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Flowers in Alias Grace are directly related to women’s deaths. Grace has a recurring hallucination of a bloody Nancy Montgomery exploding into red flower petals. Grace’s mother’s teapot, which is covered in a flowered pattern, shatters on the day she dies, and Grace believes that her mother’s spirit destroyed the teapot as a kind of revenge. Finally, Mary Whitney’s handkerchief—the one which Grace may or may not have used to strangle Nancy—is decorated with blue “love-in-a-mist” flowers. These three women (Nancy, Mary, and her mother) are the three most important female figures in Grace’s life, and the fact that they are all linked to flower imagery suggests something important about the power of women. Flowers, because they are biologically linked to fruit and pollination, are a symbol of life; similarly, women, because of their ability to bear children, are often images of fertility. However, the role of flowers in this novel suggests that women have not only the power to create life, but also to embody death. Flowers, which bloom and then die, show that women can be vessels of both life and death. Grace makes a similar statement toward the end of the novel, when she discusses her possible pregnancy, saying that “it is strange to know you carry within yourself either a life or a death, but not to know which one.” The flower imagery in the novel suggests that, on some level, all women embody this dichotomy. This allows women to transcend the role of life-sustaining child bearers, imbuing them with a far greater and darker power.
The idea that flowers are linked toward women’s power is supported by the fact that flowers remain mysterious to male characters in the novel. For example, Dr. Jordan, when drafting a letter to his mother, realizes “he has never known much about flowers.” This phrase takes on added significance due to the way flower imagery operates elsewhere in the text, suggesting that women are privy to an exclusive and deepened understanding of life and death which does not extend to men.
Flowers Quotes in Alias Grace
The Alias Grace quotes below all refer to the symbol of Flowers. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3
Quotes
All the same, Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word—musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.
Murderer is merely brutal. It’s like a hammer, or a lump of metal. I would rather be a murderess than a murderer, if those are the only choices.
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Chapter 33
Quotes
It’s dark as a stone in this room, and hot as a roasting heart; if you stare into the darkness with your eyes open you are sure to see something after a time. I hope it will not be flowers. But this is the time they like to grow, the red flowers, the shining red peonies which are like satin, which are like splashes of paint. The soil for them is emptiness, it is empty space and silence. I whisper, Talk to me; because I would rather have talking than the slow gardening that takes place in silence, with the red satin petals dripping down the wall.
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Flowers Symbol Timeline in Alias Grace
The timeline below shows where the symbol Flowers appears in Alias Grace. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...imprisonment in the Kingston Penitentiary. Grace describes walking around the walled-in prison yard, hallucinating about peonies growing from the gravel. Her hallucination expands: she sees Nancy Montgomery kneeling on the ground...
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Chapter 7
...mother, struggling to describe the landscape of Kingston because “he has never known much about flowers.”
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Chapter 13
...pays for Grace’s family to immigrate to Canada. Aunt Pauline gifts Grace’s mother with a flowered teapot as a goodbye present.
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Chapter 21
...Her reluctantly agrees, swayed by Lydia’s “admiration” and feeling like “he’s been ambushed by a flowering shrub.”
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Chapter 22
...Jeremiah the peddler. Agnes helps Grace arrange Mary’s burial. After Mary is buried, Grace lays wildflowers on her grave every Sunday.
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Chapter 23
...possessions, but she brings with her an old shawl of her mother’s and a blue flowered handkerchief left to her by Mary Whitney. During the journey, the man sitting next to...
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...to a “shy and awkward” boy of fourteen named Jamie. She then spots Nancy cutting flowers in front of the house; Nancy waves to Grace but, Grace says, “she made no...
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Chapter 27
...looks “forlorn,” Grace takes pity on him and shares a dream she had about red flowers. After sharing her dream, Grace tells Dr. Jordan that she’s decided she would like him...
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Chapter 33
...he’s gone.” On the edge of sleep, Grace has another vision of the red cloth flowers. She dreams that she is in Mr. Kinnear’s house, being chased, listening to a voice...
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Chapter 35
...that opened the novel, with Grace walking in the prison yard, seeing the red cloth flowers and Nancy bleeding and strangled. The dream ends the same way: with Grace in a...
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Chapter 36
...the next thing she can remember is. Grace says she found herself standing by the flowerbeds at the front of the house. She says, “I was thinking, I must open the...
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Chapter 38
...disrespectful.” She also puts on one of Nancy’s dresses and a bonnet, and even dabs rose water behind her ears, describing the smell as “a comfort of sorts.” While she is...
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Chapter 43
...and on one occasion hears her laughing. She also sees her dream/hallucination of the red flowers for the first time.
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...been seeing red spots, and when he pressed her she clarified that they were red peonies. “I suppose it’s the more usual thing,” Grace told Dr. Jordan, “to have eyes following...
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Chapter 46
...my Penitentiary nightdress. A square of blood-stained petticoat. A strip of kerchief, white with blue flowers. Love-in-a-mist.”
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Chapter 47
...to “some discreditable peepshow.” He then visits Mr. Kinnear’s and Nancy’s graves. He picks a rose from the bush growing over Nancy’s grave, “with some half-formed notion of taking it back...
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Chapter 53
...She is sitting on her “own verandah in [her] own rocking chair,” looking at the flowers in front of her house. She says, “On such days I think, This is like...
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