Alias Grace

Atwood builds the novel on an actual unsolved question from Canadian criminal history: Grace Marks, convicted alongside fellow servant James McDermott for the 1843 murders of their employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery, always claimed partial or total amnesia about the killings, while McDermott, hanged for the crime, insisted at his execution that Grace was equally responsible. Atwood refuses to resolve what the historical record itself never resolved, and structures the whole novel, alternating between Grace's own guarded first-person account to the young alienist Dr. Simon Jordan and closer third-person narration, as a study in how much a story can be shaped by who's asking and what they need to hear.

Grace's account of her childhood, an abusive drunken father, a mother who dies during the Atlantic crossing and is buried at sea, and her close friendship with a fellow servant, Mary Whitney, who dies from a botched abortion arranged with a man who then abandons her, gives the novel its emotional ballast well before Kinnear's household enters the story. Grace falls into a feverish collapse immediately after Mary's death and by her own account remembers nothing of the following day, an early instance of the blank spots in her memory that will later recur, far more consequentially, around the murders themselves.

Simon Jordan arrives believing the new science of the mind can recover buried memory through patient, sympathetic listening, and Atwood spends much of the novel quietly dismantling his objectivity instead: he grows infatuated with Grace even as he interviews her, sleeps with his landlady in scenes intercut against his supposedly clinical sessions, and leaves Kingston with his own professional and personal judgment badly compromised. The alienist sent to read Grace's mind turns out to be at least as opaque to himself as she is to him, which is Atwood's real point about the era's new psychology, that it diagnosed women while leaving the men doing the diagnosing entirely unexamined.