Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
Distance and adulthood did not help. I first read this book in high school, when I was just getting into my Margaret Atwood mania following my first-ever encounter with Cat’s Eye, then again in 2017, when I was reading in the back room of Papyrus and on the cusp of landing the contract gig that would lead me to a job that, in retrospect, I probably should have left sooner. Welp, hindsight is 20/20 as far as the job goes, but now I’ve read the book a third time and my most memorable opinion remains unbowed, unbent, unbroken: Dr. Simon Jordan royally sucks. I’m not sure I appreciated exactly how gross he is when I was seventeen, but adulthood has given me a far broader understanding of social nuances, and I can now objectively tell you that he is in fact the worst part of the book.
The wonderful part, which tends to characterize Atwood’s work, and is likely part of the reason I keep coming back for more and more and more: Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once. From that standpoint, it is difficult to decide where to begin – that is, Grace’s story progresses in a more or less linear fashion, but I cannot pinpoint exactly the beginning of the end. Perhaps it begins with the young doctor who arrives in Kingston (Ontario, not Jamaica) bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with dreams of establishing a private lunatic asylum. Perhaps it begins with the trial of Grace Marks and James McDermott, a pair of disgruntled servants – supposedly, in Grace’s case – accused of murdering their employers. Perhaps it begins with the double murder of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery, a Scottish Canadian landowner and his housekeeper/mistress. If we go far enough back in time, perhaps it begins with the violent proclivities of John Marks, father of Grace, whose sketchy political activities force the Marks family to emigrate to Canada in the first place; or perhaps it begins with the death of Mary Whitney, whose spirit pervades the entire book in ways that become increasingly direct.
Whatever the case, this much is inarguable: we are introduced to Grace in the year 1859. Sixteen years have passed since the Kinnear/Montgomery murders, and Grace, currently 32, has spent most of those years at Kingston Penitentiary, with a year-long stint in a Toronto asylum. Both she and McDermott were sentenced to death for the murder of Kinnear, and McDermott was promptly hanged, protesting all the while; Grace, however, was blessed with a clever lawyer, one Kenneth MacKenzie, who managed to get her execution reduced to a life sentence. This isn’t to say that the public believes in her innocence – a trial for the Montgomery murder would have ended in a more definitive death sentence, especially given the emotional testimony of Jamie Walsh, Kinnear’s errand boy, but a second trial was deemed unnecessary since both she and McDermott had already been slated for execution. Of course, there is also “a crowd of well-meaning but feeble-minded persons of both sexes” (in the words of Asylum doctor Samuel Bannerling) led by the wealthy Methodist Reverend Verringer, who believe completely in Grace’s innocence and have been badgering the authorities for a full pardon. To this end, Verringer and his Committee are getting together a petition, which they hope will be bolstered by the expert opinion of Simon Jordan, an American doctor who (1) needs the Committee’s money and (2) hopes in his turn that he will make his name on Grace’s case.
Though trained as a general physician, Simon has shifted his focus to cerebral diseases, and hopes to build a state-of-the-art asylum that emphasizes cleanliness and good care. He is fresh from a sweeping research trip in which he visited various European asylums as well as various European brothels in his quest to understand the human condition, and is confident that his time with Grace will cement his name as a leading expert in psychiatry. (And he reads Playboy for the articles.) He is therefore completely taken aback to realize that Grace has developed some rock-hard defense mechanisms and is fully capable of telling him everything and nothing in the same breath, but he perseveres nonetheless, beginning with some tentative exercises in subconscious association and progressing to the recitation of her entire life’s story. As he is drawn deeper into her case, his own life begins to unravel around him: his mother regularly sends him guilt-laced letters hinting that she fully expects to expire at any moment and trying to pressure him into a relationship with Miss Faith Cartwright, a most demure young lady of unfortunate looks; he develops a heavy crush on Grace while also struggling with a purely physical attraction to Lydia, one of the Governor’s two young daughters; Reverend Verringer’s Committee grows increasingly impatient with Simon’s snail-paced investigation, and lays plans of its own; his predatory (but attractive) landlady guilts him into paying for her daily expenses on top of the advance rent he has already paid her, then manages to lure him into her bed, where they embark upon an affair so torrid it gives me serious secondhand embarrassment.
