Wednesday 29 August 2007

"Alias Grace" by Margaret Atwood: Grace Marks


Some of these notes probaby need further tidying up so related points are all together. I'll get around to this later.

Grace Marks

General points
She is clever, observant (see her points on Simon 41-2) and self contained. She withholds knowledge of herself. For instance, she will not allow Dr. Jordan to know that she understands his symbolism of the apple. 44 Although he thinks that “She understands well enough”. She’s very perceptive of Jordan during their first meeting.

The “white peonies” represent innocence and perhaps “buried consciousness”. (In the front garden of Mr. Kinnear’s) 364 The red flowers on page 364 represent blood and death. Grace contrasts them in her dream with the white peonies (bashful innocence?) that she observed on arrival at Richmond Hill.

During “Falling Timbers” Grace recalls happier, more superstitious times with Mary Whitney: “I heard her laughing. But you often imagine things, when you are alone so much. It was this time that the red peonies first began growing.” 416

“Big blue eyes” (The keepers on Grace 73.)
Her “red hair” also brings forth comments from the keepers: “a little fire, they say it comes with the redness of the hair. But is it red where it most counts . . .” (The keepers hold most of the cliched notions of red-haired women as they make sexual comments about Grace. They, like many men of the period, are misogynous. See their further comments on 278-9) 277-8

“I have not talked much for the past fifteen years” (Before meeting Simon) 77

Father, “Not even Irish” 120 (An Englishman) Her mother was pregnant before marriage and “had to” marry him, “and it was covered up” 120. “Marks may not have been his real name”. He was a drunk and could be violent. 123. Big family! Grace acted as mother to her brothers and sisters. (“Nine of us” 121) She eventually has to leave them. 150

Grace’s family experienced dire poverty in Ireland. Her mother seemed to be always pregnant. 122-3.

She does “not like being in debt”. 177

There are several examples in the text of Grace working hard “from dawn to dusk” 302

Grace is intelligent
Grace is clever because she reflects and thinks things through

She works out that the “quilt pattern called Lady of the Lake” was not named after Sir Walter Scott’s poem but after a boat that was in turn named after the poem. This is “because it was a pinwheel design, which must have stood for the paddle going around. And I thought that things did make sense, and have a design to them, if you only pondered them long enough. And so perhaps it might be with recent events, which at the moment seemed to me entirely senseless; and finding the reason for the quilt pattern was a lesson to me, to have faith.” 396 (The poem’s content about kidnapped bride also relates to Grace’s predicament while on the run with MacDermott; something of which Grace is fully conscious. See 396)

Grace’s prudishness
She is somewhat prudish, “A leg is a leg, dirty or clean (When cleaning the floor and being observed by a man. (Dreams) 115 (She later remembers that Kinnear observed her with a raised skirt cleaning the floor.)

She oes not want to be thought of as “a mare” by McDermott. 265

Grace loses respect for Nancy after discovering Nancy’s true relationship with Kinnear “I let my scorn show, and answered her back more than was wise”. 297

Simon knows that he has to phrase his questions carefully to Grace when he wants to know if Kinnear ever “touched” Grace; “Did he take liberties?” because “Grace has a strong dash of prude in her.” 358

(It is worth noting the contrast in her reported behaviour when Grace becomes the sexually experienced Mary Whitney. She leads MacDermott on by tempting him with sexual favours.)

Sexual promises as Mary Whitney
“Then he sat down on the side of the bed, and said now it was time for me to keep my promise; and I said what promise, and he said I knew very well, for I had promised him myself in exchange for the killing of Nancy.” 384

Grace has a darker side
Early murderous thoughts
Grace has murderous thoughts on killing one or two of her brothers or sisters, “ and then there would be not be so many to feed, nor so many clothes to wash.” 124. (Suggested by the “Devil”)

On thoughts of killing her father:
“I would lie awake at night brooding over it” . . .
“I had begun to have thoughts about the iron cooking pot, and how heavy it was; and if it should happen to drop on him (her father) while he was asleep, it could smash his skull open, and kill him dead, and I would say it was an accident; and I did no want to be led into a grave sin of that kind, though I was afraid that the fiery red anger that was in my heart against him would drive me to it.” 149 (Grace is driven mad through fear, rage and being “dog tired”.)

Grace relates in precise detail the experience of emigration in her chapter on her passage at sea. Chapter 14 (A six to eight week voyage) To Jordan, “The ship was after all only a sort of slum in motion”.134.

Grace lacks sentimentality towards clothes (Is she cold or just simply, realistic?)
She is relatively unsentimental about clothes and sheets. This goes against her at her trial. (Jamie’s evidence on Grace wearing Nancy’s dress.

On the day of Nancy’s killing Grace is seen by Jamie Walsh wearing her “white stockings” He testified that “you were better dressed than usual and were wearing white stockings. He implied they were Nancy’s”. 372 (This damned Grace in most people’s eyes as cold-hearted but she may have been Mary Whitney at the time!)

