LITERATURE: Alias Grace – Theme

While I may have missed the point of Michele’s suggestion, I am finding the theme of perception that draws this novel together.  It is not really a murder mystery as I had called it, for the murder is right upfront and the mystery is not one of whodunit.  We are told early on that Grace Marks conspired with James McDermott to do the deed.  What we don’t know is why. 

We’re not going to find out much from MacDermott as he has already been hanged, but Grace has been surviving in asylums and prisons and seems all the better for it.  From her tragic background of emigration from Ireland to Canada with a drunken father, eight siblings–most younger than Grace as she cares for them–and a loving mother who dies on the journey, through being forced from her home as one more mouth to feed and put into service at the young age of thirteen in the homes of the wealthy and educated.  Eventually she will end at the service of Mr. Kinnear under the instruction of Nancy Montgomery the housekeeper, and here is the enigma we call Grace Marks as she stands charged as guilty of their murders.

So what we’re left to discover among the pages is the character of Grace, and here is where I am feeling that Atwood’s point or theme is perception (my most favorite of topics).  Looking at some of what is to be considered:

"Continuous observation of her, and of her contrived antics, led me to deduce that she was not in fact insane, as she pretended, but was attempting to pull the wool over my eyes in a studied and flagrant manner.  (…) She is an accomplished actress and most practised liar."  (letter from Dr. Samuel Bannerling to Dr. Simon Jordan)  (p. 71)

Her eyes were unusually large, it was true, but they were far from insane.  Instead they were frankly assessing him.  It was as if she were contemplating the subject of some unexplained experiment; as if it were he, and not she, who was under scrutiny.  (From Dr. Simon’s first meeting with Grace Marks)  (p. sixty)

Grace does manipulate her interactions because she is clever enough to have learned through experience to give what is expected.  Even in her body language and eye contact she knows that what she will be labeled is as she is perceived, and perception can be controlled by what is offered to be seen.

No doubt Atwood has given us the hook–the murder.  Everyone loves to hear and read about murder.  In fact, in the questioning of Dr. Simon by a very young lady about Grace and the hanging of McDermott, from the scrapbook the warden’s wife keeps on the clippings of the deeds of the inmates, I am inclined to feel that the mirrors that are slowly revealing Grace are as well being turned on the other characters in this story, including the reader.  We are then intrigued into reading further into the story because quite frankly, we are more ghoulish than the practiced genteel Miss Grace Marks.