Truth, Memory, and Madness Theme Analysis

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 could be a single true narrative of the murders—or indeed that objective truth, as a concept, really exists. Instead, she highlights the way that characters’ sense of emotional truth often outweighs their commitment to an accurate representation of events or facts.

For example, after Grace’s friend Mary Whitney dies of a botched abortion, their employer questions Grace about the identity of Mary’s lover and Grace responds that Mary had asked her not to reveal it. “Mary had not said this,” Grace clarifies, “but I had my own suspicions.” Here, Grace is clearly comfortable telling what is factually a lie in order to preserve Mary’s propriety. Perhaps more significantly, this lie also helps protect Grace; by maintaining that her silence is in service to a friend, Grace expiates herself from having to reveal her suspicions about Mary’s lover to her employer. Moments later, however, Grace becomes agitated when the housekeeper makes up an alternate explanation for Mary’s death—a fever, rather than an abortion gone awry. “And all the time,” Grace says, “Mary was there on the bed, listening to us, and hearing about our plans to tell these lies about her; and I thought, She will not be easy in her mind about it.” Clearly this lie is also one that will protect Mary’s propriety—yet Grace feels conflicted about it because she imagines that it would have greatly offended Mary, perhaps since Mary’s bold personality and her confidence in her own body might have led her to own up to her pregnancy and abortion, had she survived. Thus, while Grace’s earlier lie that Mary asked her not to reveal the father’s identity is emotionally true to the friendship between Mary and Grace, the lie that Mary died of a fever is, at least to Grace’s mind, not emotionally true to the fiery person that Mary was. Through these and other examples, Atwood suggests that what characters believe to be true often has more to do with what “feels” true to them, than what “actually” occurred. Atwood does not pronounce judgment on this phenomenon, instead depicting it as an inevitable human tendency. 

Further undermining the notion of objective truth, Atwood insists on the inherently malleable nature of memory. This is clear in Grace’s contemplation of the role of a keepsake book, in which women of the Victorian era collected mementos. “What should a Keepsake Album be?” she wonders. “Should it be only the good things in your life, or should it be all of the things?” These rhetorical questions suggest that there isn’t a correct answer; rather, memories—and thus what we think of as “the truth”—are another kind of story that characters tell themselves.

Finally, Atwood attacks the sexist Victorian notion of associating madness with women, showing that institutions manipulate the definition of sanity in order to disempower and discredit women. Grace does faint and hear voices—characteristics stereotypically associated with “mad” women—but Atwood complicates the question of madness by showing that it exists in plenty of other iterations, many of which are ignored by patriarchal society. For example, in describing a woman she knew in the asylum, Grace says, “[she] was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue, he was the mad one but nobody would lock him up.” Atwood even depicts Simon Jordan’s incontrollable sexual fantasies and urges as a kind of madness, wryly writing, “He is both sane and normal, and he has developed the rational faculties of his mind to a high degree; and yet he cannot always control such pictures.” Atwood further undercuts the association between madness and womanhood by showing how Dr. Jordan unravels as he learns more about Grace’s story, ultimately losing all memory of Grace after he is injured in the Civil War. These kinds of male madness are not societally coded as such because the idea of (in)sanity is, Atwood shows, less a measure of an individual’s relation to reality than it is a societal construct that is used to empower some people (mostly men) and disempower others. Thus, Atwood’s critique of the Victorian concept of female madness is part of her larger argument about the nonexistence of objective truth.