A remediação da memória cultural de Grace Marks no romance Alias Grace, de Margaret Atwood

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Teresa
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/gaudiumsciendi.2018.2998

The present article attempts to prove that Margaret Atwood remediates the cultural memory of Grace Marks, thus producing, preserving and renewing a site of memory. In 1843, Thomas Kinnear, the employer of Marks and of James McDermott, and Nancy Montgomery, the housekeeper and lover of Kinnear, were found murdered in Upper Canada. The Irish immigrants Marks, sixteen years old, and McDermott, twenty years old, quickly quit Kinnear's estate with Kinnear's and Montgomery's personal possessions. The fugitives were later located and imprisoned in Lewiston, New York. McDermot was charged with murder and Marks was accused of aiding McDermott. Because of the crimes committed, both of the accused were sentenced to death. While McDermott was hanged, Marks was later sentenced to life imprisonment, probably because of her tender age. Marks spent twenty-nine years in prison, which includes the short period she spent at an asylum in 1854 and which lasted for fifteen months. In 1872, Marks was pardoned. Atwood became bewitched by Marks, which led her to write Alias Grace in 1996. Attempting to address the remediation of the cultural memory of Marks, the present paper is divided into four parts. Following the introduction, which is the first part of the text, the concepts of cultural memory and of remediation will be approached with the aid of the works written by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney. The remediation of the cultural memory of Marks will then be considered. Finally, some concluding remarks connected to the relevance of the remediation previously referred to will be presented.