All of the spinning plates come crashing to the ground when the Committee, chafing under Simon’s insistence on a gradual approach, arranges for Grace to be hypnotized by Dr. Jerome DuPont, who claims to be a Neuro-hypnotist from the school of James Braid. This may or may not be the literal truth: DuPont is one of many aliases for Jeremiah Pontelli, an itinerant peddler who became one of Grace’s closest – and only – friends prior to her stint in Kinnear’s household. Despite Simon’s skepticism, the hypnotism succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest dreams when Grace is unexpectedly possessed by the vengeful ghost of Mary Whitney, her best friend and a surrogate sister of sorts, who died at the age of sixteen after a secret abortion. As the hypnotism quickly spirals out of Jeremiah’s control, Mary gleefully claims full credit for the Kinnear/Montgomery murders, admitting that she took over Grace’s body at strategic moments in order to seduce both Kinnear and McDermott. This squares with Grace’s uncharacteristic lapses of memory at certain points in her narrative; it also explains McDermott’s dead certainty that Grace was eagerly invested in the deaths of their employers, though Grace herself says otherwise.
Having been unable to escape the room of her death, Mary has been riding along in the back of Grace’s head, unseen and mostly undetected, for the last eighteen or so years. Though still affectionate towards Grace, whom she does not wish to hurt, Mary lost sight of the bigger picture when she and Grace learned that Nancy was pregnant with Kinnear’s child, and beguiled McDermott into murdering Kinnear. She then cheerfully strangled Nancy herself, and retreated just in time for Grace to realize that both of her employers were dead; but she made other appearances later in Grace’s life, most notably in the asylum, where she was observed singing, shrieking, and capering. All of this comes as a huge shock to the Committee, whose members thought a hypnotism might trigger some deeply repressed memories of innocence but now find themselves with an unprovable confession on their hands. At least there’s one good effect, for Grace: though she holds no memory of the hypnotism and remains unaware of Mary’s presence, she is treated with a kind of wary caution, which tranlsates into a sort of respect from the people around her. No one tells her anything about Mary’s confession, but the aftermath of it goes more smoothly than one might have expected.
As for Simon, whose previously ordered life was already badly off track, the final straw comes when the lustful Mrs. Humphrey tries to seduce him into murdering her abusive alcoholic husband for her. (She already has a shovel to bury him and a nice spot picked out in the garden – I’ve gotta say, it’s not great that she has a plan.) With no backbone to speak of and nothing else for it, Simon writes her a groveling “It’s not you, it’s my mother” letter, packs his bags, and fucks off to the States, where he joins the Civil War as a Union doctor, receives some flying shrapnel to the head, and loses all memory of everything that happened to him after childhood, at least according to his mother. If her literal word can be believed – and I do believe it – he then enters a lengthy period of convalescence under the care of his habitually overbearing mother and the ever-obedient Miss Cartwright, who apparently has nothing else to do even though I think she can do better.
Meanwhile, Lydia – whose desire to become Mrs. Dr. Jordan was not subtle – is hastily married off to Reverend Verringer after drowning her sorrows in a hot girl summer, and Grace remains imprisoned until she finally receives a full pardon in 1872, at the age of 45. Upon her release, she is escorted to New York, where she receives both an offer of a forever home and a proposal of marriage from the adult Jamie Walsh, who has spent many years bitterly repenting his role in her conviction. He has one truly disturbing kink but is otherwise mostly normal, and Grace settles into her new life as his wife, and possibly even the mother of his child(ren). It’s impossible to tell if it’s pregnancy or menopause or cancer, as Grace herself is not sure, but there’s no reason not to hope. The book ends with her working on a quilt that incorporates three different fabrics representing herself, Mary Whitney, and Nancy Montgomery, to unite their stories into one.