She dresses in Nancy’s clothes when she leaves Richmond Hill
“The last thing I did was to take off the clothes I’d been wearing that day; and I put on one of Nancy’s dresses, the pale one with the white ground and the small floral print, which was the same one she had on the first day I came to Mr. Kinnear’s. And I put on her petticoat wit h the lace edging, and my own spare clean petticoat, and Nancy’s summer shoes of light-coloured leather, which I so often admired, although they did not fit very well. And also her good straw bonnet; and I took her light cashmere shawl, although I did not think I would need to wear it, as the night was war. And I put some rose-water behind my ears and on my wrists, from the bottle of it on her dresser; and the smell of it was a comfort of sorts”

She relates that she “burnt my own clothes; I didn’t like the thought of wearing them ever again, as they would remind me of things I wished to forget . . . and it was like my own dirtied and cast-off skin that I was burning”. 388

(This long passage is interesting because it shows Grace’s cold attitude towards wearing dead Nancy’s clothes. She had refused to make love in Kinnear’s bed to MacDermott but was happy to wear Nancy’s clothes! Remember that she was unsentimental about burying her mother in her “second best sheets” as her mother would not have need for the best one. There is a sense in the latter part of the passage of Grace casting off her identity by burning the clothes that she had worn before. The theme of “The Lady” is also present in the items and scent that Grace takes and wears. Is she Grace here or Mary Whitney? All this is remembered by Grace.

After having been arrested Grace’s “only anxiety appears to get some of her clothes sent to her, and her box”. The reporters write that she does have “any traces of broken rest and a guilty conscience” and appears quite calm, with her eye full and clear as though she slept undisturbed”. ( It is this calm lack of guilt and her willingness to wear Nancy’s clothes and send for Nancy’s box that puts people against her. See the Chronicle And Gazette, Kingston, August 12th 1843. Page 403.

On Grace’s attitudes towards possessions, particularly those of the dead:
“But although it was true this box and the clothes in it had once been Nancy’s, they were hers no longer, as the dead have no use for such things.”412

This did not go down well with the public at Grace’s trial.
(MacKenzie) “The foolish girl could not be dissuaded from dressing herself up in the murdered woman’s finery, an act which was viewed with horror by the press and public” 436 (MacKenzie goes on to say tell Simon that “If I’d had my wits about me, I would have advance that very fact as evidence of an innocent and untroubled conscience, or, even better, of lunacy”. 436)

MacKenzie “That woman has nerves of flint” 437.

On keeping secrets
Grace learned to keep secrets from an early age. (Fear of God). Her father had taken part in sectarian violence and murder with Orangemen against protestants who had “taken the side of the Catholics”/ “I was always very careful about keeping the secrets of others, no matter what they might be”. She is made to swear on a Bible. 125 (She keeps McDermott’s plan to kill Nancy and Kinnear too”!) She has a perverse pride in keeping a secret as she want to put the lie to men not being able to “trust a woman” 125.

On not “betraying” MacDermott“still I did not wish to be the means of betraying him. There is something despicable about betrayal”. 394

Grace and Class
Shifts in class. Grace is the granddaughter of a Methodist who could not get “a position” because “he had done something unexpected with the Church money”. 119 (Notice how Grace after falling into the servant class resumes her “position” towards the end of the novel. What happened to Grace’s grandfather also highlights the shiftlessness of most men throughout the novel. 119 Aunt Pauline remained lower middle class with her shop but still felt that she had “married beneath her”. 120 “As keeping a shop was not how a lady should live”.

The context of Grace’s conviction
Verringer: “ ‘There is still a widespread feeling against Grace; and this is a most partisan country. The Tories appear to have confused Grace with the Irish Question, although she is a protestant; and to consider the murder of a single Tory gentleman – however worthy the gentleman, and however regrettable the murder – to be the same thing as the insurrection of an entire race’”. 91

She is strong willed and self-contained
On the Penitentiary and its it keepers and inmates: “it is dog eat dog around here, and they are the bigger dogs”.

“I wanted her to be stronger, (Grace on her mother), so I would not have to be so strong myself.

“Did not cry” on the death of her mother. 139

She is unsentimental on clothes belonging to the dead. Buries her mother in the old sheets “since she’d always placed herself second best in life.” 139

She is patient: “One ought to bear all patiently, as part of the correction we are subject to; unless a way can be found of tripping your enemy without detection”. (And cunning!) 277-8

Third person narrator“Before he was hanged, McDermott said that you were the one who put him up to it, says Dr. Jordan. He claimed you intended to murder Nancy and Mr. Kinnear by putting poison into their porridge, and that you repeatedly urged him to help you; which he very piously refused to do.” 299

Grace “allows herself to smile” when contradicting this while claiming that if she really wanted to use poison she would have needed no help from McDermott. (Control)

Grace and her energy as “a medium”.
Dr Jordan begins strongly but he fades in the novel. He loses energy to Grace
“The trouble is that the more she remembers, the more she relates, the more difficulty he himself is having. He can’t seem to keep track of the pieces. It’s as if she’s drawing his energy out of him – using his own mental forces to materialize the figures in her story, as the mediums are said to do during their trances.” 338 (This is not the first time that Grace is considered to be naturally inclined to be a medium. Jeremiah said so and Grace becomes the subject of the medium, Du Pont (Jeremiah).

Grace role-playing the trapped romantic figure (In a modern context don’t we role-play too? See also the notes on themes.)

She is aware of people’s “romantic” view of her and role plays this view of her. She is never seen to “smile” or “laugh”:

Lydia: Why don’t you ever smile or laugh, we never see you smiling . . “
“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”. 27

Especially from the doctors she retreats into silence: “At last I stopped speaking altogether, except very civilly when spoken to”. “

On Simon Jordan on his first visit: “I look at him stupidly. I have a good stupid look which I have practised”. 43. (Fears him as he is a doctor. Past experiences makes her put her guard up against him.)

McKenzie calls her “Our Lady of the silences”. 433 (Enigmatic Grace.)

Atwood places a fragment of a poem from Longfellow on women and their fate:

. . . for it is the fate of a woman
Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is
Speechless,
Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence . . .”
(This fragment of poetry is at the head of the Chapter that has McKenzie say that Grace is “Our Lady of the Silences”.

