LITERATURE: Alias Grace – Stark Simile & Metaphor

Even though the story is a murder mystery, so to speak, since we have been already made aware in the first few pages as well as it being clearly noted on the back cover, the handling of this case based on a real life event is what will make the story worth the retelling and the book worth the reading.  And Margaret Atwood possesses all the skills to make it so.  In this excerpt, Grace Marks has been meeting with Dr. Simon Jordan on a regular afternoon basis in his attempts to understand the criminal mind, and this is from Grace’s pov:

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me–drawing on my skin–not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end.  As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.  (p. 69)

The drawing on me might indicate Grace’s understanding of the interviews, as she slowly begins to trust him and speak openly–something she has never done since her incarceration fifteen years prior.  She had learned to connive and survive in prison, and behaves and speaks accordingly and well planned out to the staff and inmates.  Simon may indeed be drawing a heretofore unseen picture of Grace, and it is a soft and sensual one that she reveals to him.  While Grace is not well educated, she has learned from watching others to be a lady, and is mentally quick and questioning.  This scene however seems to open her up to sexual feelings that she has not allowed herself in many years, nor barely scratched the surface of prior to imprisonment.

But underneath that is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful.  It’s like being wakened suddenly in the middle of the night, by a hand over your face, and you sit up with your heart going fast, and no one is there.  And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but too ripe and splitting open of its own accord.

And inside the peach there’s a stone.  (p. 69)

This is likely Grace’s fear of being analyzed yet again, her fear and mistrust of others bordering on paranoia as "no one is there."  She feels herself perhaps as vulnerable as a peach, although I find it inconsistent with the hard skinned self she has presented all these years.  The time has come when she is ready to seek understanding ("but too ripe and splitting open of its own accord") but there is still either another layer to penetrate that is well protected, or she knows the reality of the inner Grace and sees it as — a stone.

Atwood’s incredible writing has always been a revelation and joy to read, and as in the style of Cormac McCarthy, does not allow the reading to be held back by quotation marks in dialogue.  But as a semicolon myself, it was a delight to count the two within a single sentence in the paragraph quoted.