Symbols of Alias Grace

521 Words3 Pages
Book Club Task # 2 Symbol #1 The Governor’s wife’s scrapbook was one of the symbols that I saw in Alias Grace. The scrapbook is a book of articles about criminals that either face the gallows or were sent to the Penitentiary. “What it has instead is all the famous criminals in it, the ones that have been hanged…” (27). This book of criminals was first described by Grace in Chapter 5. This scrapbook is a symbol representing the way society views Grace and her actions. They take “articles” of information, piece together the lies that either the media made up or Grace herself fed to them and they form a “scrapbook” of her, their own interpretation of Grace. Nobody really knows what is true or false nor do they care. If the description suits their liking, anything will be true in their eyes. This relates to a minor theme that is starting to appear in the book: Appearance vs. Reality. To the public, Grace appears to be either dumb or a bloodthirsty maniac - “I think of all the things that have been written about me – that I am an inhuman female demon … that I am soft in the head and a little better than an idiot.” (23) – while in reality, she is much smarter and not truly insane. At the beginning of each chapter, there are also newspaper or journal entries about the infamous Grace Marks. These entries seem to be from the scrapbook. An example will be the bottom entry seen on page 49. Symbol #2 The second symbol in Alias Grace would be the peonies. Peonies are these beautiful flowers that Grace remembers growing in Thomas Kinnear’s garden. In real life they represent happy marriage, power and nobility. The peonies mean something slightly different in the book however. The red peonies symbolize bashfulness and shame. When the red peonies were first mentioned in the first paragraph of the story, Grace was dreaming of the day the crime was committed. She hung her head
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