G. Commenting on the Governor’s wife’s scrapbook on her and withholding her reactions and role-playing the penitent
“But I’ve learned to keep my face still, I made my eyes wide and flat, like an owl’s in torchlight, and I said I had repented in bitter tears and was now a changed person . . .” 29 She is aware of the penitential behaviour expected in “The Penitentiary”. See the matron 37. “They” want her to “confess”. 39

As a servant“I have now been a servant for three years, and could act the part well enough by this time”. 261

Grace on if Kinnear discovered discord between Grace and Nancy: “There is nothing such a gentleman would wish to get rid of sooner than a discontented servant – you are paid to smile, and it does well to remember it.” 297

Nonetheless sexual tension seems to have been in the air at Richmond Hill when Kinnear “put his hand over mine on the handle” of a bucket of water. 297

Maintains her “dignity” 40.

MacKenzie suggests to Simon that Grace may have derived some of her story and “corroborative details” from reading the newspapers after the trial: “Criminals will read about themselves endlessly, if given the chance. They are as vain in that way as authors. “ 434

MacKenzie does not believe Grace: “those four people kept popping in and out of one another’s beds” (Page number?)

The Press
Grace is “a celebrated murderess” (Stories in the press and public views of Grace, see 25. A list of items on her notoriety.

“Red hair of an ogre” G “ A wild beast”.

Grace isolated and alone
"I sing a song, just to hear a voice and keep myself company”. 37
She was often kept in solitary confinement for minor infractions or for “running mad”. 37-8

Grace was also moving towards a position of isolation by going to Kinnear’s. The journey to Kinnear’s exemplifies this. Chapter 23 The title of this section of the novel, “Snake fence”. The title hints at the danger that Grace is entering into. Grace’s journey to Kinnear’s is auspicious. (See the incident in Montgomery’s Tavern in which Grace is accosted by a travelling companion. Jeremiah intercedes. 239

Grace knows no one in the village is reluctant to venture there.
“. . .it struck me at once how very solitary I was, as I had no friends here except Nancy, if she could be called a friend . . .I did not know where my family was, which was the same as having none”. 301-2

Grace to Jamie Walsh: “I felt I would cry again, and said simply, I have no friends here.” 303

On McDermott wanting her to accompany him to the scaffold:
”The road to death is a lonely highway, and longer than it appears, even when it leads straight down from the scaffold, by way of a rope; and it’s a dark road, with never any moon shining on it, to light your way.”
On being pressed by Jordan on how she knows so much about this she says, “I have not been there, I say, except in dreams”. (Does this passage hint at the split personality within Grace?)

Grace as victim/vulnerable
“Mary said I might be very young, and as ignorant as an egg, but I was bright as a new penny, and the difference between stupid and ignorant was that ignorant could learn”. 172 (This can be tied to Grace’s thoughts on the last pages of the novel about being “naïve” and being a “victim”.)

Remember that Grace was only 16 at the time of her trial!
Jeremiah passes on the talk that he has heard about Kinnear and servant girls. “They say in the neighbourhood that he has a hankering after the servant girls, especially those close to home”. (Power and male relationships between the boss-servant class.) 307-8 He adds to Grace’s discomfort:
“Once a man gets a habit it is hard to break, he said. It’s like a dog gone bad – once a sheep is killed, the dog will get a taste for it, and must kill another”. 308 (Irony on killing and Jeremiah knows Kinnear’s character.)
Jeremiah tries to get Grace to “come away” with him because “You would be a lot safer with me than you are here, he said.” 310

Jeremiah “And I tell you truly that you are surrounded by dangers here”. 312

At her trial Grace faints at the mention of death and nearly dies herself when she falls on a spike that “went into my breast, right next to my heart”. (A piece of melodrama at the trial. But Simon does not know as he is not present to hear this part of Grace’s story. Chapter 43.)

Jeremiah and mesmerism and his bid to “save” Grace
(He tries to enlist Grace as his assistant for mesmerism in the USA. “I would teach you how, and instruct you in what to say, and put you into trances. I know by your hand that you have a talent for it; and with your hair down you would have the right look”. 311 (Fascinating! Grace would be good at trances! All this is ironic given the chapter on Pandora’s Box (48). As they worked together on that does this hint at Grace’s performance in that chapter as being fraudulent?)
But “marriage” is not on offer! Jeremiah: “Marriage never did any good, as far as I can see” 312

Grace was naïve (but she begins very young)
Grace is slow to pick up the servant Sally’s advice before taking up Nancy’s offer of a position at Kinnear’s:
“When I asked Sally’s opinon, she said she didn’t know if it was a suitable position for a young girl like me . . .she felt she’d done her duty by me in saing as much as she had, because I had no mother to advise me. And I didn’t have the least idea of what she was talking about”. 234 (When Grace briefly works at Mr Watson’s)

She does not realise how Nancy got snuff and ink stains on her dress. “she most likely slipped and fallen down”. 262

On being told by McDermott that Nancy and Kinnear “lived in secret as man and wife, though they were no more married than he was . . . and that all the neighbourhood knew of it”, Grace realises her naivety or at least that could be want she wants us to believe: “I was much surprised , and said so; . . . “I was not so knowing as I thought myself, and could scarcely see the nose before my face”. 295-6

She supported her younger siblings (for a time)
Her money supported her family at thirteen. 147. Still her father wants all her wage. She and the other sibling were beaten by their drunken father. 149. The father, “shouting that I was a slut and a whore . . . I feared that he might someday break my spine, and make a cripple out of me”. 149

On leaving Mrs Burt’s “The little ones cried as I went away, carrying my small bundle including my mother’s shawl, . . .” 150 (Grace goes to Mrs Alderman Parkinson’s) 150

