Alias Grace

by Margaret Atwood

All the same, Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word—musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.

Murderer is merely brutal. It’s like a hammer, or a lump of metal. I would rather be a murderess than a murderer, if those are the only choices.

But if I laughed out loud I might not be able to stop; and also it would spoil their romantic notion of me. Romantic people are not supposed to laugh, I know that much from looking at the pictures.

That is what really interests them—the gentlemen and the ladies both. They don’t care if I killed anyone, I could have cut dozens of throats, it’s only what they admire in a soldier, they’d scarcely blink. No: was I really a paramour, is their chief concern, and they don’t even know themselves whether they want the answer to be no or yes.

Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.

If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything.

One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— One need not be a House— The Brain has Corridors—surpassing— Material Place— Ourself behind ourself, concealed— Should startle most— Assassin hid in our Apartment Be Horror’s least.… —EMILY DICKINSON, C. 1863.

I predict that he will end as an inhabitant of the private Asylum I still dream of establishing; although I must curb my propensity to view each new acquaintance as a future paying inmate.

It is remarkable how frequently military men, when retired on half-pay, go to the bad; it is as if, having become habituated to strong excitements and violent emotions, they must duplicate them in civilian life.

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

I help the regular laundress, old Clarrie, who is part coloured and used to be a slave once, before they did away with it here. She is not afraid of me, she doesn’t mind me or care what I may have done, even if I killed a gentleman; she only nods, as if to say, So that’s one less of them.

He keeps forgetting he is no longer rich, and therefore no longer entirely his own man.

Still, there’s a severe and unadorned elegance about her—like a Quaker meeting house—which has its appeal; an appeal which, for him, is aesthetic only. One does not make love to a minor religious edifice.

Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.

She fixes him with a deep and meaningful gaze, and Simon sighs inwardly. He is familiar with that expression: she is about to make him an unsolicited gift of her symptoms.

“Where do you stand on the Abolitionist question, Dr. Jordan?” says Mrs. Quennell. Now the woman is turning intellectual, and will insist on a belligerent discussion of politics, and will doubtless order him to abolish slavery in the South at once. Simon finds it tiresome to be constantly accused, in his individual person, of all the sins of his country, and especially by these Britishers, who seem to think that a conscience recently discovered excuses them for not having had any conscience at all at an earlier period. On what was their present wealth founded, but on the slave trade; and where would their great mill towns be without Southern cotton?

My mother said Aunt Pauline meant kindly but had standards, which were all very well for those that could afford them.

So my mother and my father each felt trapped by the other.

He had it all planned out before he brought it up for discussion, my Uncle Roy being a man who liked to have his ducks lined up in a row before shooting them.

A sea voyage and a prison may be God’s reminder to us that we are all flesh, and that all flesh is grass, and all flesh is weak. Or so I choose to believe.

I have noticed there is nothing like a death to get your foot in the door.

At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven, in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart-shaped stone; and am therefore doomed to “wander lonely as a cloud,” as Wordsworth has put it.

“You must have some good woman friend you can go to. Or who can come to you.” Simon is anxious to transfer Mrs. Humphrey from his own shoulders to those of someone else. Women help each other; caring for the afflicted is their sphere. They make beef tea and jellies. They knit comforting shawls. They pat and soothe.

This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing.

She had two grown sons who were away at college in the States; and also a spaniel dog named Bevelina, which I include as family because it was treated as such. I am fond of animals as a rule but this one took an effort.

Over the years in prison, when I have been by myself, as I am a good deal of the time, I have closed my eyes and turned my head towards the sun, and I have seen a red and an orange that were like the brightness of those quilts; and when we’d hung a half-dozen of them up on the line, all in a row, I thought that they looked like flags, hung out by an army as it goes to war. And since that time I have thought, why is it that women have chosen to sew such flags, and then to lay them on the tops of beds? For they make the bed the most noticeable thing in a room. And then I have thought, it’s for a warning. Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed.

They sit and sip; the brew in the glass tastes like waterweed, with an undertone of raspberry beetles. “It is purifying to the blood. My housekeeper makes it herself, from an old recipe,” says Reverend Verringer. Very old, thinks Simon; witches come to mind.

I reached the privy and emptied the slop pail, and so forth. And so forth, Grace? asks Dr. Jordan. I look at him. Really if he does not know what you do in a privy there is no hope for him.

By this time it was hot as an oven, with grey clouds blotting out the light, although it was not yet sunset; and still as the grave, with no wind, but heat lightning flickering on the horizon, and a faint growling of thunder. When the weather is like that you can hear your own heart beat; it is like hiding, and waiting for someone to come and find you, and you don’t know who that person will be.

Dr. Jordan is writing eagerly, as if his hand can scarcely keep up, and I have never seen him so animated before. It does my heart good to feel I can bring a little pleasure into a fellow-being’s life; and I think to myself, I wonder what he will make of all that.

Hopeless dispatches, scrawled on pieces of bark, sent out in cleft sticks from the swallowing jungle. Suffering from malaria. Bitten by snake. Send more medicine. The maps are wrong. He has nothing positive to relate.

