Alias Grace: Did She or Didn’t She? Atwood Keeps Us Guessing.

Alias Grace is a novelized version of a completely fictional attempt to unravel what actually occurred during a factual and later sensationalized murder that took place not far from Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1843.  Margaret Atwood, the author, is better known for another novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, about the future.  What unites these two books is an implicit feminist viewpoint on gendered issues. That is, neither of these books contains polemics, or rants, or arguments about why the way that gender has been used is a problem, instead they argue through showing – and this is a particularly persuasive argument because the reader finds him or herself making the argument him or herself – not being preached to by an author.

In the process of writing about this book, I will likely do some of that preaching, so this will be significantly less convincing of the feminist perspective than the novel.  Also, as a man, I will inevitably note the places where the argument fell flat.  More precisely the spell of having the reader take on the feminist perspective was broken.  For instance, at one point the character who interviews Grace, whom I will introduce in a moment, is staying at a boarding house where the hired help has fled for non-payment, the man who owns the house has fled to drinking and carousing, and the woman who is married to the man who fled is indisposed, so he is left on his own to attend to the basics of living for a brief moment.  The narrator, who at this moment is a woman, notes that he is essentially incapable because he has never had to do various tasks for himself.

This would have been a stronger argument if she were talking about cooking, but she was talking about sweeping floors and carrying a chamber pot out to the outhouse and then washing it out.  I think the larger point is an important one that ties the book together – those who are cared for, as the upper crust and professional class were until modern labor saving devices made that no longer necessary, were much more dependent on their help than they knew.  Heck, that is true today.  I was talking with another faculty member about how clueless we were about the administrative structure necessary to run a University as students and even as junior faculty members.  But my point is that in this moment Atwood’s attempt to get us to see this wears thin – she points out mechanical aspects that the caregivers engage in that we could figure out – professors have been doing their own typing since the advent of quality word processors.  On the other hand, we still haven’t figured out how to recruit, admit, orient, and house the students who so regularly show up in our classrooms at the beginning of every semester like clockwork.

At the moment when she points out that character could not do tasks that were within his means, Atwood is, in my mind, an unreliable narrator.  When we run into an unreliable narrator, the narrative they are weaving cracks – we begin to question it.  We wonder about her motives.  At the moment illustrated above, I become aware of Atwood’s wanting to preach, or, more precisely, to use me as the instrument of her preaching – to use me, the reader, to do her dirty work.  The central protagonist in this novel – Grace – is, like Atwood at that moment, a highly unreliable narrator.

Grace Marks – a domestic employed by Thomas Kinnear – was found guilty of murdering Kinnear.  Another domestic in Kinnear's employ, James McDermott, was also found guilty.  McDermott, however, was hung and Marks was not.  She was imprisoned and also spent some time in an asylum, but was ultimately pardoned, released from prison, and mysteriously ended up in Upstate New York.  Neither McDermott nor Marks were tried for the murder of Nancy Montgomery, who was also employed by Kinnear and was murdered at the same time he was.  She was, in addition to being Kinnear's chief housekeeper, his mistress and she was pregnant with his child.  McDermott and Marks were not tried for Montgomery’s murder once they received the death penalty for Kinnear’s murder as it wasn’t deemed necessary to have multiple death sentences.

With these facts, and the sensationalized and contradictory accounts from the newspapers, Atwood weaves a tale that asks the question of whether Marks was guilty of the murders or not.  The foil for determining this is an invented series of conversations between Marks, who is imprisoned and working for the prison governor as a maid, and a somewhat lost physician who is the son of an industrialist; Simon Jordan.  This is the man I referenced above who was clueless about how to sweep a floor.  His father’s Massachusetts company has failed and he is having to live on less and less money.  He has decided to come up with a means of supporting himself by making a name for himself as a psychiatrist so that he can open a humane asylum and actually cure those who come to him.  Grace is the case that will make him famous if he can get to the heart of the question about her guilt. 

Charcot demonstrates hypnosis.

This long novel, then, is dominated by the pre-psychoanalytic conversation between a naïve, but knowledgeable physician who, like Freud, is aware of the work of Mesmer and, more importantly, the work of Martin Charcot – the physician in Paris that Freud studied under and whose work Freud translated.  Charcot was the first successful treater of hysteria – that vague disorder of women.  Charcot used hypnosis – and Freud started with that, but found it not as helpful as something else he discovered – the talking cure.  A treatment that was invented by another mentor of his, Joseph Breuer and Breuer’s patient, Bertha Pappenheim.  Freud would take this “talking cure” and refine it into psychoanalysis.

