Freedom is a captivating impulse. No other compulsion has characterized American history so aptly, from the first pilgrims at Plymouth seeking religious freedom, to the liberty issue of the Revolutionary War, to the restless urge to push westward and claim social and economic freedom, even at the cost of others’ liberties. And freedom is an innate, universal instinct. We are uneasy and awake under captivity. It is only natural.
Part of the allure of Grace Marks in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is her measured, modest disposition. She is practical, almost forgiving. There are no theatrics with her, no melodramatic angst (she does faint once or twice, but never as a tool to garner sympathy). Her calm and patience contrast sharply with who she is: a convict, a captive, a murderess. Half of the public thinks Grace is a cold-hearted, jealous killer. The other half thinks she is a witless, perhaps insane, innocent wrongly condemned. But Grace is neither heartless nor hapless. She is not the kind of person you would expect to find imprisoned.
Perhaps Grace appears strangely content because she has lived a life of confinement. Her immigration from Ireland to Canada consisted of nightmarish squalor in the cramped, unsanitary lower deck of a ship, reminiscent of Jonah in the belly of the big fish. And even in Canada, with its promises of abundant land and free enterprise, poverty is another, sometimes more oppressive, incarceration.
Consistently, Atwood examines the lines drawn by gender and class. For instance, take Mary Whitney, Grace’s best friend: a servant made destitute by her father’s involvement in William Lyon Mackenzie’s rebellion against the Canadian oligarchy, Mary is poor. But not only that. She is a woman. Taken advantage of and abandoned after conceiving, she dies after a painful abortion. And even after death, Mary is seen by society as deceitful, impure, and shameful.
The power imbalance between genders features inescapably in Atwood’s other works. The most obvious example is The Handmaid’s Tale, and its oppressive society makes a clear point about the way society treats women. In The Blind Assassin, the inequality between men and women plays a central role in the development of the protagonist, Iris, who finds herself made an accessory to her husband and his whims. Iris is on the other side of Mary’s poverty, but as a woman, she too is relegated to a gilded cage.
Yet it would be disingenuous to leave the book at only that. The imprisonment felt so closely in Atwood’s novels is not only a sense of external oppression, but an inward searching for something nonexistent. A sense of bereavement and eternal loss. “Home is where the heart is,” Iris thinks to herself, toward the end of The Blind Assassin:
I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn’t there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow.
I’m heartless, I thought. Therefore I’m homeless.
Here, we find that the issue of freedom and imprisonment extends inward. It is not simply that Iris, Mary, and Grace cannot live free of the weight of societal expectations and enclosures. The most painful part of oppression is the loss of a heart. This is a grief experienced by even Simon Jordan, the young psychologist who has made it his burden to help Grace unearth her memories. “At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven, in which to bestow their hearts,” he writes, “or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow.” Ironically, as the story unfolds, Simon makes no progress in undoing Grace’s inability to remember her role in the murders. Instead, anxious and troubled, he descends into baser behaviors. The burdens set on him ― solving the mystery of Grace’s amnesia, putting the pieces of the case together, giving a final verdict on her innocence ― are too many and too much. In many ways, obligation imprisons Simon and brings him to the brink of his own kind of insanity.
There is another curious thing about Alias Grace.
One of Grace’s superstitions is that a window must be opened after someone dies to let their soul out. In the crowded, dense darkness of the voyage of her mother’s death, Grace is distressed over her inability to open a window for her mother’s soul, which she pictures trapped in the misery of the ship forever. After Mary’s death, Grace believes she hears the whispered words, “Let me in.” And later, as Grace is hypnotized in hopes of regaining her lost memory, it is Mary’s voice who speaks, claiming to be distinct from Grace.
Atwood leaves the ending ambiguous. Perhaps Grace is possessed by Mary or perhaps she merely suffers from multiple personalities. Perhaps Grace is flat-out lying. Or insane. We aren’t given an answer. But regardless of what the truth is, the motif of a trapped soul returns over and over. Grace is a prisoner of her society, but her imprisonment goes even deeper. A sense of restlessness, incited by feelings of captivity, permeates our world, too, from the framework of society to the quietest, inward parts of our lives. We are all captives of the world, beholden to death and illness and circumstance. And we are all captors of ourselves.
“I would like to see,” Grace narrates. “Or to be seen. I wonder if, in the eye of God, it amounts to the same thing. As it says in the Bible, For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” The verse comes from 1 Corinthians 13:12: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
We long for freedom as we long for full and complete knowledge. We desire closure and conclusion just as much as we want the story to end in a blankness that equals freedom. The end of Alias Grace is ambiguous, just as the human impulses for freedom and closure contradict, just as the poet Philip Larkin writes, in the last stanza of his poem “High Windows”:
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
The captive yearns to escape through the windows, for beyond them comes light and promise. But as Larkin’s poem nearly suggests, is there nothing beyond those bright, high windows? Is there nothing in the great beyond? Or, perhaps, is he suggesting that there is something far greater, far beyond imagination or belief? We do not know which we would rather it be. We do not know which one is truer to human experience.
For Grace, too, as she recounts her journey in the wake of the murders, wondering what will become of her, she contemplates the final end:
But the waves kept moving, with the white wake of the ship traced in them for an instant, and then smoothed over by the water. And it was as if my own footsteps were being erased behind me, the footsteps I’d made as a child on the beaches and pathways of the land I’d left, and the footsteps I’d made on this side of the ocean, since coming here; all the traces of me, smoothed over and rubbed away as if they had never been, like polishing the black tarnish from the silver, or drawing your hand across dry sand.
On the edge of sleep I thought: It’s as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed.
It is almost the same as being innocent.
And then I slept.
It is depressing to end with the idea that death is the only final escape from the brutal, rote captivity of life. That is only the case if you assume that beyond death lies only darkness, shadow, and the end of all things good and worthy. We can read sleep as a euphemism for death. After all, that is what literature has taught us to read. But sleep is also a synonym for rest. Perhaps, then, we find flickers of a someday satisfaction of both freedom and peace.