This must stop, he tells himself. This can’t go on. But nothing has been going on, and therefore nothing can stop.

It’s the middle of the night, but time keeps going on, and it also goes round and around, like the sun and the moon on the tall clock in the parlour. Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can’t stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it’s the day itself. A Saturday. The breaking day. The day the butcher comes.

ugh god this deteriorating train of thought is so lovely

What should I tell Dr. Jordan about this day? Because now we are almost there. I can remember what I said when arrested, and what Mr. MacKenzie the lawyer said I should say, and what I did not say even to him; and what I said at the trial, and what I said afterwards, which was different as well. And what McDermott said I said, and what the others said I must have said, for there are always those that will supply you with speeches of their own, and put them right into your mouth for you too; and that sort are like the magicians who can throw their voice, at fairs and shows, and you are just their wooden doll. And that’s what it was like at the trial, I was there in the box of the dock but I might as well have been made of cloth, and stuffed, with a china head; and I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out.

'oh yes oh yes oh yes we both, oh yes we both reached for, the gun the gun the gun the gun'

Did she say, I will pay you your wages on Saturday and then you can be gone out of here, and that will be the end of it and good riddance? Yes. She did say that. Was I crouching behind the kitchen door after that, crying? Did he take me in his arms? Did I let him do it? Did he say Grace, why are you crying? Did I say I wished she was dead? Oh no. Surely I did not say that. Or not out loud. And I did not really wish her dead. I only wished her elsewhere, which was the same thing she wished for me. Did I push him away? Did he say I will soon make you think better of me? Did he say I will tell you a secret if you promise to keep it? And if you do not, your life will not be worth a straw. It might have happened.

It took ages upon ages to reach THE INCIDENT(tm), and now that we finally have and it still remains so elusive... This might actually be my favourite paragraph in the entire book.

I wake up at cock crow and I know where I am. I’m in the parlour. I’m in the scullery. I’m in the cellar. I’m in my cell, under the coarse prison blanket, which I likely hemmed myself. We make everything we wear or use here, awake or asleep; so I have made this bed, and now I am lying in it.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

She hasn’t refused to talk—far from it. She’s told him a great deal; but she’s told him only what she’s chosen to tell. What he wants is what she refuses to tell; what she chooses perhaps not even to know.

He drinks a little champagne—there only is a little—and sits in the same rowboat as Lydia, and flirts with her in a half-hearted way. She at least is normal and healthy, and pretty too. Possibly he should propose to her. He thinks she might accept. Cart her home to propitiate his mother, hand her over, let the two of them work on his well-being.

Her behaviour would not be so reprehensible if she were a widow, she goes on. If the Major were dead, she would not be betraying her marriage vows; but as it is.… He tells her the Major has treated her abominably, and is a cad, a scoundrel, a dog, and deserves even worse from her. He has kept a semblance of caution: he’s made no offers of instant marriage, should the Major suddenly and accidentally topple off a cliff and break his neck. Inwardly he wishes him a long and healthy life.

He’s driven by what feels like uncontrollable desire; but apart from that—apart from himself, at these times, as the sheets toss like waves and he tumbles and wallows and gasps—another part of himself stands with folded arms, fully clothed, merely curious, merely observing. How far, exactly, will he go? How far in.

MacKenzie frowns at his cigar, which has gone out. It strikes Simon that the poor fellow doesn’t really enjoy smoking, but feels he ought to do it because it goes with the racehorse pictures.

“Lying,” says MacKenzie. “A severe term, surely. Has she been lying to you, you ask? Let me put it this way—did Scheherazade lie? Not in her own eyes; indeed, the stories she told ought never to be subjected to the harsh categories of Truth and Falsehood. They belong in another realm altogether. Perhaps Grace Marks has merely been telling you what she needs to tell, in order to accomplish the desired end.” “Which is?” asks Simon. “To keep the Sultan amused,” says MacKenzie. “To keep the blow from falling. To forestall your departure, and make you stay in the room with her as long as possible.”

Behind it is the graveyard, neat and green, the dead kept under firm control. No rambling weeds here, no tattered wreaths, no jumble and confusion; nothing like the baroque efflorescences of Europe. No angels, no Calvaries, no nonsense. Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole.

If, that is, you’ll accept—a debatable point—that we are what we remember.” “Perhaps,” says Simon, “we are also—preponderantly—what we forget.”

THE MOST IMPORTANT SENTENCE TBH

Yes, she said, it is really true. You are pardoned! I am so happy for you! I could see that she felt some tears were in order, and I shed several.

That is it, I thought. I have been rescued, and now I must act like someone who has been rescued. And so I tried.

It took me some days to get used to the idea; indeed, I am not quite used to it yet. It calls for a different arrangement of the face; but I suppose it will become easier in time. Of course to those who do not know my story I will not be anybody in particular.

And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she’d been reading.

Mr. Walsh’s beard was very large and red, but I assured myself that it could be altered in time.