I remain, as always, a lifestyle girlie, and the chapters detailing Grace’s life fascinate me as much now as they did when I was seventeen. I could read about her life all day and never get bored. But I’ve never liked Simon and I’ve never liked the character-writing-letters trope, and I do believe they both drove me up the wall the first time I picked up this book. Though the letters fill in background details and provide copious information on characters who are never directly seen – primarily Simon’s mother, and to a lesser extent Miss Cartwright – I still think there are too many of them. Similarly, I think there is too much of Simon. I am puzzled as to why we needed so much male gaze, particularly this male gaze, in a book that is supposed to be about a woman. I really did not need Simon’s habit of reimagining every woman he meets, however incidentally, as a prostitute. I did not need his internal musings on the maids of his childhood, whom he regarded as little more than property; I did not need to know that he liked to poke through their rooms and snoop through their things. I just don’t care. He is not an interesting character. He is a vehicle for the recounting of Grace’s story, a link to the burgeoning field of psychiatry, the skeptic in the room whose shaken belief seems to validate Mary Whitney’s supernatural existence. I could have lived with that if I hadn’t spent so much time in his head as he fantasizes about beating a straight answer out of Grace, sneers at the well-bred society ladies who seek his medical advice, and daydreams about violently raping his landlady.
As for that landlady, I didn’t need her either. She is frightfully annoying at her best and frighteningly conniving at her worst, and all in all I think she and Simon are a match made in a very exasperating corner of Heaven. The thing is, Simon has always had the option to lock his door, but he never does. He has always had the option to find a less creepy rooming situation, but he never does. This woman should not be anywhere near his bedroom, at least not in the middle of the night, yet she ends up there repeatedly, without his invitation or consent. His relationship with her – business-related or otherwise – should have ended the moment he realized she was sneaking into his room and stealing his laudanum. Their first hook-up kills me, because what the fuck was she doing bending over his bed while he was sleeping? Does she really expect me to believe her so-called sleepwalking took her straight into her attractive boarder’s bedroom and made her investigate his bed? But this is an era in which normal boundaries are considered uncouth, so Simon never bothers to set them because he still feels, despite it all, that he is a good man, even as he curses himself for a fool. I hate his fucking boundary-challenged landlady and I always have, but neither can I overlook the fact that he has consistently allowed her to take advantage of him, under the guise of propriety. His flight at the end would have been far more satisfying if he’d had the balls to go completely scorched earth and call her out for everything, even if only in private, and not in writing. What was she going to do? Film him and send the tape to every potential asylum donor?
And this might come as a shock after all the words I’ve dedicated to them, but these two chuckleheads are actually not the point of the book, which after all is titled Alias Grace, not Alias Dumb and Dumber. The book’s saving grace (ha) is the actual Grace, exactly as she is, without the filters and assumptions placed upon her by others or the interference of an angry ghost. Left more or less to her own devices, Grace is quiet and straightforward, but also so savagely funny in many of her observations that she can never be called dull or unpleasant, even if she never really means to be funny. I suspect I would not get along with her in real life, given her strong adherence to a very conservative mindset, but she is actually surprisingly good company. Others – particularly Nancy – think she is simple or even stupid, but she is neither of these things, though she does need a certain amount of processing time before things truly click. I can relate. In her few positive relationships, she is kind and supportive and utterly loyal; and, though she is staunchly pro-life, she unconditionally supports Mary Whitney in the bitter aftermath of her abortion. (Oh look at that, I guess you can identify as pro-life and still value the life of the mother.)
I am less pleased with Mary; I was quite fond of her when she first appeared, but she quickly wears out her welcome. While I do not blame her for the decisions she makes in life, the ones she makes in death are wholly selfish and short-sighted. She doesn’t get to have desires of her own after she dies because her desires are projected into the world through Grace, whose own wishes are quite different. I don’t know how intentional this was on Atwood’s part, but Grace comes across as a little oblivious and possibly asexual, while Mary is far more aware of the opposite sex – which is completely fine, but not when she’s using Grace’s body to cozy up to two men without Grace’s knowledge or consent. It isn’t cute, and she needs to back off if she’s serious about Grace’s well-being. During the hypnotism, she laments Grace’s near-hanging with so little self-awareness that I want to smack her. Of course they almost hanged Grace, what the fuck did you think was going to happen? What normally happens if you commit a murder under someone else’s name, in a time and a place in which spiritual possessions are not generally accepted as a legitimate alibi?
My other glaring issue, if we look at this solely as Grace’s story and ignore the aforementioned Mrs. Robinson-flavored arc: What in the cinnamon toast fuck is this?
The truth is that very few understand the truth about forgiveness. It is not the culprits who need to be forgiven; rather it is the victims, because they are the ones who cause all the trouble. If they were only less weak and careless, and more foresightful, and if they would keep from blundering into difficulties, think of all the sorrow in the world that would be spared.
