Can We Believe What the Newspapers Tell Us?: Missing Links in Alias Grace

JUDITH KNELMAN Can We Believe What the Newspapers Tell Us? Missing Links in Alias Grace In the summer of 1843 a bachelor farmer and his housekeeper were found dead in the basement of their home in Richmond Hill, a village just north of Toronto. Their two servants were implicated by the coincidence of their own disappearance and that of some silver plate. One of the servants was Grace Marks, whose reputation is rescued in Alias Grace. Contemporary newspaper accounts of the murder and then the trial left a number of tantalizing questions that others before Margaret Atwood have tried to answer, but never before with material clearly labelled 'imaginary.' Atwood implies that the newspapers failed Grace by sensationalizing and politicizing her case. This is possible, but unlikely. Servants could and did murder their employers. Female servants were strong and quite capable of murder. Grace may have been well treated in comparison with the way other servants were housed, fed, and worked, but unlike most other servants she was isolated at the formative age of fifteen, with no mistress to provide moral training. Indeed, her situation was quite the -opposite, since evidence at the trial confirmed that the lady of the house was actually the housekeeper. The ideal employer, according to a handbook put out by the Ladies' Sanitary Association, was active and vigilant, regular inher habits, by no means particularly indulgent, but rather strict, with however temper under control and not prone to fault-finding. She is, in short, one who does her duty in her station, be it high or humble, and 'looketh well to the ways ofher household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.' (13) Grace's victim was none of these things. She was neither feared nor respected, and in this way contributed to her own demise. However, the lawyers were too delicate to dwell on the consequences of her immoral behaviour. Predictably, the Toronto newspapers, largely owned by and published for the class that depended on servants, registered shock and horror at the murders. 'Our publication of this day is stained by an account of one of the most atrocious, diabolical acts that ever disgraced this or any country,' the Star, Transcript and General Advertiser alU10unced in its next edition, the following Wednesday (2 August, 2). On the same day, the Examiner said it UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1999 678 JUDITH KNELMAN had 'seldom had to record a more atrocious and cold blooded case of murder than has recently been perpetrated in this city.' These papers quite naturally considered the case from the perspective of potential victims. Their readers might have been feeling at the mercy of servants living in their houses whom they had perhaps unwittingly offended. What had triggered this bold action? Who was to know what further aggression was smouldering in servants' quarters? What if these murderers were to strike somewhere else? What if other servants took encouragement from their example? There was bound to be, at such a time, a collective tension at the prospect, however unlikely, of anarchy in the established class structure, and a palpable sigh of relief when the perpetrators were caught. At any given time, as Stanley Cohen explains in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, most people 'in a society share common values. They agree on what is damaging, threatening, or deviant and recognize violations (Cohen, 75). Any society maintains its identitybyconstructing limits and expelling what it defines as antisocial, that is, whatever calls into question the system it is based on. In a frontier society built on the English class system but sustained by trust and fellowship, strong subversive action by a servant, especially a female one - action that resulted in the employer's death would have been unusual and alarming: such deviant behaviour could threaten the stability of everyday' life. The public would naturally have feared that other social subordinates might be inspired to follow suit. Even today, as the press plays up the story of a crime, a perspective is negotiated through which such fears are stirred up and then allayed. The crime is visualized, explained, and contained. '[M]otives are imputed, causal patterns are searched for and the...