Grace’s squeamishness on cruelty to animals“I was so squeamish and tender-hearted”. (On getting Jamie Walsh to kill a chicken for her. 289

“Some people have churns that are worked by a dog, which is penned up in a cage and made to run on a treadmill with a hot coal under its tail; but I would consider this to be cruel.” 266

And, on being asked to kill a chicken for dinner:
”I said, Oh no, I could not do that, I’ve never done it before and don’t know how; as I had an aversion to shedding the blood of any living thing, although I could pluck a bird well enough once killed; and she (Nancy) said not to be a silly goose, its was easy enough, just take the axe and knock it on the head, and then give it a strong whack right through the neck”.
(There is obvious irony here with Nancy explaining how the chicken could be killed. The passage also establishes Grace’s squeamish credentials on spilling blood and this may be posturing for Jordan. Yet the irony is rich when Grace says, “I could pluck a bird well enough once killed”. She took and wore some of Nancy’s clothes after the latter had been killed.)

Veils and looking (hypocrisy) 268-9
Grace to Simon: “Sir, at any polite gathering of society ladies and gentlemen . . .there is a good deal that can be seen slantwise, especially by the ladies, who do not wish to be caught staring. They can also see through veils, and window curtains, and over the tops of fans . . .But those of us who do not have to be bothered with all the veils and fans manage to see a good deal more”>

The symbolism of the book's ending for Grace

“The Tree of Knowledge” that Simon alludes to with the apple is returned to by Grace at the end of the novel when she makes a new synthesis of her life.

As Mary Whitney in the Asylum
Grace’s sub personality came through and Moodie’s observations.
“Inside the peach there is a stone” (Hint at the double soul) Grace79

This was the name she gave “at the tavern in Lewiston” when making her escape from Kinnears. 117

“She (Nancy) said there was something about me that made her uneasy, and she wondered whether I was quite right, as she’d several times heard me talking out loud to myself” 324 (Kinnear laughs this off saying that he often talked to himself. Still, this shows a division in Grace’s selfhood.)

Male characters’ views of Grace

First impressions from a pamphlet produced by Rev. Verringer found in a drawer by Dr Jordan:

She looks five years older than 16.
She looks like the “heroine of a sentimental novel” 67

When Jordan first views Grace through “a small window” he sees:

“An image almost mediaeval in its plain lines, its angular clarity: a nun in a cloister, a maiden in a towered dungeon, awaiting the next day’s burning at the stake, or else the last-minute champion come to rescue her. The cornered woman . . .” 68 “ . . . I must resist melodrama . . .”

Jordan’s view of Grace as “a female animal”

“Simon can smell her (Grace) as well as look at her . . .her scent is a distracting undercurrent . . .He is in the presence of a female animal; something fox-like and alert. He senses an answering alertness along his own skin, a sensation as of bristles lifting. Sometimes he feels as if he’s walking on quicksand” 103. (He becomes intoxicated by her).

Jordan wonders how Grace is to “fill in the rest of the time” after after her conviction. During a moment in which Grace threads a needle, a gesture that has a sexual connotation as she responds to Jordan’s question: “Do you feel you have been treated unjustly?”

‘I don’t know what you mean, Sir.’ She was threading the needle now; she wet the end of the thread in her mouth, to make it easier, and this gesture seemed to him all at once both completely natural and unbearably intimate. He felt as if he was watching her undress, through a chink in the wall; as if she was washing herself with her tongue, like a cat.” 105 (In a sense this also recalls Jordan’s recurring dreams about listening in and spying on servant girls when a boy. The passage also shows his lust for Grace”)

Dr Bannerling thinks she is “a sham” . . .”She is an accomplished actress and a most practiced liar”. He also thinks that Mrs Moodie has been taken in with a “piece of theatrical twaddle served up to her” by Grace. (On Moodie’s report of seeing Grace screeching and having “fits”, “hallucinations”, “caperings” (dancing) etc. 81

On other male colleagues who are also taken in by Grace: “this latter being an outstanding example of the old rule of thumb, that when a handsome woman walks through a door, good judgement flies out through the window”. 81 (Grace is obviously a stunning looking woman)

Dr. Bannerling sees her as “as siren” and that Jordan would do well to “stop your ears with wax”, as Ulysses made his sailors do, to escape the Sirens”. 82 (This may also be an indirect comment on Grace as a female Ulysses, who “crosses the ocean three times” and ends up at Ithaca, New York. Ithaca means “home”, “nostalgia”, “the journey home”; it was also the birthplace of Ulysses/Odysseus who was away for ten years on voyages from his home.)

Dr. Jordan thinks that “Verringer is in love with Grace Marks! Hence his indignation, his fervour, his assiduousness . . .Does he wish to winkle her out of jail, vindicated as a spotless innocent, and then marry her himself? She is still a good-looking woman, and would be abjectly grateful, abject gratitude in a wife being, no doubt, a prime commodity on Verringer’s spiritual exchange”. (Jordan maybe somewhat cynical here).

Kinnear on Grace’s potential to be “a lady”
( This is somewhat like GB Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (“My Fair Lady”):

“. . . I was certainly a handsome girl, as I had a naturally refined air and a very pure Grecian profile, and that if he put me in the right clothes and told me to hold my head high and keep my mouth shut, he could pass me off for a lady any day.” 324


Grace is associated with water
Simon through the third person narrator: If she has anything to hide, she may want to stay in the water, in the dark in her element. 374(Water has long been associated with consciousness. Grace also crosses water several times in her narrative.)

