Alias Grace by Margret Atwood - Coursework Example

Number] Role of Gender in Margret Atwood’s “Alias Grace” Margret Atwood’s ‘Alias Grace’ is an intriguing story. It is fictional narration of a real life character Grace Marks, the ‘Celebrated Murderess’ who was accused and later convicted in the murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his house keeper Nancy Montgomery. It was a complicated case since Grace Marks was diagnosed to have amnesia because of which she had no recount of the night of the murders. The novel keeps the reader swinging back and forth between the feelings of innocence and guilt for the main character Grace Marks. Reader’s thought shifts between whether she is guilty or not, and the complexity of her character perplexes him, perhaps that’s what the writer aims for. There are different themes presented all through the book, which includes gender, class, misunderstandings, guilt and innocence. It also addresses the strange mysteries of the human personalities. More in-depth analysis reveals the complexities of every individual character which can only be understood more closely and correctly if we analyse it in a gender-biased fashion. Atwood construct the feminine and masculine genders in such a way that they entangle each other and breathe amidst the differences in power of lower and upper class of the Victorian Society. Atwood also establishes the gender’s identities based on their social positions, hence power. She crawls further in to the characters and deeply analyse the genders based on various factors like ethnicity, sexual desires, class and power. If we analyse the title character, Grace Marks, we can see how she learned, in the course of her living, the pre-conceived notions of feminine gender, as perceived by the society. Her beloved friend and colleague Mary Whitney elaborated what a woman’s aim should be; “It was a custom for young girls in this country to hire themselves out, in order to earn money for their dowries, and then they would marry, and if their husbands proposed they would soon be hiring their own servants in their turn and then they, ―would be mistress of a tidy farmhouse, and independent”(182). All through the novel people ‘marry for money’, men or women. For example in the case of Dr. Simon Jordan, her mother kept persuading him to marry for money, as she herself did it. This is also shown in the character of the Governor’s daughter, Lydia, who was apparently in love with Dr. Jordan, but later on she married Reverend Varringer, because he was more economically sound. It is taught throughout the book that in that era, if a man is eligible in manners of wealth and position, he will be accepted by a woman, it will not be a marriage based on love. Woman tends to look for a man who is well sounded in status and position. Unmarried woman were looked down in the society and they are disgraced, often mocked, critized, and treated as if their lives are incomplete, so as their purpose of life. Grace, also describes her dismay when she realizes that she will not be able to get married now that she in the prison “I would never be married now, or have any babies of my own…it is a regret” (pg 78) On the other hand, marriage is not the aim of life for men but to gain economic success. Dr. Jordan’s mother persuaded him all along to marry but he chose to focus on his career. Although he was not inclined romantically towards Lydia but he still enjoys the undivided attention and harmless flirtation, he also establishes a sexual relationship with his landlady Mrs. Humphery. Men dream about woman but she just stays like an object in his life, she can never be his destiny. Dr. Jordan dreams about Grace as his perfect wife; “She has beauty without frivolity, domesticity without dullness, and simplicity of manner, and prudence, and circumspection. She is also an excellent needlewoman…His mother would have no complains on that score” (pg452) Grace’s employer Mr. Thomas Kinnear, never married. According to him; “Some gentlemen do not have an inclination for the married state. They were very pleased with themselves the way they are, and think they can get along without it … If they want a thing; all they have to do is pay for it. It‘s all one to them” (pg257) In this novel, women are depicted as an object of desire, consumables and are used for sexual satisfaction and consumption of men. It is described in her mother’s life as well as in the untimely death of her beloved friend, Mary Whitney. She dies because of a bad surgery to abort the child she has conceived from her employer’s son George Parkinson. He did not accept the child or the mother, but very conveniently throws 5$ on her to get it aborted. When Grace said; “Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do. But it is not their fault; it is only how they are brought up.”