In some respects I found the richest ground of this book to be in the fiction, partly - I think - because the non-fiction was all so familiar/typical, and as issybird observed "Atwood patronizes us here".
I rather liked the character of Jeremiah the peddler aka Dr Jerome DuPont. He offered up strange sorts of outside possibilities (especially as regards his mesmerism etc.). [Spoiler added given how many have not finished:]
Mrs Humphrey (Rachel) was pitiable, and gave good grounds for really disliking Dr Jordan:
Quote:
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Her other game is that she is trapped, at the mercy of his will
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as if that was a game! She
was at the mercy of his will. But I found I had to temper my dislike with the understanding he could (and in reality rather than fiction probably would) have treated her much worse than he did. He was a weak and unthinking fool rather than malicious.
Dr Simon Jordan I found to be something of a mishmash. Could he really be such a gullible fool as regards how he is manipulated by Grace? Or was it that he fell in love with Grace and so became foolish? Or is it just that he is young, spoilt, selfish and essentially uncaring of anyone else around him that makes him this foolish? And yet his travels and studies should have made him more worldly, I would have thought, and his ambitions to open an asylum seem larger than the man we meet in the story. Dr Jordan as a character seemed a bit all over the place to me.