Little Miss Sociopath

Alias Grace

by Margaret Atwood
p. 1996
 

Since being introduced to her by my favorite professor a few years back, Margaret Atwood is increasingly becoming one of my favorite authors. Alias Grace is further proof of this, a sprawling work of historical fiction that sticks with you a long time after you finish reading it.

Alias Grace is, for all intents and purposes, a work of fiction, but it is based rigidly in real events. It centers on the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his servant and lover, Nancy Montgomery, by the hands of two other servants, James McDermott and 15-year-old Grace Marks, ostensibly the protagonist of this novel, though her actual moral alignment is deliberately left ambiguous, just like the real outcome of the gruesome crime.

Atwood details the life of Grace from her humble beginnings, leading up to a series of meetings with the fictional Dr. Simon Jordan, a student of psychology who becomes Grace’s primary doctor in order to root out the truth of the crime and the girl’s true nature—victim or perpetrator. Grace relates to Jordan her entire history while she lives out her humble life as a servant to the governor of the penitentiary at which she has spent the better part of two decades. In the meantime, Jordan interacts with some of the other women in his life—his desperate, hapless landlord, a forward young admirer, his lonely mother and her choice for Simon’s prospective wife, while trying to sort out his increasingly inappropriate feelings for Grace and his opinion on her guilt.

I won’t lie; Alias Grace is a long novel, and it took me awhile to get into it, but there is something about Atwood’s writing that draws you in, lulls you into a sense of certainty about these characters that can easily be dashed in a few short words. She does a fantastic job not only of fictionalizing these very real people who lived and lusted so long ago but also of crafting a tale that is complete without ever revealing the truth—because who can know that, really, but the only survivor of the affair, Grace herself?

Indeed, we can’t ever know whether Grace was an unwitting victim wrapped up in events beyond her control, or a scheming seductress who orchestrated the whole thing, but Grace’s guilt is not really the point of this novel. Atwood’s real intentions are to get the reader to question their beliefs on whether or not Grace is capable of such a thing, and if not, why we think that way.

Atwood is a well-known feminist writer and it’s easy to see how Grace Marks could captivate her and inspire this work of realistic fiction. The events surrounding Grace’s life and incarceration are sensational, and the details of her conviction controversial. Could a young girl really be capable of such a heinous murder? Should Grace have paid more dearly for her crimes or did she deserve freedom? Atwood tells it in such a way that Grace seems simultaneously pitiable and suspicious. To date I cannot decide which way my opinion swings. On the one hand, it would be unfair to lock up someone swept into insurmountable events and young Grace was an easy target; on the other hand, Grace, in this story, comes off almost as a sociopath—emotionless, totally lacking in remorse—and if there is truth to this description, it’s easy to see why so many believed her to be every bit the celebrated murderess she was for three decades.

This is definitely a novel that prompts you to reconsider your beliefs on very relevant matters. Is it not more misogynistic to think that Grace could not possibly be guilty, simply because of her sex? Did the sweeping misconceptions about the virtue of the fairer sex, so prevalent in those times, get in the way of justice for Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery? And what is to be said of the fact that servant girl Nancy’s murder was not even tried in the wake of the conviction for Kinnear’s murder? Was it her gender or her stature that prevented justice for Nancy?

Atwood’s story is full of unreliable narratives, from Grace’s detailed but confusing firsthand account (her portion of the story lacks in punctuation, often making it difficult to discern what is being spoken or thought), to Simon Jordan’s general mistreatment of women and lust for Grace as a famed murderess, a kind of misogyny in its own right. Since we’ll never know the whole story, all we have are the bits and pieces. Atwood did her best assembling them, but even if the picture is completed, it will only tell a fraction of the story. It’s up to the reader to decide how to deconstruct the work of art from there.