Loucura feminina e prisão em Alias Grace: discutindo a relação entre literatura e história

Abstract

This present work does a relation between literature and history in the novel: Alias Grace (1996) of Margaret Atwood, as it discusses four crucial points which are essential parts to achieve the main goal of this research. Knowing that Alias Grace is created from the fictionalization of historical data, firstly, this work checks how those historical data are present in the literary work. Then it discusses the identity issues according to theories of Ciampa (1984) and Dubar (1997). Concerning to the specific relation between literature and history it aims to understand what were the women ́s roles and how female malady were viewed in the nineteenth century. To discuss the gender issues, we used the ideas of gender as “performance” of Butler (2003) and the ideas of gender of Beauvoir (1949). In order to think the relation between literature and history, the theories of Hayden White (1983) were used. The main goal of this work was to understand how the female malady was viewed among the Canadian society of the nineteenth century. It is concluded that the well-spread thought of a woman biological weaker than man as well as the gender issues were closely related to the female malady. The patriarchal system shared the idea of “weak woman” to dictate her roles in the society, those women who dared to disobey it could be easily considered mad.