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career as a household servant when she was eleven or twelve, separated
from her own family forever. She passes from one situation to the next,
learning as she goes every aspect of housekeeping, keenly observing her
employers and their houses, taking an expert's joy in her proficiency, par–
ticularly in her mastery of laundry and needlework. Out of these mundane
details something visionary arises: at Mr. Kinnear's home before the mur–
ders have occurred, she sees "the shirts and nightgowns flapping in the
breeze on a sunny day. ... like large white birds, or angels rejoicing,
although without any heads." She describes, from time to time, the quilts
she has worked on - and Atwood uses their mysterious names - Jagged
Edge, Rocky Road, Broken Dishes, Secret Drawer, Snake Fence - as sug–
gestive titles to her chapters which are like pieces of diverse fabric stitched
together in an ancient pattern. Like Grace's story, they can be read differ–
ently by the beholder; the quil t called Attic Windows "had a great many
pieces, and if you looked at it one way it was closed boxes, and when you
looked at it another way the boxes were open."
Only implicitly does Grace's narrative reveal the emotional life of the
adolescent girl; she lives chiefly in the lives of others. At one grand house
she makes a beloved friend - the only one she will ever have - of a slight–
ly older servant. Mary Whitney is mischievous and fiery; she offers an
alternate selfhood to the frightened Grace: "Sometimes when I would be
shocked at her, she would say that I would soon be singing mournful
hymns ... and going around with a mouth pulled down all glum and saggy
like an old maid's backside; and I would protest, and we would end by
laughing." Mary is seduced, however, by their employer's son, and dies
after a botched abortion.
Mary Whitney persists in the story, however. She remains the image
offriendship which Grace will fail to find again in the dishonest and self–
ish Nancy, and Grace will assume Mary Whitney's name when she tries
to escape with McDermott. Mary's spirit, in one sense or another, erupts
at the end when Simon, despairing of finding that primal truth he seeks,
submits Grace to the operations of a mesmerist. A strange, raucous, mock–
ing voice bursts out of the tranced Grace's mouth, identifying itself as
Mary's; it is
she
who murdered Nancy, "borrowing [Grace's] . .. fleshly
garment." A tale of possession, then - or of multiple personality - or of
the complex duplicity of feminine character as Atwood conceives it? Was
Mary the true self for which Grace was an "alias"?
The governing consciousness who figures in the latest novel by Joan
Didion is also female, but it is a female consciousness unlike that of the nov–
els considered above. If it resembles the author's own state of mind, that
awareness, suffering deeply from acedia yet sleeplessly attentive,
which
reg–
isters appearances in her non-fictional writings, it is also a consciousness
