Connecting the theme of mandess to Grace Marks

One of the common themes we have seen throughout our semester in World Literature is madness. We have observed true madness, false madness, and the various ways that society perceives those who have been given the label.
In “Alias Grace”, Atwood poses the question as to whether or not Grace Marks is a murder. For many of us, murder and madness go hand-in-hand. The thought of taking another human life is outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior in society, yet still murder is something that we see every night on the evening news. The novel is set in the mid-1800’s in Canada when the nation was just being settled by Europeans. Despite the strict guidelines for social behavior in higher classes, it was still very much a lawless frontier in many aspects. So, the concept of right and wrong may have been blurred due to different factors.
However, a woman committing murder must have only meant one thing; madness. Men were responsible for protecting their land, their dignity, their families. Yet women were supposed to be treated like second-class citizens and understand that it was their “role” in society. Although I do not support the killing of other people, I do find it interesting that Grace and the other women in the asylum were treated differently because they were “murderesses”. (I will comment on the idea of hysteria in a post a bit later!)
Grace’s conversations with Dr. Jordan act as a form of therapy. She remarks how she feels at ease with him and that recalling parts of her tragic life story are not so painful when she is speaking with him. Yet, Grace says:
“And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but too ripe and splitting open of its own accord. And inside the peach there’s a stone.”
I believe this is a much more real representation of madness, rather than those constructed by society that are so prevalent in this novel. Grace feels herself splitting on her “own accord” due to the factors that have brought her imprisonment. Whether those factors are guilt for the murders or the struggle to prove her innocence, it is clearly taking its toll on Grace.