“I remembered the night we’d peeled the apples, and how she’d said I would cross the water three times, and then get married to a man whose name began with J. All of that seemed now like a childish game, and I no longer had any belief in it.” 416(Grace remembers an earlier conversation at Mrs Alderman Parkinson’s with Mary Whitney. Much of this comes true although at this point in the novel Grace cannot see that it will.)

Grace compares Simon with Dupont
At the end of Chapter 34 Grace finds herself comparing the two men: “And although I have an esteem for Dr. Jordan and he has been kind to me, I thought he looked a poor fish beside Jeremiah, like a man at a fair who’s had his pocket picked but does not yet know it’. 356 (Dupont managed to keep his friendship with Grace secret in this chapter.)

Grace's sexuality and reputation
The keepers trying to take down Grace from the position of “maiden”: “we heard about that, putting on your stays and stockings you was when you was nabbed”. 72

Narratives and storytelling (A crucial area linked with Grace)

On being told by Simon that girls had their own magazine and produced “literary offerings”. Grace wonders if this would not scare away men from “wanting” wives like that, “writing things down for everyone to see, and made-up things at that, and I would never be so brazen”. 78 (Yet it is Grace’s narrative that intrigues Simon and makes her sexually interesting to him! She is as the lawyer Mckenzie says, a “Scheherezade”.

“Grace clutches her two hand to the side of her head” during her narrative on Nancy’s death, ‘That is what they wanted me to say. Mr MacKenzie told me IK had to say it, to save my own life’. In truth Grace really is a Sherezade as she also had to tell her “story” during her trial to save her life! 368

As Simon writes Grace feels as if “he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me – drawing on my skin . . .” 77 (It is as if she, herself, is the quilt and forming his narrative).

After she says that she has been made an example of with the “death sentence Simon ponders “what does an example do afterwards Her story is over. The main story, that is: the thing that has defined her. How is she supposed to fill in the rest of the time?” 105

At its core Grace’s narrative is a “forest of amnesia”.

On storytelling:
. . . today I must go on with my story. Or the story must go on with me, carrying me inside it, along the track it must travel, straight to the end, weeping like a train and deaf and single-eyed and locked tight shut; although I hurl myself against the walls of it and scream and cry, and beg to God himself to let me out.” ( In a strong sense, Grace is a prisoner of her narrative! It is this that keeps her locked up.)

On veracity (truthfulness) and narratives
Dr Jordan does not get everything from Grace as she decides what to include and what to leave out of her narratives. Some points on urinating and pictures that should be withheld from newspapers, are shared with the reader on page 251 but are not shared with Simon Jordan:
“But I do not say this to Dr. Jordan. And so forth, I say firmly, because And so forth is all he is entitled to. Just because he pesters me to know everything is no reason for me to tell him.” Grace, 252

Grace plays with her narrative in Chapter 43 when she imagines what she may tell Simon. She knows that one day he will not return to listen to her: “I have become quite used to him somehow, and fear that when he goes away, as he is bound to do sooner or later, there will a sad emptiness in my heart.” “I could say this: 410 (It could be argued that she is manipulative but equally her needs as a human being are important, here.)

Remember that Simon is NOT PRESENT during this chapter and Grace is speaking her story to herself and unconsciously to the readers. (Does this not contribute to the theory that she is mad?)

He knows that she is being selective and withholds information:
“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” 374

She is imaginative too and very capable of inventing description, narrative, etc. The beginning of chapter 27 is a good example of this:

Today when I woke up there was a beautiful pink sunrise, with the mist lying over the fields like a white soft could of muslin, and the sun shining through the layers of it all blurred and rosy like a peach gently on a fire.

In fact I have no idea what kind of a sunrise there was. In prison they make the windows high up, so you cannot climb out of them I suppose, but also so you cannot see out of the either, or at least not onto the outside world”. 275 (To be fair here she does admit to inventing this description and gives reasons why. Yet she has the perceptive intelligence and capacity to invent.)

At the end of the Chapter entitled, “Fox and Gees” Grace gets pleasure from delivering an entertaining narrative for Simon, who in turn, has been feverishly making notes:

“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”. 328 (Grace plays to part of Sheherezade to a tee here.)

There seems to be an element of selectivity in Grace’s narrative and this is in part because of the fragments that she can remember:

On the story that the Lawyer, McKenzie tried to get her to tell on what MacDermott said she did.

“What shall I tell Dr. Jordan about this day?” On the day of the trial she felt like a “stuffed” “doll”, . . . “my true voice could not get out.” 342

Note how she toys with her narrative as she struggles with her memory:

“Did I say, I saw you outside at night, in your nightgown, the moonlight?
(A number of possibilities are given beginning with “Did I say . . .”)
She concludes with “It might have happened.” 343 this added to Grace’s confusion about what really happened.

On men from the period during the Trial: veracity and belief
‘They told me I must be lying; they wanted to know more. Except for Mr. Kenneth MacKenzie the lawyer. But I am sure that even he did not believe me’.
‘I will believe you,’ says Simon. It is, he realizes, a fairly large undertaking.’ 357

Another interesting example is this:
“Because he (Dr. Jordan) was so thoughtful as to bring me a radish, I set to work willingly to tell my story, and to make it as interesting as I can, rich in incident, as a sort of return gift to him: for I have always believed that one good turn deserves another.” 286

On her narrative:
. . . today I must go on with my story. Or the story must go on with me, carrying me inside it, along the track it must travel, straight to the end, weeping like a train and deaf and single-eyed and locked tight shut; although I hurl myself against the walls of it and scream and cry, and beg to God himself to let me out.
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion . . . It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else”. 346 ( in a strong sense, Grace is a prisoner of her narrative!)

