Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood: A Full Summary and Guide
What Alias Grace is about
Margaret Atwood published Alias Grace in 1996 with McClelland & Stewart. It won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel takes a real criminal case and turns it into a long, patient examination of memory, class and the stories women are allowed to tell about themselves.
The facts behind it are these. In 1843, in Canada West, Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery were murdered. Two servants of the household, Grace Marks and James McDermott, were convicted. McDermott was hanged. Marks was sentenced to life in prison.
Atwood picks the story up years later. Grace has been hired out from the penitentiary to work as a domestic servant in the home of the prison Governor. A committee of gentlemen and ladies from the Methodist church, led by the minister, wants her pardoned and released. The difficulty is that Grace cannot remember the day of the murders, and she shows symptoms of hysteria. So the minister hires a doctor, Simon Jordan, a psychiatrist, hoping he will declare her an hysteric rather than a criminal. Jordan interviews Grace on afternoons in the sewing room of the Governor's mansion.
He wants her dreams and her buried memories. She will not give them to him. When he presses, she slides away from the suggestion, so he asks her to start at the beginning instead. What follows is her life story, told in her own order, at her own speed.
The main characters
Grace Marks is the centre of the book and its narrator for long stretches. She describes a childhood in Ireland with a father often drunk and a mother often pregnant, and herself left to care for the younger children. She describes the filthy, crowded hold of the emigrant ship where her mother sickened and died. In Canada the family nearly starved because her father kept spending his wages on drink, and after her mother's death he began abusing her, at one point attempting to rape her. Jordan listens, but he is impatient. He treats her early hardship as beside the point.
Mary Whitney is the friend Grace makes once she goes into service, her roommate and her teacher. Mary shows Grace how to play the part of a servant and mocks the family's upper class airs when nobody can hear. Her advice about men is blunt: if there is a ring, there had better be a parson. Mary becomes pregnant, presumably by a son of the household, and dies after a botched abortion. Grace helped her home and into bed, then woke to find her dead. Afterwards Grace is troubled by the thought that she should have opened the window in the night to let Mary's soul out.
Simon Jordan is Atwood's invention, a fictional doctor dropped into a factual case. He arrives as a researcher into criminal behaviour and becomes personally entangled, unable to square the mild woman in front of him with the murders on her record. He is also, quietly, compromised. He grows aroused by Grace's accounts of James McDermott's advances and of Thomas Kinnear's affair with Nancy Montgomery. His landlady, abandoned by her drunken husband, pursues him. He refuses her repeatedly, gives her money in the hope she will stop, and is finally seduced once, after which he tells her he had wished it to be with someone else.
The themes
Identity runs through everything. Grace is a servant, a convict, a possible lunatic and a public curiosity, and each role is assigned to her by somebody else. The title points at the gap between a person and the name attached to her.
Justice here is a matter of who gets believed. Grace's account is shaped by what her listener wants, and Jordan's professional interest keeps sliding into something less respectable. Madness is the loophole the committee hopes to use, a diagnosis that would save her where innocence cannot.
Class is constant and physical. The hold of the ship, the sewing room, the back stairs, the pregnancy a maid cannot survive while the son of the house carries on untouched.
The hypnosis scene and the ending
Stop here if you want the ending kept.
A spiritualist on the committee pushes for a Dr DuPont, a "Neuro-Hypnotist", to put Grace in a trance and reach her buried memory. Jordan can no longer talk them out of it. Grace recognises DuPont as Jeremiah, a friend from an earlier post, in disguise. Under the trance, a voice that appears to be Mary Whitney's takes over. It says Mary haunted Grace because her soul was never freed, that she possessed Grace's body on the day of the murders and drove McDermott to kill Montgomery and Kinnear, and that Grace remembers nothing because she never knew.
Jordan concedes there are scientific reports of a double personality. He does not write the report. He leaves town claiming his mother is ill, promises to send it, and instead joins the Union Army. Wounded in the war, he returns to his mother's house. His last word is "Grace". Grace is eventually pardoned, changes her name and starts again in the United States.
Why it still matters
Atwood came to the story through Susanna Moodie's Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush. She had already written a poem cycle, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), and a 1974 CBC television film about Marks called The Servant Girl, both drawing on Moodie's version. By the time she wrote the novel she had read more widely and changed her mind, having found that Moodie fabricated parts of her third-hand account. That shift is built into the book. Alias Grace is about an unreliable source and about how much of history is assembled from them. It suits readers who like historical fiction that withholds its answer, and anyone drawn to novels where the puzzle is a person rather than a crime.
