Holes Within History: A Brief Review on Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

One of the best parts of historical fiction is the freedom to choose. A writer can create a timeline with historical facts while building a fictional narrative that draws upon as many or as few truths as they wish. Using incomplete historical documentation and building a story around it seems to be the direction that Margaret Atwood went with for her novel Alias Grace.

Now that’s not to say that Atwood steered clear of historical accuracy- she didn’t have much to go on initially. Atwood has a piece at the end of one edition mentioning that there weren’t many articles or media releases that survived to modern-day, and the ones that did all seemed to tell a different account of the grisly murders her story is based on.

As she says in her afterword: “Where mere hints and outright gaps exist in the records, I have felt free to invent” (Atwood, 564).

This gave more leeway for Atwood to construct one of the narrators, Grace Marks: the young girl accused of murder during an infamous trial in 1843 Canada.

Atwood The Puppeteer

Readers of Atwood’s work may describe her as sly. This could be argued especially in Alias Grace. By “filling in the gaps” so to speak, Atwood toys with the reader and nearly always has them second-guessing who they believe Grace to be as a character.

The reader is essentially gaslighted throughout the whole novel and one could claim that that, in itself, is a good indication of Grace’s insanity. Or at least, we are definitely in the position of other characters like Dr. Jordan where she is the shell we must crack and cannot. One must ask themselves if all the second-guessing as a reader is used as a stepping stone by Atwood to understand Grace.

In either scenario, Grace Marks certainly leaves a curious mark on the people who interact with her whether it is a character in the story or a reader of the novel.

She makes us argue as to the reliability of the only sources we have of what happened. She states that:

"I have of course fictionalized historical events (as did many commentators on this case who claimed to be writing history). I have not changed any known facts, although the written accounts are so contradictory that few facts emerge as unequivocally 'known" (Atwood, 564).

Grace Marks: Amnesiac, Insane, or a Compulsive Liar?

Here are some arguments for all three.

Amnesiac:

• Are Grace’s musings the work of a forgotten memory? Is she trying to wade through the fog of her mind to pick out fragments of situations she once knew? That seems to be one of the stories that are told in the newspapers but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.
• There are a few scenes in the novel where Grace supposedly fades in and out of consciousness. An example of this is when she and James McDermott flee the scene of the crime to cross the Canadian border. Somewhere in this cloud of events, Grace and James almost sleep together but it is implied that it was Grace’s advances that lead to it. Once she becomes fully conscious she believes James to be assaulting her and asks him to get off of her. He does, but with confusion as she made the initial advances.

Insane:

• If you want anyone on your side to argue that Grace Marks is insane, your best bet would be Susanna Moodie, an English settler and writer in Canada who met Ms. Marks in person later in Grace’s life. Here’s what she had to say:

“Among these raving maniacs I recognised the singular face of Grace Marks- no longer sad and despairing, but lighted up with the fire of insanity, and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment” (Atwood, 53).

• Two words: Mary Whitney. Many times throughout the book, Atwood has the reader questioning whether the character of Mary Whitney is even real. Was Mary Whitney the mother figure Grace invented to help her experience womanhood alone?
• Grace also dealt with a lot of abuse from her family in Ireland, especially by her father. This could contribute to unhealthy coping mechanisms or mental illness later in her life. Her mother’s early death on the boat en route to Canada would have added to this trauma for Grace, and if Mary Whitney was a real person for her, Mary’s death too would contribute to Grace’s mental state.

Compulsive Liar:

• The most telling aspect one could take from Grace’s narrative in arguing she is lying is when she says at the beginning of the book “that’s what I told Doctor Jordan” (Atwood, 7). She is implying she is telling him what he wants to hear, not the real truth.
• Mary Whitney, again. We know one thing for sure and that is Grace Marks is not Mary Whitney. Yet she used her name as an alias when she was caught by law enforcement. This could have been done in haste considering the situation she was in, but it also allows us to consider that Grace isn’t past lying to anybody.
• The seance at the end of the novel leaves a lot of questions remaining that can either fit in this category C or category B above. Before the murders, the peddler Jeremiah asked Grace to come away with him as a clairvoyant saying she didn’t need to be a real clairvoyant and they would basically scam people out of their money. Was this what happened during the scene where she claimed to be the spirit of Mary Whitney? Did she take advantage of the spiritualism fad at the time to make people believe that it was the late Mary Whitney who made her commit her crimes?

Grace Marks, Photo from Independent

By The End of It All, What Do We Really Know?

To be honest, we are no more informed than we were 500 pages ago. From what seems like a novel about the life of Grace Marks, you learn more about her disturbed doctor, Simon Jordan than you do of her as a patient. In saying this, it could be considered that Jordan too, learned more about himself than Grace. This novel is a rollercoaster ride of questioning everything you know.

It is important to note that any information the reader receives about Grace is from Grace which can be extremely biased. Other characters in the novel who know Grace often having contradicting opinions of her.

As a whole, if you are interested in getting into Atwood’s works, this one would be a great start. To learn more about the actual case itself, there is a link via the Toronto Public Library about the trial of Grace Marks that you can read.

For those who have read the book, what are your conclusions? Do you have any? Maybe it would be better to ask: what are your conclusions as of today because, in my experience, they will likely and invariably change the more times you read the book.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. McClelland & Stewart, 1996.