Alias grace dreams
I finished reading Alias Grace a couple of nights ago. I think one of the quotes from the blurb on the back read something like 'surely, this is as far as a novel can go' and I think I agree. Not so much with the plot, which is still brilliant and involving, but by the sheer amount of technical skill Atwood demonstrates. You'll find a number of different writing methods - styles that lesser novels pick one of and use all the way through - like poetry, letters from characters to other characters and extracts from other (real life) texts of Grace Marks' murder trial. What makes it all so impressive is that in one chapter you could be reading straight from the mind of Grace herself and then the next a number of letters from Dr. Simon Jordan (her fledgling psychologist) addressed to his mother, and it all seamlessly connects while feeling relevant to the story. And the story is an interesting one. I have the feeling I would've appreciated more if I had heard of Grace Marks or knew a little bit about the case before reading. There's a sense that Atwood is writing for people who might have wondered about Grace Marks' past and needed someone imaginative to fill in the gaps for them. But Atwood still does an excellent job of catering for
The ''dream work'' is the process by which the mind condenses, distorts, and translates ''dream thoughts'' into dream content. '' In the novel Alias Grace, author Margaret Atwood retells the story of Grace Marks, a real nineteenthcentury Canadian woman who was accused of, and spent thirty years in jail for, the murder of two people. Montgomery, after all, was a maid, not the mistress of the house, and Marks resented Montgomery's airs of superiority. Atwood was first attracted to this story through the works of so-called Canadian journalist Susanna Moodie, who wrote about a wildly crazy Grace Marks. Atwood admits that at first she believed Moodie's recounting of the circumstances that surrounded this famous murderess. But either way, like I said before, the book did what I wanted it to do: prove to me that Margaret Atwood is a bloody good writer. He posits that all dreams represent the fulfillment of a wish on the part of the dreamer and maintains that even anxiety dreams and nightmares are expressions of unconscious desires. Freud explains that the process of ''censorship'' in dreams causes a ''distortion'' of the dream content; thus, what appears to be trivial nonsense in a dream, can, through the process of analysis, be shown to express a coherent set of ideas. Kinnear and Montgomery were having an affair, and many people have speculated that Marks, who was recently brought into the Kinnear household as a servant, was jealous. Freud makes a distinction between the ''manifest,'' or surface-level, dream content and the ''latent,'' or unconscious, ''dream thoughts'' expressed through the special ''language'' of dreams. The Interpretation of Dreams presents Freud's early theories in regard to the nature of the unconscious dream psychology, the significance of childhood experiences, the psychic process of ''censorship,'' the ''hieroglyphic'' language of dreams, and the method he called ''psychoanalysis. That was when she discovered numerous discrepancies in Moodie's work and decided to write her own version of Marks's story. Although Freudian theory, since its inception, has been relentlessly attacked from all sides, critics and proponents alike agree that Freud's ideas have exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century thought and culture. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is universally considered the ''father'' of psychoanalysis, and many date the birth of psychoanalytic theory from the 1899 publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (copyright 1900).
Common topics in this essay:
Dreams Freud,
Alias Grace,
Grace Marks,
Kinnear Montgomery,
Grace Marks',
Interpretation Dreams,
Dreams Freud's,
Atwood's Marks,
Simon Jordan,
Marks Atwood,
grace marks,
alias grace,
dream content,
interpretation dreams,
''dream thoughts'',
grace marks',
susanna moodie,
real life,
straight mind,
marks's life,
|
Acceptance Essays
