Book Review: Alias Grace

A Fair Trade Book (on principle, drattit!)



Title: Alias Grace

Author: Margaret Atwood

Date: 1996

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 0-385-47571-3

Length: 465 pages

Illustrations: reprinted drawings

Quote: “[W]hen you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”

For those who’ve not already met Grace Marks, the murder suspect whose story is retold in this novel, perhaps the simplest way to introduce her is to say that she was the Jodi Arias of the 1850s. Very young and apparently quite attractive, she was the most logical suspect of a murder she would hardly have been able to commit all by herself. She told several different stories about how the murder might have been committed, apparently based on what she thought people would believe or understand rather than any actual memory she may or may not have had. Based on the logical probability that she was an accomplice in some way, she was transferred among various prisons and mental hospitals for years until it became obvious that, in any case, she wasn’t violent. She seems to have left a different impression on the staff at each institution. When finally released, she disappeared; she was still early in middle age and had seemed healthy, and in those days it was easy for a woman to change her identity by merely getting married and moving to a different town. And Grace Marks was a bit of a celebrity; some of those who hoped her story would end that way were men who could have made it happen.

Alias Grace is a story based on one of the possible explanations of the baffling facts of Grace Marks’ story. We’ll never know why the real Grace Marks bothered to use an alias when her legal name was known. Atwood, always fascinated by lies and distortions, offers one possible explanation: as the quote above (found on page 33) warns us, Grace Marks might have had multiple personality disorder.

Not many writers can invent a plausible character like the one this explanation requires Grace Marks to be, and make reading a full-length book about her fun. Nevertheless that’s what Atwood has done.

She does it by showing us, rather than telling us, all about the snobbery and sexual hypocrisy and bigotry and cruelty and filth and folly, and faith and courage and self-control and public spirit and friendliness, of nineteenth century Anglo-culture. To a considerable extent Anglo-culture had remained isolated and homogenous. Grace Marks was born in Ireland and became infamous in Ontario; the rules for good-girl conduct in those places, in the U.S., and in the U.K., were much the same.

The real Grace Marks was described as beautiful and witty, as unattractive and stupid, as mousily modest and (by Victorian standards) brazenly frank. As a good Victorian girl employed in domestic service, trying to avoid being “ruined” by premarital pregnancy in order to save up and be the lady of her own house some day, she might have felt obliged to be all of those things even without the benefit of multiple personalities. In the days when every well-off family shared their home with a staff of servants, the “maids” and “girls” got the short end of every conceivable stick. They might be dismissed without references by the men of the house if they said no to sexual invitations, by the women if they failed to say no;  unmarried mothers and their children were social outcasts, unmarried mothers who abandoned children and their “orphans” were even worse off; probably there were more sophisticated rich men who seduced (or simply raped) maids than there were maids who seduced teenaged boys, but in all cases, if sexual relationships were known to exist, the maids were blamed. ("Blame it on the maids" is a refrain in another Atwood novel.) The safest course of action for the maids was to make themselves as unattractive as possible.For this purpose any degree of dirtiness, stupidity, or poor health that the lady of the house would tolerate was useful to a maid. Childishness was good if none of the men in the house happened to be a pedophile. When Atwood’s rendition of Grace-as-character tells her own story, she’s in her mid-twenties, but she generally talks like a rather shy, slow child of twelve or thirteen. It’s not inconsistent with the facts that this might have been the real Grace Marks’ strategy; people who thought her “little more than an idiot” seem to have been men and jealous wives.

Some other disparities in the record of Grace Marks may be meaningless. Was her hair red or brown? People who have red hair at fifteen generally have brown hair at forty. If she was never visibly violent, did she at least act demented at times? She wouldn’t have been the first Irish woman who got drunk enough to act foolish on “one innocent glass of wine or beer with meals,” as served by Europeans and by many early nineteenth century English families; nor would she have been the first nineteenth century mental patient whose reactions to harsh experimental treatments included genuine temporary insanity, nor, for that matter, the first whose fear of abusive hospital employees or more deranged patients prompted the patient to act demented.

But...was she a mousy, narrow-minded, innocent, rather boring Nice Girl who wasn’t terribly troubled by memories of murders she had not planned or witnessed, whose mind was full of recipes and needlework patterns, or was she a Mean Girl who planned the murders during an adolescent mood swing and all but literally saw the victims’ eyes following her everywhere? Is it possible to be both?

Atwood and her fans enjoy ambiguities and the novel contains a further one. Are alternate personalities simply different aspects of a single personality, as rationalist psychologists prefer to believe, or are they ghosts or devils that invade the afflicted personality, as occultists have always claimed? Is it possible to draw the line, and, if so, where? If a timid patient always admired someone else’s reckless courage, even though the reckless person died by misadventure, and the timid patient then acts bold and reckless while identifying self with the reckless person, is it possible that the reckless person’s spirit has any real influence on the patient? Atwood’s Grace makes it very clear what she believes, but she’s only an ignorant housemaid. Readers are free to interpret Grace’s story either way.

Stories like the real Grace Marks’ were never commonplace, but neither were they unique. They were, as Atwood suggests toward the end of this novel, useful to those who wanted to sell the idea that owning lots of machines “liberated” people from the whole servant/employer relationship, rather than (as Betty Friedan claimed) isolating women in houses full of machines. Then as now, many “personal assistants” and their employers became each other’s closest friends...but Victorian elitism probably made it easier for housemaids to feel more like what Grace Marks’ accusers made her out to be than like what, e.g., Alice B. Toklas really was.

Margaret Atwood has been the rock star of fiction-writing-in-English for a long time now. Her books hardly need reviews; they need announcements. She needs a dollar from the sale of a Fair Trade Book about as much as any of the deceased authors of other books recently reviewed here need one. However, a rule is a rule; Atwood has charities like anybody else (and has written in aid of her charities for a long time). If you buy Alias Grace here, for $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment, we'll send $1 to Atwood or the charity of her choice. What I have is a hardcover copy of luxuriant size, such that only the smaller, cheaper paperback editions of Atwood's other books (or maybe one of her picture books) would fit comfortably into a package beside it, but that $5 per package applies to as many books as fit into the package, and if you choose to add other vintage Atwood books to the package we'll send her charity $1 per book. Charities she's been known to support have included Amnesty International and Audubon Foundation.