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More and more, I'm thinking that the use of Grace Marks, a real person, was a snare for both the reader and Atwood. It constrained Atwood in a way that a purely fictional retelling wouldn't have and the reader gets caught up in the "real" events at the expense of the story.
It's been so long since I've read The Woman in White, but I wonder to what extent Alias Grace can be considered a sort of homage, but the flip side: a lower class woman struggling against the repressions of the times. Grace had far fewer alternatives than Laura! And to what extent are Mary and Anne doppelgangers?
Once I started thinking along those lines, I thought Atwood would have been far better served by an entirely fictional account, one that would have let her say exactly what she wanted, instead of having to force her narrative to fit the known facts.
In any case, I think our particular line of discussion while entertaining illuminating, has gotten us very far from consideration of Alias Grace as just a story and as a representation of the Victorian novel. We've been led astray. But another unanswerable issue is to what extent Atwood may have intended it?
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