(pg214) The part in the above quote pertaining to men who doesn’t have to clean there messes, takes her back to the memory of her friends death and to that man George Parkinson who made that mess and left. It is not just Mary Whitney who had been a victim of sexual harassment but she has experienced that attitude of men towards women all along, first her mother was mishandled, then her close acquaintance Mary Whitney was deceived by an evil man. The House keeper of her employer Nancy Montgomery too was subjected to this masculine mind-set and later became a mistress to her employer. Grace herself was subjected to this approach by men all her life not only be her employers, but other male servants as well as the guards of the prison she now inhibits. Women are considered sexually submissive and rather cold and only men are commissioned to have an active an open sex life. They are most generally and essentially forbidden to express their sexual desires and lives. Here Atwood challenges this patriarchal phenomena in the role of Mrs. Humphery, who was left unwanted by her careless husband, later she initiates a sexual relationship with Dr. Simon Jordan, refuting all claims of woman’s sexuality to be cold and passive. At various instances she tries to seduce and allures him towards her because it was forbidden in the society for a woman to disclose her affection and sexual desires to a man so openly. She often hinted him and tried to seduce him which he understood, at one point he tried to describe her the differences between a respectable a woman and a prostitute. She tried to seduce him towards her by disguising her desires as pain and sickness, which he was able to easily interpret. Men, in ‘Alias Grace’ are distinctively gender biased, they have very naive and conservative views of the women amongst them, In one such scene Dr. Jordan refers to women as objects of desires and dismisses their individuality and desires completely, he used to argue that; “if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn’t have it both ways, he’d point out: if women are seduced in their turn, then they were mad to begin with” (pg301). In a very abusive and disgusting manner one prison guard mocks the core existence of a woman, as being a consumable object without any feelings and emotions, he points out to Grace; “You know why God made women with skirts, it‘s so they can be pulled up over their heads and tied at the top, that way you don‘t get so much noise out of them, I hate a screeching slut, women should be born without mouths on them, the only thing of use in them is below the waist” (pg279.) All these accounts educated and challenge the wits of Grace Marks, she contemplates; “Why it is, a girl of fifteen or sixteen is accounted a woman, but a boy of fifteen or sixteen is still a boy”(pg304) And in another such instance she questions: “He‘s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man, although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man Is not an old bachelor until he is fifty”(pg41). Grace Marks outmaneuver men by her class performance and feminity, and destabilize all their wills to know the truth about reality and her sickness. Atwood, through the character of Grace Marks, broadcast that gender has only cultural and social boundaries, it doesn’t affect any person’s individuality and it has no biological foundation. She learned to rise above it and deceive men all around. Even Dr. Jordan was taken by surprise by the calmness and composure of her manners, and thus attracted towards her. He said; “She has manifested a composure that a duchess might envy. I have never known any woman to be so thoroughly self-contained… Her voice is low and melodious, and more cultivated than is un usual in a servant- a trick she has learned no doubt through her long service in the house of her social superiors”(pg153). Grace shaped herself and perform as people’s expectations, as she was manipulated by her lawyer when she was accused of murder “as a poor motherless child, uneducated, and illiterate, and little better than a half wit”, She dressed herself in this makeup and thought that; “Seen perhaps as an innocent woman wrongly accused and imprisoned unjustly, or at least for too long a time, and an object of pity rather than of horror and fear. It took me some days to get used to the idea; indeed I am not quite used to it yet. It calls for the different arrangement of face; but I suppose it will become easier in time” (pg513). Thus, the constructed masculine identity shrinks Grace to be passive, fragile, week and inferior being who cannot voice her opinions and we witness that the gender identity based on the contrasting sex, men and women, defines themselves from different positions and leaves a woman always in a ‘questionable’ position. As given weight by Grace’s remarks; “Why should the one be rewarded and the other punished, for the same sin” (pg321) She learned from Lawyer Kenneth Mc Kenzie , the tactics of manipulating the true identity of one’s self and to guise as a vulnerable, fragile, illiterate and a victim of Mc Dormatt’s gruesome plot, where she was forced to do what she would have not done on her own. Thus by narrating her own life history and story of that nights event she was able to manipulate or influence (the reader) the general public, her doctor and community services who testified in her favour to be given life imprisonment rather than to be hanged. Thus it is investigated through the novel, that the gender and class is a socio-cultural aspect which is handed over to us by the course of life. Grace Marks learns to fight the ideologies of the male dominant society and to voice her own story in her own narration. She deconstructs the ideologies of the society and retaliate the wrong doings of the individuals in-humane and often contemptuous comments around her by the mask of madness. Work Cited Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. NY: Anchor, 1996. Print. Read More