Post 1: An introduction and key thoughts

Welcome! This blog is about one of Margaret Atwood's much less famous novels, Alias Grace. The book is set in mid-1800's Canada, where the Irish immigrant Grace Marks currently lives. Grace has been convicted of a crime she claims she did not commit, and her "accomplice" James McDermott was hanged for: the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery.

Grace was deemed to be insane during the trial and has spent the last eight years in a penitentiary (she was sixteen when she was first locked up, and at the beginning of the book she's going to be turning twenty-four at her next birthday. The governor of the prison's wife uses Grace as a kind of housekeeper, and the beginning of the novel is split between the setting of the penitentiary and the governor's house, and also spends time in flashbacks. Dr. Simon Jordan spends a great deal of time with Grace, trying to unravel her mysterious mind. There's a better summary of the book here.

Now, on with the post!

First of all, Alias Grace has about the strangest format I could think of. There are parts, which are divided into chapters within. "Well, that's not too strange," you say to yourself, but no. It gets worse.

The chapters alternate between poetry, and what appear to be newspaper clippings. There's also the mixing of point's of view, which always throws me for a loop when I first start. Then, there's the fact that little to no quotation marks are used when Grace is talking. At first, I hated this, but now I have come to like it. It makes the book feel as though it is more of a conversation between the reader and Grace, except I never get to ask her a question.

The book is also all over the place. First Grace is talking about flowers very poetically, "Out of the gravel there are peonies growing. They come up through loose grey pebbles, their buds testing the air like snails' eyes, then swelling and opening," (5). This imagery is quite calming and very simple. It is immediately followed by "huge dark-red flowers all shining and glossy like satin. Then they burst and fall to the ground," (5). The contrast of the simplicity of flowers with the dark, blood-like imagery of the second part of the sentence is typical Atwood. In my experience with Atwood's writing style, it's common for her to pull you one way, but then shake you and go another.

So far, one of the major themes in the book is the treatment of woman, which is not a surprise given that it was written by Margaret Atwood. The very first parts of the book are focused solely on how horrible the conditions are for Grace. She talks about how terrible the food is, and how horrific the conditions are, and the fact that many of the other women in the penitentiary aren't even insane. She talks about the women who are alcoholics, and the women who are there to escape their husbands, and the women who just need a place to be in the winter.

Perhaps the most distressing thing about what Grace says about the prison/asylum is that everything she says sounds remarkably similar to something one would say about a mental institution or prison today. It took a while for it to really sink in for me, but our systems today are similar, in many ways, to the systems of the mid-1800s. Is that not disturbing? Since clearly, it didn't work then, shouldn't we know to change it not? This is something I am going to watch carefully as I read on, and I'd be interested to know what others think of this subject.

So far, I am very pleased with this section of Alias Grace and I cannot wait to read more!