Now at this point, you may think that my psychoanalytic interests have completely derailed me and that I am making all of this up.  Well, that may be.  But there is another clue here that might be helpful.  One of the minor but key characters in this novel, the only person who knows both Grace and Simon Jordan in their respective homes, is named Dora.  Now this is not a common name, but it is the pseudonym of one of Freud’s five case studies.  It was a case that Freud was proud of because he used his ability to interpret dreams to “solve” the case, but it was also a case that it took him five years to publish because it was a failed case.  Dora fired Freud.  She gave him two weeks’ notice, the same way that a domestic would give an employer two weeks’ notice.   The Dora in this book is, in fact, a domestic.  She was the domestic who quit working at the house where Simon Jordan was staying, and she also worked as a domestic at the prison governor’s mansion alongside Grace and gave her the inside scoop on what this man Jordan, who was so interested in her, was really like at home.

So, I think we might have an alternate version of the Freud tale.  OK, maybe I’m going over the top, but Freud’s father was a wool merchant – and Simon Jordan’s father’s failed industrial venture was a Massachusetts textile mill owner.  OK, maybe I’m grasping at straws – or threads – but this is either an alternate, failed version of Freud’s method that is on display – or it is a very pointed but very deeply veiled criticism of Freud and how badly he misunderstood women.  And Dora would be the perfect case to use to point out Freud’s ineptitude when it comes to women.

Actually, I think this book is taking on something much bigger than Freud – it is taking on the culture of Canada in the mid to late 1800s – and the deeply misogynistic and highly class based system that repressed not just the Grace’s of this world, but also her partner in crime – or the real criminal – McDermott.  But I think it may well be referencing Freud as an instrument of that culture – something that he certainly was in the Dora case – at the same time that he was in the process of upending that culture by listening to women and reporting what they said.  Jordan Simon listened, but he never had the courage to report what he heard for fear that he would be laughed out of the profession - something Freud had to face head on.

So, let’s get back to the story.  Grace is being interviewed by Simon in the Governor’s mansion.  She is an unreliable narrator because she remembers too much detail – more than anyone could.  She is like Scheherazade, stringing along her listener and staving off her death by doing that.  But she is also unreliable because we can’t always tell what she is telling her listener and what she is simply thinking.  We don’t know what Simon knows versus what we know.  We know a story that is too detailed and too clear and too linear to be an organic narrative.  We also know things – including dreams about Simon – but also memories of “dreams” that took place at Kinnear’s home before the murders – that Grace deliberately withholds from Simon.  We also know that Simon thinks that Grace is withholding things from him, but what he thinks she is withholding is different than what we have access to – and it isn’t clear to us what he thinks she is withholding.  It seems to me that he feels she is withholding the key to understanding what goes on in the minds of women – and that connects up with the idea that Simon may be a stand in for Freud.  As far as we can tell, what we have access to is largely of a piece with what she is telling- except that it hints that she may not be quite as prim as she appears in the tale told to Jordan.

The story of her life that Grace tells is an abysmal one.  She is born in Ireland – but she is a protestant and her grandfather was a minister.  Her mother married a man who drank everything he earned – and her aunt shipped them off to Canada.  Her mother died on the trip over and Mary was left to look after the brood of kids and to try to keep a rein on her father.  They were soon ensconced in a boarding house that might as well have been a chicken coop and she escaped (feeling somewhat guilty about leaving the younger children behind) to work, at the age of 13, as a live- in maid.  Her father agreed to this arrangement because he thought that he would get her wages.  He did collect a part for a while, but she soon became independent of him and lost track of him - she was truly on her own in a new world.

At the house where she landed, she was befriended by Mary Whitney, who also worked there, but Mary was more worldly wise, and Grace learned from her how the world worked for girls/women like her from Mary.  Mary , thought, got herself pregnant by one of the young masters of the house, but then died when her abortion went horribly wrong.  Grace feared that she wasn’t able to let Mary’s spirit escape from the room she died by opening a window in time, just as she had failed to let her mother’s spirit escape from the hold of the ship they were on when her mother died.  Grace moved from this house to other houses, working for one owner after another who tried to seduce and/or rape her, but she kept her virtue intact and she ended up working for Kinnear because she felt befriended by Nancy Montgomery – the housekeeper and, unbeknownst to her at first, lover of Kinnear. 

As we creep more and more slowly towards the murder, we have been treated to a wealth of details about the social lives of the households of the professional class in Canada in the 1840s.  And we have been given a sneaky prism through which to view this.  Grace is a protestant and the granddaughter of a minister.  She is one of us – the class of people who read books.  But she is also, by virtue of her father being a n'er do well, a member of the class that does not read books – the Irish Catholics who were coming from Ireland because of the potato famine and who were seen as not just being members of a different class, but essentially a different race.  We learn just a bit about the recent Canadian troubles – the revolt of the working class against the landed gentry.  McDermott, Grace’s partner in crime – or the bully who did all the killing and then took her as hostage – was a revolutionary.  Grace is branded a revolutionary by association at the trial, but that is not the person through whose eyes we see.  We see the inequalities of this land through the eyes of someone who by all rights could very well be in the gentry class.

