Finding Grace, finding ourselves in Mary Harron’s Alias Grace1

Scholarship on Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (1996), according to the scholar Gina Wisker, has principally taken two directions: ‘historical […] contextualiz[ations of] the representation and treatment of women’ and ‘problematiz[ations of the] ways in which people and historical records are obsessed with the impossible task of fixing, articulating, proving history, and the facts of any events’. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s influential work on form, and focusing on the first episode of Mary Harron’s six-episode adaptation (2017), I argue that the miniseries routinely tantalizes us as a whodunnit, but that it, in fact, reflects back to us our own needs and wants. I go over Atwood’s and Harron’s source material before revealing how they characteristically point to the inherent uncertainties of Grace Marks’s case and how, in so doing, they do significant service to the complexities of her character. My broader claim is methodological: my reading speaks to the two registers identified by Wisker, and it reveals how Harron builds on Atwood by provoking us both to make intentional our partiality as viewers and to situate ourselves in our interpretative projects.