Saving Grace: Mediating Victorian True Crime in the Age of #MeToo

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.