[issybird]

Originally Posted by gmw

It wasn't that I found it without interest, although there seemed far more text than warranted, and we don't actually learn anything factually new

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Grace definitely fitted the "unreliable narrator" theme very well. She was remarkably eloquent and had an extraordinary memory for all sorts of details - or did she?

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

It was a bit reminiscent of Scheherezade weaving tales in The Thousand and One Nights. Grace is weaving her long and detailed story to please Dr Jordan, but we have no idea of where the truth might lie.

I had the same thought about Scherezade, even to the extent of spinning out her story, in Grace's case for the possibility of freedom and also for the immediate boon of time out of prison and not working. As long as she could keep Dr. Jordan writing things down, she had a reprieve from her usual existence. There was even the immediate benefit of living in the past and divorcing herself from her surroundings; even her grim childhood probably took on a gloss compared to life in prison.

But, I also thought there was a less organic reason for Grace's tedious narration, namely that Atwood was showing off. In line with gmw's comment about some of it was awkward, I thought Atwood went out of her way to give us the benefit of her research and perhaps even was making a meta comment on things that novels don't tell, because they're too ordinary to be worth it. She justified it with an exchange between Dr. Jordan and Grace about how Dr. Jordan didn't understand how a Victorian house was run, so Grace told him in all the soporific details, even down to relieving herself - which is a standard trope of things not told, but taken as given.

I thought it one of those differences between a Victorian novel and Atwood's version of one; a Victorian novel of its time doesn't go into all that stultifying detail, because why would it? People reading it as contemporaries had that knowledge, but Atwood patronizes us here.

Originally Posted by gmw

I do have lots of text highlighted in my copy that I still have to work back through, things I thought at the time seem relevant to the guilt or innocence of Grace. But such conjecture is probably pointless. We are now at how many removes from the real events? Based on Atwood's book I think I could make a case for several different versions. I wonder if that was her intention.

I absolutely think that was her intention.

Originally Posted by gmw

And speaking of the Govenor's wife's scrapbook (first quote above), this paragraph from chapter three is part of the hard work I was talking about:

Anyone want to take a stab at decoding the first two sentences? The branch and tree descriptions relate to what exactly? Is the silk covering the table or the scrapbook? What was sent from India?

I thought the branch and tree descriptions tied into one of her ongoing themes, both about women's work and domestic arts and the branch/tree motif, which persisted through the book. A reference to the hanging that Grace escaped?