding Grace’s recall of events leading to the murder, when she is under hypnosis. The dynamic nature of epistemics also allows us to reason along the lines of agent- vs. subject-oriented modality when assessing the ‘truth’, particularly in what may be considered the denouement in the miniseries.
Keywords: Modality, Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Memory, Truth, Madness, Margaret Atwood.
Title: The Language of Truth, Memory and Madness in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
Author: Claudia Monacelli
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
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