Day 173.1: Aliases
Nov. 6th, 2024 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionFinished Alias Grace for the second time and it has me a little more confused, which I think is great. When I read it the first time, I thought "This is a really good historical novel," but then the bits about feminism did not strike me. Now they do (though I think Atwood resists the label and maybe prefers to say she's not a feminist?). This time, I definitely see Grace as more emblematic of the ways patriarchy weighs down on women, in detail... this all would be really nice for an essay, but my genuine experience of reading it was less didactic and more, oh, yes, yes this is the way she was limited.
Grace is very smart, and also a woman of the 'common class'. Her life is set. I think Atwood does a very, very wonderful job of establishing just how set it is, and how set women's lives were (and still are). The women are like space debris: they fly their orbits until some thing knocks them off course, and then that's that, they fly off. They die. I say this with full feeling: Mary Whitney's fate was horrifying, as is Nancy's fate, as is Grace's mother's fate, as are all the women's fates in the novel no matter how minor (Mrs. Humphrey's, Lydia's...). But they are set: the thing that dooms them is pregnancy, and of course men, and then they fly off their orbits and die.
The thing that struck me this time around is just how fiercely the women resist. They aren't things at all, no matter how sternly the men insist. They defy, they fight back in all their various ways: they flirt with the men, they cajole them, they give in painful inches, they turn into ghosts and possess each other, they communicate through knocks and whispers. When for a brief time women are allowed to say it plainly, they do so, and they are wrathful. In this context, Grace's refusal to be seen as any one thing, her complexity, is the centerpiece, her 'tree of paradise' in the end is absolutely beautiful.
I think Grace's voice is also phenomenal. The way I could tell was, the bit at the end, when she's gotten her Heaven, feels different in very nice ways. She is very smart, and that is also the nature of memory.
Amazing book. I don't think I've gotten to the end of its intricacies at all.
Grace is very smart, and also a woman of the 'common class'. Her life is set. I think Atwood does a very, very wonderful job of establishing just how set it is, and how set women's lives were (and still are). The women are like space debris: they fly their orbits until some thing knocks them off course, and then that's that, they fly off. They die. I say this with full feeling: Mary Whitney's fate was horrifying, as is Nancy's fate, as is Grace's mother's fate, as are all the women's fates in the novel no matter how minor (Mrs. Humphrey's, Lydia's...). But they are set: the thing that dooms them is pregnancy, and of course men, and then they fly off their orbits and die.
The thing that struck me this time around is just how fiercely the women resist. They aren't things at all, no matter how sternly the men insist. They defy, they fight back in all their various ways: they flirt with the men, they cajole them, they give in painful inches, they turn into ghosts and possess each other, they communicate through knocks and whispers. When for a brief time women are allowed to say it plainly, they do so, and they are wrathful. In this context, Grace's refusal to be seen as any one thing, her complexity, is the centerpiece, her 'tree of paradise' in the end is absolutely beautiful.
I think Grace's voice is also phenomenal. The way I could tell was, the bit at the end, when she's gotten her Heaven, feels different in very nice ways. She is very smart, and that is also the nature of memory.
Amazing book. I don't think I've gotten to the end of its intricacies at all.