MEN AND NARRATIVES (Unreliable)
The lawyer and the confession/newspapermen
“That is not my confession, I say, it was only what the lawyer told me to say, and things made up by the men from the newspapers”. 116
Grace noticed that the newsmen were young and “wet behind the ears” and “barely old enough to shave”. “They were all like that, wet behind the ears, and would not know the truth if they fell over it”. They also put years on her age. 116. “They will make up any old thing to suit themselves”. 117 Grace points out the newsmen’s inaccuracies in spelling names, etc. 116

(Good copy and a plausible confession mattered more than the truth)

MacKenzie had told Grace to tell “what must have happened, according to plausibility, rather than what I myself could actually recall” . . .”I was to leave out the parts I could not remember, and especially to leave out the fact that I could not remember them.” 415

Ironically, MacKenzie wanted Grace to pretend that she was “very ignorant” and “little better than a half-wit, and very soft and pliable, easily imposed upon.” 419 (He coached her to tell lies about her experiences.

Destiny
She is “the destined maid” from the extract of Coventry Patmore’s “Angel in the House” 1854, page 382

Grace and the theme of being a Lady‘I have no reason not to be frank with you, Sir, she said. ‘A lady might conceal things, as she has her reputation to lose, but I am well beyond that.’
‘What do you mean, Grace? He said. (Jordan)
‘I was never a lady, Sir and I’ve already lost whatever reputation I ever
had”. 104
For most of the novel she is a servant both in an outside prison. But she becomes a lady in the final chapters!

(Remember that this is something that Nancy had aspired to. The theme is associated with the rigid classed based society in Canada’s Toronto. Notice how Grace becomes “a lady” when she moves across the water “for the third time” when she moves to Ithaca, New York. Society in the USA was much less stratified and class orientated. It was more democratic. Her creativity is underscored by the suggestion that she is going to have a baby.)

Aunt Pauline remained lower middle class with her shop but still felt that she had “married beneath her”. 120 “As keeping a shop was not how a lady should live”. 120

On Nancy (and her desire to be a lady)“She asked me to brush out her hair for her, just like a lady’s maid, which I did with pleasure”.

Kinnear on Grace’s potential to be “a lady”
( This is somewhat like GB Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (“My Fair Lady”):

“. . . I was certainly a handsome girl, as I had a naturally refined air and a very pure Grecian profile, and that if he put me in the right clothes and told me to hold my head high and keep my mouth shut, he could pass me off for a lady any day.” 324

Grace and quilts
“But I do not say this to Dr. Jordan. And so forth, I say firmly, because And so forth is all he is entitled to. Just because he pesters me to know everything is no reason for me to tell him.” Grace, 252

Symbolic significance in Grace’s words:“A log cabin quilt is a thing every young woman should have before marriage, as it means home; and there is a red square at the centre, which means the hearth fire. Mary Whitney told me that. I don’t say this, as I don’t think it will interest him, being too common” 112 (Interesting withholding of symbolic information from Simon by Grace.)

She adds that she the quilt that she would make for herself would be “Tree of Paradise”. 112-3 (Grace repeats most of the information here to Simon that she eventually carries out in the novel’s final pages, including the quilt’s specific design).

Simon calls the quilt’s name into question, “Trees of Paradise, or Tree?” Grace says “Tree” because of the title of the quilt regardless of the number of trees. “Because that is the name of the pattern”, Sir, I say”. (Much of this conversation is brought on by Simon’s introduction of the potato and its link with what is underground.

Grace has an excellent knowledge of the Bible. See her points on “Jacob’s Ladder”, etc. 114

Grace is clever because she reflects and thinks things through.
She works out that the “quilt pattern called Lady of the Lake” was not named after Sir Walter Scott’s poem but after a boat that was in turn named after the poem. This is “because it was a pinwheel design, which must have stood for the paddle going around. And I thought that things did make sense, and have a design to them, if you only pondered them long enough. An so perhaps it might be with recent events, which at the moment seemed to me entirely senseless; and finding the reason for the quilt pattern was a lesson to me, to have faith.” 396 (The poem’s content about kidnapped bride also relates to Grace’s predicament while on the run with MacDermott; something of which Grace is fully conscious. See 396)

Dreams
(See in the notes on “Split Consiousness” how Grace’s divided self is linked with dreams.

Men as teachers (though Grace is consciously aware of such role-playing and humours Simon) Simon asks her about her new quilt and Grace (in the first person) answers: “Yes is its, Sir, it is a Pandora’s Box for Miss Lydia. This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing”. 168

Dreams of her mother in “her winding sheet” but the dream takes a strange turn, “I knew that this was not my mother at all, but some other woman, and she was not dead inside the sheet at all, but still alive” 193 (Significance? Maybe this is a premonition about Mary as she is sleeping near Grace.)

Reverie (daydream)
As the tension rises at Kinnear’s Grace dreams about water “rising slowly up like the sea; and I fell into a reverie, and was remembering back to the time I crossed the great ocean, and how at that time of day the sea and the sky were the same indigo, so you could not tell where one left off and the other began. And into my memory there floated an iceberg, as white as white could be; and despite the warmth of the evening I felt a chill”. 269
(Here the difficult crossing by ship is recalled and the icebergs the death of Grace’s mother, guilt, etc. This could also be a sign of Grace’s amnesia and the unconscious. The “icebergs and what is submerged represent her observable and hidden memories. Remember that icebergs only show one fifth of their size above surface!) Grace (and Atwood) use word and image associations here.)

