What happens in Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood?

Answer 1

The novel is based on the story of a true life prisoner, Grace Marks, and murders that took place in the mid nineteenth century in Richmond Hill, near Toronto. The book opens when Grace has been in prison for several years. She has been found guilty, alongside fellow servant James McDermott, for the murder of their employer Thomas Kinnear. Neither was tried for the contemporaneous killing of Kinnear's housemistress Nancy Montgomery because the pair were already sentenced to death for Kinnear's murder. While McDermitt was hung, Grace's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because of her extremely young age (sixteen) at the time of the murders.

Grace's case attracted the sympathy of many reforming groups, and in the first few pages of the novel she is introduced to Dr. Simon Jordan, a young American who has been employed by the Reverend Verringer to investigate Grace's state of mind and to produce a report giving his opinion as to her guilt or innocence of the crimes, crimes which she has always maintained she cannot remember.

The development of the novel concerns the meetings between Dr Jordan and Grace, which take place in the house of the prison Governor, where Grace spends most of her day employed as a seamstress, being escorted back and forth to the prison each morning and evening. Dr Jordan attempts to trigger Grace's memories by the psychoanalytic technique of 'association'. He brings objects such as vegetables which he hopes will remind Grace of the cellar in Kinnear's house where both bodies were found, and of buried memories in her own subconscious. However, Grace only connects these objects to her experiences as a servant and talks about peeling and cooking the vegetables she is shown.

While Grace sews she tells Dr Jordan her life story, so that the novel moves back in time, long before the murders, to her unhappy and impoverished childhood in Ireland, the appalling conditions she experienced crossing the Atlantic with her family along with many other Irish immigrants, and the death of her mother during the sea voyage. Grace is haunted by the memory of her mother being tipped into the ocean, and her guilt at having saved the best sheet and wrapped her mother's corspe in the second best one.

Once in Canada, Grace's father drinks away what few coins the family have and leaves Grace to care for her six younger brothers and sisters. After a while she is sent into service and experiences a brief period of happiness when she finds companionship with a young maid called Mary Whitney, who acts as both mother and friend towards Grace. However, Mary is impregnanted by one of the sons of her employer and dies of a botched abortion, an experience that horrifies Grace who sleeps in the same room with her and wakes to find her dead and lying in a pool of blood. While the family rushes to hush up the cause of Mary's death, Grace is left to wash Mary's body, but during the day lapses into a period of unconsciousness. This is the first of several periods of 'lost time' Grace experiences, and which return at the crucial time of the murders.

Grace leaves her current employer and, after a few further jobs, she meets Nancy Montgomery who invites her to join the Kinnear household as a maid. Grace hopes Nancy will be a pleasant workong companion like the dead Mary Whitney. However, soon after she arrives at Thomas Kinnear's house in Richmond Hill, Grace realises that Nancy is difficult to work with and fearfully jealous that Grace will attract the attention of Kinnear. The other servant in the houser, James McDermott, is sullen and rebellious. He hates Nancy and tells Grace that the housemistress sleeps in Kinnear's bed. Grace discovers this is true, and that Nancy is pregnant by her employer, a fact that troubles her deeply because it reminds her of the death of her lost friend, Mary Whitney.

Nancy tells both Grace and McDermott they are sacked and McDermott tells Grace he intends to kill both his employer and Nancy before he leaves the house. When Grace recounts the day of the murders, there are gaps in her story when the actual killings occur. She runs away to America with McDermott, giving as her reason that she was frightened he would kill her too if she did not. Grace signs into a hotel with McDdermott under the name of Mary Witney. The pair are tracked down, arrested and taken back for trial in Canada. Each of the accused blames the other, and each changes their evidence during the trial, so it is never clear what actually did happen in the Kinnear household.

As Dr Jordan listens to Grace's story he becomes increasingly affected by her. He is haunted by his desire to get at the truth and by growing sexual fantasies about Grace. He finds himself out of his depth and feels as if he is losing grip on his own sanity. He begins a sado-masochistic affair with his married landlady, who has been deserted by her abusive and alcoholic husband.

Grace is eventually subjected to a session of hypnotism by another doctor and while under hypnosis she speaks in a strange voice, telling those present that she is Mary Whitney, that she committed the murders, and that Grace knew nothing about them. Readers will be suspicious about this, however, as they are let into the secret that exists between Grace and the hypnotist - he is an old peddlar friend of hers who used to con spectators at fairs under the pretence of hypnotising his accomplice.

The plot culminates in Dr Jordan's landlady telling him her husband is about to return, and asking him to help murder the man so the two of them can be together. Simon packs his bags and quits Toronto speedily, leaving his landlady with the false excuse that his mother is ill in America. He never discovers whether Grace is insane, suffering from a personalilty disorder, genuinely amnesiac, a cunning instigator of the murders, or a frightened and unwilling witness to them.

Eventually, years later, Grace is released from prison, and begins a new life in America; she marries by arrangement a man who gave evidence against her at her trial but has since come to regret it. On the final pages, now 46, Grace reveals that she may be pregnant, though she could be suffering from a tumour such as killed her mother.

Throughout the novel Grace sews blocks for quilts, and at the end she is making her own personal one. It will contain a piece of her own prison nightgown, a piece of Mary Whitney's petticoat, and a piece of Nancy Montgomery's dress. 'So they will all be together'. The reader can never be sure if Grace is a cunning spinner of yarns, who has quilted her story together from bits and pieces or truth, half truth and lies, or genuinely suffers from loss of memory. But her life story, which occupies at least half the book, clearly shows the abuses and horrors experienced by female servants in Victorian Ontario, a story of the official history of the country