I had a rage in my heart for many years, against Mary Whitney, and especially against Nancy Montgomery; against the two of them both, for letting themselves be done to death in the way that they did, and for leaving me behind with the full weight of it. For a long time I could not find it in me to pardon them.
I mean…….? I can understand the rage against Nancy, who objectively was a giant bitch (at least as Atwood portrays her), and it is true that she might have incited fewer murderous passions against herself if she had been a less toxic employer. I will even go so far as to say that she should have known better than to hire a young, pretty housemaid if she was really that concerned about her baby daddy’s wandering eye, which she inarguably was. Obviously it’s easy to judge from a distance, but it just seems like common sense to hire a 50-year-old who’s built like a cylinder if you don’t want the master of the house chasing after the housemaids. From that angle, yes, Nancy was remarkably stupid in some of her choices. But the hands that pulled the kerchief that strangled her to death were Mary Whitney’s – sort of – and the finger that pulled the trigger on the gun that killed Kinnear belonged to James McDermott, and you cannot get around that. I won’t say either woman made amazing decisions, because clearly they didn’t. But the decisions they made should not have resulted in death sentences, full stop. If this is not just Atwood’s idea of the philosophy of the real-life Grace Marks – if it is Atwood’s own personal philosophy – it is a serious misfire, and it feels out of step with the rest of the book, whose overarching premise is Grace’s ultimate innocence.
I love Atwood’s work (uh, mostly) and I always will, but this particular passage is breathtakingly stupid, in addition to being completely wrong. In my view, I am responsible for not drinking myself to death and not getting hit by a bus. These are things that are easily within my control. I will not be held responsible for the actions of a violent maniac, not even if I marched up to him with a sign reading “SHOOT ME.” Sure, that’s a bad idea on my part, but if I’m not threatening that maniac with bodily harm, there is nothing to enforce the message on my sign, excepting his own unlawful desires. For all that Grace seems to want to pity McDermott, he was not a mindless beast. He was given a choice, and he made it. So, no, he doesn’t get off on the “My victim made me do it” defense. As much as I dislike Simon, I will at least give him the barest credit for having the good sense to walk away from Mrs. Humphrey’s murderous plans – because he has free will, you see? See how that works? And while we’re at it, why aren’t we raging at Kinnear for letting himself get shot without so much as a how-d’you-do? Wasn’t that rather careless of him? In this book, a book that has taken great pains to portray a toxically slut-shaming society and the insidiousness of misogyny, why is it only the women who are considered accountable for their own untimely deaths?
For the record, I believe this is a one-off. Certainly there are themes and general philosophies that recur throughout Atwood’s books, but this is not one of them, or if it is it isn’t so baldly stated anywhere else. I would like to believe it is a quirk of the character of Grace, reconstituted from the journals of Susanna Moodie or possibly from other writers of the time. Not that it matters terribly; Alias Grace was first published in 1996 and is almost 30 years old at this point, and of course everything exists in a unique context through which it must be specifically viewed, or perhaps forgiven. This is not a trend-chasing blog, so everything on it suffers from some degree of lateness. Still, I can’t help but set Grace’s anti-victim lecture against Katharina’s final monologue in The Taming of the Shrew, in which she praises wifely submission. Some people think Shakespeare was in earnest and others think he was being dreadfully sarcastic, but we’ll never know either way. I get a similar feeling from Alias Grace, though in this case it’s more that I can’t tell if Atwood was writing from the heart, or if she was merely fleshing out a cutting satire of a textbook conservative. This is the woman who wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, so nothing is really off the table.
My ultimate conclusion is that I’d read it again, but, having struggled through the travails of Dr. Jordan three times now, I’m not in a hurry to revisit this book. I know why he’s there, sort of, and I suppose the story would suffer if he and Mrs. Humphrey got cut out of it; or at the very least it would be about 200 pages shorter. As is usual with Atwood’s work, the prose (in Grace’s sections) is gorgeous, insightful, full of snarky mockery, and I absolutely love it. I could read that kind of thing all day every day. The trouble is that Simon’s chapters, combined with the weepy letters penned by his nasty mother, are juuuuuuuust enough of a turn-off to make rereads slightly unappealing. There is a reader for every book and a fan for every character and I believe this holds true for both Alias Grace and the ineffectual Dr. Jordan, but at this point I’m really just thanking my stars that he only appears in one book.