We have been seduced by a Scheherazade who looks and feels like one of us.  And so, when she says that she didn’t do it – which her story leads us to in the parts that she tells to an absent Simon Jordan who is off finding objective evidence about what happened – we believe her.  Then when he returns, and she is interviewed in a hypnotic trance by a peddler that she previously knew who is now posing as a physician and hypnotist and she reveals to an audience that includes Simon Jordan that Mary Whitney’s soul traveled into her and performed heinous acts – we believe her.

Grace is guilty – and not guilty – but of what?  In both versions of the story, her own and “Mary Whitney’s”, she did not kill Kinnear; McDermott did that.  In her version of the story, McDermott also killed Nancy, but in Mary’s version, Mary helped McDermott with the final murder.  To be legally minded for a moment, Mary is not guilty of the only crime that she has been tried for.  She may or may not be guilty of the murder of Nancy Montgomery, whose statute of limitations has likely run out – but no matter – she is innocent.  But Simon Jordan does not have a legal mind.  He wants to know if she is guilty – and so do we – but of what?

Mary Whitney’s story fills in blanks in Grace’s story – particularly those moments when Grace doesn’t remember – or dreams of being outside and being touched sexually but chastely by McDermott or maybe Kinnear.  In Mary’s version, when Mary is in control of Grace’s body, she gets Grace to seduce both Kinnear and McDermott – and puts McDermott up to the crime.  Nancy has decided to fire them both, and Mary eggs McDermott on to murder them and take the valuables and they can escape to the States together.  In this version, McDermott must have been confused by the contrast between the lustful and conniving Mary and the chaste Grace who primly objected to whatever advances he would make. 

So, we are asked to choose between two versions of Grace (who takes the alias Mary Whitney when she runs away from the murder with McDermott), and to judge her.  I think that if we judge her guilty, it might be as an accessory in the murder of Nancy - which she can't remember, but not of Kinnear.  If we were to judge her innocent, we could do that by blaming her alter ego or the ghost inside her of instigating the murders and of having a hand in them - or we could determine that the ghost was a ruse and that her version to Simon and then to us is real, and she was innocent. 

But I think that if we do either, we have not gotten something essential about Grace.  Grace – and the name is no accident – moves through her life – at least as she reports it – without being buffeted by the currents around her.  All the sexism, classism, neglect, and abuse that she experiences doesn’t alter her essential goodness.  But it also leaves her as a character who is essentially passive.  Freud – unlike Simon Jordan – does not see the women that he meets with as blameless.  Dora is, according to Freud, passionately desirous of all the men in her life – each of whom, including Freud, uses her to their own ends.  Grace, left to her own devices, and in her own mind, I think like Freud's Dora's view of herself, is innocent – and not, as Freud would have her be, lusting after the men who are forcing themselves on her.

Grace – her essence – is blameless in so far as she really has no interest in the ways of men.  She would, thank you very much, like to lead her own life.  She would like to be free to make a quilt –a quilt pattern adorns each chapter, which is named after that quilt pattern.  She would like to stitch a life of her own making, but she is not free to do that.  I think that Atwood is encouraging us to create a world where Grace could become who it is that she is.  I think.  Perhaps the greatest feat of this book is that Grace – and Atwood – can be guessed at, but not known.  I think that Atwood would have us not be able to assign guilt – or Grace, but instead to be stumped by this mystery.

And that, I think, may help understand the power of this book.  The essence of it is that Grace remains unknown, despite the best efforts of others.  The tragedy, too, is that she remains unknown.  If knowing another is to love them – and loving requires a reciprocal engagement with the other – a process of getting to know each other, perhaps Grace’s strength is to resist being known by those who would force themselves upon her.  In a world where love is, perversely, seen as taking knowledge of another from them – either through raping them or through interviewing them to get at their secret – she avoids the degradation that both would subject her to. 

Simon Jordan is not so lucky.  He is seduced, essentially against his will, by the woman who is boarding him.  He is known by her and gets to know her – but the knowing is false and shopworn.  He desires to know and be known by Grace.  But he does not have the tools, nor do they have the platform, from which to get to know each other.  He ends up feeling isolated and alienated within the context of a non-loving erotic relationship – and this ends up being his fate in the afterward of the book.

The cost for Grace is that she remains unknown.  When she is finally pardoned, she is shipped to Upstate New York to become the mail order bride of the boy from the next farm over from Kinnear’s who had a crush on her, but then betrayed her at her trial.  She forgives him and they marry.  But what gets her husband horny are tales of her mistreatment in prison.  He is in love with having saved her – but still not with her.  She is a morally superior being – consistent with her tale of innocence, but an unknown one – the cost of being the virgin (vs. the whore, in the age old dichotomy).

Women are, in this book, the stronger sex.  They endure more, they survive – Grace is the only one left standing, along with the boy next door – from the Kinnear household, which she notes (including the boy next door) early in the text.  She also remains intact, which Simon Jordan does not.  Guilty or not, she survives – and, in the bleak world depicted in this text, that is an accomplishment.     

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