She is aware of Simon’s interest in her dreams and is willing to make up dreams for him. See midway down 281. Yet she thinks “like most gentlemen he often wants a thing to mean more than it does”. 282

Grace dreaming before Jamie Walsh wakes her.“I was dreaming what a bear had come out of the forest, and was looking at me”. (The dream reveals how she felt hunted) 303 When Kinnear asks her about the young man she was with she feels as if she was “spied upon” 305 (Sexual tension: Kinnear spied on her with his telescope.)

She is a somnambulist. (A sleepwalker)

“He is using a kind voice, kind on the surface but with other hidden desires beneath it” 45

She has lost part of her memory. 46

See “Fox and Geese” pages 325-7 when Grace slips into unconsciousness during the night of the thunderstorm and sleepwalks. The catalyst seems to be the storm and Kinnear’s playful seduction of Nancy

Beds and sleeping
Grace shared a bed with Mary Whitney and Nancy: “Nancy and I went to bed together, as was always the case when Mr. Kinnear was away, on account of her fear of burglars”. 361 “That night Mary Whitney appeared to me in a dream. It was not the first time; she’d come before, but never to say anything” 363 (In examples traumatic events take place.) Grace is aware of McDermott’s plan to kill Nancy and asks him (out of self preservation) to delay it . 360

During her dream in Lewiston it is Mary Whitney and not Nancy who welcomes her back to the parlour in Richmond Hill “for I had been on a journey, I was sure of it, and had been absent a long time.” 399

Grace's plit personality
Verringer argues this on pages 91-2
“Some lesion of the nervous system, and that the Devil himself is simply a malformation of the cerebrum”.

“Alias Grace” suggests the focus on one personality within two entities.

Jeremiah said to Grace, “You are one of us”. (She thought his comment strange) 179 (It was probably because of her comments on numbers and her view that “There are sharp rocks ahead”. 179

After Mary’s death Grace, who is alone with her says, “Let me in”. Grace thinks she must have heard wrongly and that Mary rather said, “Let me out” . . . “ I was hoping Mary’s should would fly out of the window now, and not saty inside, whisperings into my ear, but I wondered whether I was too late”. (Hints here of Mary’s soul unable to escape because of the closed window and taking up residence in Grace’s body. As Grace is superstitious this may involve some auto suggestion on Grace’s part. In any event, Grace was traumatised by Mary’s death. She was only 14-15) 207

Grace’s amnesia brought on by the discovery of Mary’s death and the trauma that followed: “at that moment I fell to the floor in a dead faint”. 208

“I kept asking where Grace had gone. And when they told me that I myself was Grace, I would not believe them, but cried, and tried to run out of the house, because I said that Grace was lost, and had gone into the lake, and I needed to search for her.” 208 (After waking from a deep sleep Grace comes to herself again.) 208 “But I had no memory of anything I said or did during the time I was awake”. (Grace’s amnesia begins). 209

“She (Nancy) said there was something about me that made her uneasy, and she wondered whether I was quite right, as she’d several times heard me talking out loud to myself” 324 (Kinnear laughs this off saying that he often talked to himself. Still, this shows a division in Grace’s selfhood.)

On McDermott wanting her to accompany him to the scaffold:”The road to death is a lonely highway, and longer than it appears, even when it leads straight down from the scaffold, by way of a rope; and it’s a dark road, with never any moon shining on it, to light your way.”
On being pressed by Jordan on how she knows so much about this she says, “I have not been there, I say, except in dreams”. (Does this passage hint at the split personality within Grace?)

During the night of the thunder storm as Kinnear seduces Nancy, Grace loses her consciousness when she goes to bed. Even the description of the house splitting in two suggests a divided self:

“The rain was pouring down like ten thousand and the house working in the wind like grinding teeth; and I was sure that the every next minute we would split in two like a ship at sea, and sink down into the earth. And then, right next to my ear, I heard a voice whispering: It cannot be. I must have been frightened into a fit, because after that I lost consciousness altogether.” 325 (This then leads into a dream. Dreams and consciousness are strongly connected. In this dream Grace sleepwalks in another consciousness (as Mary Whitney). See final paragraph of 325. The dream is sexually charged: “ I felt a drowsy languor stealing over me, and urging me to yield, and surrender myself; as to do so would be far easier than resist”. (Note here that there is also not just an association of words but an association of ideas. Before going to bed Grace was aware that Kinnear was seducing Nancy and this sexual play is transposed into Grace’s consciousness.) Grace goes on to dream of “Death” as a horse rider. 326.

Grace is unsure whether she is asleep or conscious at one point in “Hearts and Glizzards” “I whisper, Talk to me . . .I think I sleep” 344-5 and, “Here I com, I am coming now. You never obey me, you never do what I say, you dirty girl. Now you will have to be punished”. ( Split consciousness, the voice is probably Mary Whitney, who has been subsumed into Grace and is only present during sleeping hours.)

Grace dreams that Mary Whitney comes to her during her final night with Nancy.
“In this dream, I dreampt I was walking in a place I had never been before, with high walls all around mad of stone, grey . . .” 364
Note how the white peonies of her “dream” during the night of Nancy’s murder “were still coming up from the stones” and represent buried consciousness. Innocence even, Grace’s and perhaps, Nancy’s. The “ dark red flowers” of Grace’s dream represent Nancy’s blood” as she sees and acts as Mary Whitney but remembers as Grace:
“Then up ahead I saw Nancy, on her knees, with her hair fallen over and the blood running down into her eyes.” (Grace’s dream on the night of Nancy’s death 364-5) (The kerchief around Nancy’s neck was Grace’s and as Mary Whitney she and MacDermott pulled on each end to strangle the dying woman. But this is left out of this dream as Nancy “came apart” into patches of colour, she scattered, a drift of red and white cloth petals across the stones”. 365

