This is a book with a lot of questions but not a lot of concrete answers. I think there are some really solid reasons why that is though. First of all, the book was based on a real person and a real case and Grace Marks drops out of the limelight completely (and changes her name) once she is finally pardoned. That alone made it impossible to have any "follow-up" on her mental health status. Secondly, doctors did not have good understanding of mental illness in the 1800s. Early on in the book, Dr. Joseph Workman from the Provincial Lunatic Asylum tells Dr. Simon Jordan in a letter that he is "inclined to believe that neither religion nor intemperance will induce insanity in a truly sound mind - I think there is always a predisposing cause which renders the individual liable to the malady, when exposed to any disturbing agency, whether mental of physical." This is incredibly "forward thinking" since that is what doctors believe now, meaning that some people are predisposed to mental illness through genetics, but that doesn't always mean they will be mentally ill. If there is a incident in their environment - a one-time traumatic event, or a longer experience where someone doesn't feel "safe", that person with a predisposition can develop a mental illness.
I don't think there is a clear-cut answer of Grace being innocent or guilty. I know in the book they talked about spirits entering people if the window is not open for the spirit to escape at a death. I don't think Mary Whitney's spirit entered Grace because the window wasn't open at her death, but that is they way people thought back then. I see it more as a split personality (like Sybil). Grace certainly had several traumatic events happen in her life: leaving her homeland; her mother's death on the ship; her father's abuse; leaving home to work at the age of 12 - and leaving her younger siblings with their abusive father. The final straw to break Grace mentally was the death of her very best friend, Mary Whitney. I think at that moment, her personality split. Mary took on the difficult things that Grace couldn't process. Grace was the "innocent, sweet, loving" personality and Mary Whitney was the "cold-hearted, manipulative, seductress of men" who is capable of either committing the physical act of murder itself, or using men to commit the act on her behalf. So if Grace doesn't know what Mary is doing, does that make her guilty of murder? Most psychiatrists today would say no. But, if Grace had a split personality, what happened to Mary after she was pardoned? I would love to know what happened to Grace Marks in real life!
I really didn't know what to make of Simon Jordan! He seemed like this solid, upstanding man who was dedicating his life to understanding mental illness, while sacrificing his own chance at marriage & children sometimes. At other times, he seemed creepy and self-serving, always thinking about women in inappropriate ways and having sex with them and even thinking about using violent behavior with and/or against them. Talk about having and outer good persona and an inner bad persona! Yikes! Maybe that's why Simon and Grace developed a bond. They both had two personalities. It's interesting that he ended up brain-damaged.
This is not my favorite writing style. I really like it when authors use proper sentence structure, quotation marks and punctuation for the main character as she narrates her story, rather then a stream-of-consciousness. I found it really distracting at first, but I found myself "going with the flow" after awhile. I also had trouble with the timeline, mostly at the end. I couldn't keep track of the passing years since the end of story was told through dated letters. I did like the use of the letters though, and I really liked the snippets of past musings/records/journals regarding Grace Marks at the beginning of each chapter, especially since they came from actual documents written at the time.
I was pondering why the title of the book is "Alias Grace". Is it the Mary Whitney/Grace connection? Mary Whitney, alias Grace, committed a crime.... Or Grace's split personality, Mary Whitney, uses her own name (Mary Whitney) when she flees to the United States after the murders.... Or that Grace uses an alias after she is pardoned.... Maybe it is because Grace is never allowed to just be "Grace" because she is forced to be someone other than who she really is because of her circumstances in life.
I really like Margaret Atwood as an author. Her books are incredibly different from each other (at least the books I have read by her). I wouldn't say this is my favorite by her, but I thought is was very intriguing and well-researched.
Wendy's Rating: ****
No comments:
Post a Comment