Alias Grace Themes

Through Grace’s experiences as a prisoner, Atwood explores how societal forces manipulate and control women’s abilities to tell their own stories, often through preventing them from speaking. This implicitly points to the power of storytelling—if women were allowed to tell their own stories, then their experiences, ideas, and ambitions would define them, rather than the diminished personhood given to them by men. Grace’s experiences show not only that storytelling is a vital way to…

A dominant question of Victorian times was whether women were, by nature, good or evil. Atwood takes up this question in the novel, arguing that this binary is not a sufficient way to understand women, just as it would be an insufficient way to understand men. Atwood takes this argument a step further by showing how society’s repression of female sexuality—and its willingness to allow, and even condone, sexual violence against women—cements this binary understanding…

Dr. Jordan’s mission is to learn the truth about Grace’s role in the Kinnear and Montgomery murders by helping Grace to recover her memories of the day the murders took place. By reading the novel, the reader becomes party to this truth-seeking project, attempting, along with Dr. Jordan, to determine which of the three accounts Grace has given of the murders is the true one. However, Atwood consistently challenges the idea that there…

Even before she was imprisoned, Grace owned very little. The most important object in her possession, her mother’s teapot, was sold off by her father to cover his debts. At Mrs. Alderman Parkinson’s home, Grace and Mary are only allowed one candle a week; Mary steals candle-ends from the dining room because one candle a week “was less light than [she] wanted to have.” This powerful moment shows that not allowing women to own…

The dramatic tension at the heart of Alias Grace is whether or not Grace is guilty of killing Nancy, which matters since her guilt determines whether her pardon was just. Alias Grace explores the question of justice in both legal and religious terms, with Grace’s devout (though not exactly conventional) Christianity playing a key role in how she interprets her life. Through Grace, Atwood explores the nature of a higher power—however, just as she…