‘That is why they put me away’. . .
‘They said I was awake. But I do not wish to say any more about it’. 365

On the morning of Nancy’s killing:“I felt light-headed, and detached from myself, as if I was not really present, but only there in body”. 366

And,

“Everything was the same but not the same, and when I went to wash my face and do my hair, my own face in the mirror over the kitchen sinkwas not like my face at all. It looked rounder and whiter, with two great startled eyes, and I didn’t wish to look at it.” 366-7

And on making Nancy’s final breakfast:

‘I went to the garden to gather chives . . .I reached out my hand for the chives, and it was as if my hand was not mine at all, but only a husk or skin, with inside it another hand growing.” 368

When she “becomes” Mary Whitney Grace has no inhibitions. She is sexually provocative. There is nothing of the “prude” in her when her personality splits into the sexually experienced, Mary Whitney.

Sexual promises as Mary Whitney“Then he sat down on the side of the bed, and said now it was time for me to keep my promise; and I said what promise, and he said I knew very well, for I had promised him myself in exchange for the killing of Nancy.” 384

Split personality while escaping from Richmond Hill
MacDermott is driven beyond endurance by Grace/Mary’s sexual suggestions:

“Then he was very angry; for he claimed I had asked him to stop the wagon, so I could get down and relieve myself by the roadside; and having done so, that I had spread out my own shawl, not two minutes before, and had invited him to join me on it like the hot bitch I was, at the same time saying I would now fulfil my promise.”

I knew I had done no such thing, having been sound asleep, and I said so.” 391 (It seems is if Grace is changing into her other personality (Mary Whitney) as she dozes beside MacDermott in the wagon on the journey to Toronto.)

On the run on the paddle steamer Grace chooses to be known as “Mary Whitney” 395

When telling of the events of the Inquest she says to the imagined Simon (for he is not present) “For as you know, Sir, I could not rightly remember the events of that terrible day, and did not feel I had been present at them at all, and had lain unconscious for several parts of it, but I was well aware that if I said this I would be laughed to scorn . . .” 413

At the trial Jamie Walsh said “I was standing by the pump with my arms folded, wearing white cotton stockings; and when asked where Nancy was, I laughed in a teasing manner, and said he was always wanting to know things; but that Nany had gone to Wrights’, where there was someone ill, with a man who’d come to fetch her.

I remember none of this”. 419 (Grace perhaps as Mary Whitney after the murders)

Grace distrusts doctors
The abortionist doctor 206
Dr. Bannerling
Dr. Reid visits Nancy and Grace, with her previous knowledge of Mary Whitney’s experience with a doctor, associates him with death:
“as with crows, when you see two or three of them gathered together you know there is a death in the offing, and they are discussing it.” 315 (Nancy is pregnant, nonetheless, Grace sets the tone here of death and seems to foreground it.)

She distrusts Simon, at first.

On freedom and the mind
“Rock of Ages . . .”

“I like this song, as it make me think of rocks, and water, and the seashore, which are outside; and thinking of a thing is next best to being there. “ 227 (This could be linked to the idea of Grace being a female Ulysses.)

Grace’s knowledge of the Bible
“I knew my Bible backwards and forwards – which was not far from the truth” (Grace on her knowledge of the apochrypal “Susannah and the Elders”.

The story is highly ironic given the fact that a young lady has been “falsely accused of sinning with a young man, because she refused to commit the every same sin with them; and she would have been executed by being stoned to death” 259 (Nancy sees Grace as a sexual rival for Kinnear during Kinnear’s telling of this story)

Is she sacrificial?
Her nightdress is “coarse-woven and of a yellowed colour; I should not say iet was mine, because we own nothing here and share all in common, like the early Christians . . .” 275
(There is something suggestively sacrificial about her because she is locked up for so long (a) because she is a young woman (b) she is Irish and (c) she never admitted guilt.)

The sermon in the church appears to be ironic “The sermon was on the subject of Divine Grace, and how we could be saved by it alone, and not through any efforts on our own part, or any good works we might do.” 293
(Is Grace not in charge of her own destiny? Was she fated to suffer as she did? The title of the sermon also draws attention to the oxymoronic nature of Grace’s name: “Grace Marks”. The sermon is also about the need to “guard against complacency” (Something that could be said of Grace in these chapters. )294

She is very knowledgeable about plants and knows the Latin terminology. This also hints at her self - education
She likes radishes because “I relish the sharpness of it, which is like the peppery smell of a nasturtium” 286

Grace is the prisoner of her notoriety
What keeps Grace in prison for so long is her notoriety that was stoked by the ballad, news stories and politicians, Susana Moodie’s dramatic accounts, etc. The climate in ultra conservative led to a vindictive attitude towards those convicted of murderer, especially those who were Irish and who had been convicted of killing their employers. The uprising and the fears that it invoked was the main contextual factor.

The newspaper reporters forgot Kinnear and concentrated on Grace, the “murderess”: “because it is more important to be a murderess than the one murdered, you are more stared at then.” 343-344.

©

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

None of the quotes are even on the same page. It would have been nice to use some of these quotes for my essay but I cant because the quotes are no where to be found

Anonymous said...

perhaps because you have a different edition...

Anonymous said...

perhaps because you have a different edition...

Anonymous said...

These quotes are mind-blowing. Despite the numerous notes I've taken while reading this book, you've made so many not-so-obvious yet amazing connections between the characters and their actions. How much time did you spend accumulating and finding these links? Thank you for helping make this book so much more profound... Now I will get back to reading this book a second time.

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I teach Film, Media and English Lit.