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Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood

Start date: January 1, 2018

Finish date: January 30, 2018

Why we're reading this: Jan 2018 New School
[close] Jan 2018 New School

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Oct 27, 2014 Candi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction, favorites

This book is a gem. A work of fiction, but based on actual historical events, Alias Grace is the story of the convicted murderess, Grace Marks. Sixteen year old Grace and fellow servant James McDermott are said to have brutally murdered their employer, Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper and supposed mistress, Nancy Montgomery, in Canada during the 1840’s. However, Grace claimed to have no memory of her own culpability in these murders. Both were found guilty; James McDermott was condemned to dea This book is a gem. A work of fiction, but based on actual historical events, Alias Grace is the story of the convicted murderess, Grace Marks. Sixteen year old Grace and fellow servant James McDermott are said to have brutally murdered their employer, Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper and supposed mistress, Nancy Montgomery, in Canada during the 1840’s. However, Grace claimed to have no memory of her own culpability in these murders. Both were found guilty; James McDermott was condemned to death and Grace Marks was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Provincial Penitentiary in Kingston, Canada.

In the novel, Grace’s story is revealed to Dr. Simon Jordan, a fictional, progressive, young doctor who is trained in the study of mental illnesses. Dr. Jordan’s expertise has been requested by a group of individuals who are petitioning for a pardon for Grace. Grace’s story, as she relates it in the first person to Dr. Jordan, is so very compelling, I could not put this book down. I was immediately drawn to Grace as she so expressively recounted her memories of her childhood, her migration to Canada from Ireland, her new life as a servant, her trial and her life in prison. Just like Dr. Jordan, I at first wondered about her guilt, her sanity, and whether or not she was speaking with candor or artifice.

The prose here is so wonderfully moving. At the end of one of her sessions with Dr. Jordan, Grace says, either to the reader or to herself:
“While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me – drawing on my skin – not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.”

“But underneath that is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful. It’s like being wakened suddenly in the middle of the night, by a hand over your face, and you sit up with your heart going fast, and no one is there. And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but too ripe and splitting open of its own accord. And inside the peach there’s a stone.”

Grace also has a way of discerning others that is at times both shrewd and witty. I felt as if she could easily have switched roles with Dr. Jordan – she being the analyst and he being the subject of her scrutiny rather than vice versa. And, Dr. Jordan, I felt was verily in need of some rehabilitation of his own psyche!

In addition, I found even her general observations of her surroundings to be rather droll. I found myself laughing out loud on occasion. In her description of a bustle, she says “it was like having another bum tied on top of your real one and the two of them following you around like a tin bucket tied to a pig.” Grace’s narrations of her dreams, too, were so vivid; I could feel the stirring emotions these evoked. “I was seeing it all for the first time, although I also knew I had been there before, as is the way in dreams… And I longed to be there, although in the dream I was there already; but I had a great yearning towards this house, for it was my real home.”

I grew to admire Grace throughout this book. But, was she innocent or guilty of the heinous crime for which she was convicted? Are we, the readers, able to come to a conclusion based on Ms. Atwood’s spin on this factual event? Or, is that not the real purpose here – to come to a veritable conclusion? No matter what you conclude, the consummate storytelling in this Atwood novel is well worth your time.
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