While Reading Never Let Me Go, I couldn’t help but compare Kathy to both Mrs. Dalloway and Saleem, as both Kathy and Mrs. Dalloway are haunted by their memories which are closely tied to their friends, but, like Saleem, Kathy’s memories are admittedly fragmented. Telling and recounting her memories function as a way to preserve aspects of the past after it has gone, whether that be her friends, Hailsham, or a broken gift from a friend. The song “Never Let Me Go”, the novel’s namesake, is reflective of this. It is a song about coping with the human fear of losing the ones you love.

I remember a quote from Jane Austen (in “Northanger Abbey”) that I feel is applicable to the entirety of “Alias Grace”: “A woman, especially if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can”. The portrayal of women in “Alias Grace” shows how women needed to conceal parts of themselves while simultaneously exaggerating others. There are several places in which Grace’s interiority show she is stitching together parts of her identity and story, much like the quilt stitching pattern Atwood employs as a motif. The methods Grace uses to protect her story also involves a nuanced depiction of the attributes of femininity and the performative nature of gender.

Femininity is a concept that mandates how girls and women grow to understand their placement in society, and their gender roles are conveyed to them through ideas which may directly or indirectly address their perceived positions in their communities and society. As such, femininity with respect to the social, political, and historical components of one’s society is closely connected to the environments that surround girls and women This aspect of socialization cannot successfully be analyzed or removed from these contexts. The social relationships formed involving women and girls will always be heavily influenced by these notions, resulting in a multitude of feminine identities through which women and girls navigate their lives. These gender roles also exist as a space that needs to be filled to satisfy the expectations of others, thus employing the performativity of gender. Whether it be in one’s self-worth, sense of belonging, or positive values, the brand of femininity one adopts in turn dictates which actions are socially acceptable and which are not.

Taylor Holmes, Kaitlin Peterka, Sylvia Himebook

“Out of the gravel there are peonies growing. They come up through the loose grey pebbles… huge dark red flowers shining and glossy like satin.” (5)

“In the one instant before they come apart, they are like the peonies in the front garden at Mr. Kinnear’s that first day, only those were white.” (5)

“We put flowers from Mrs. Alderman Parkinson’s garden into the coffin… there were long-stemmed roses and peonies; and we chose only the white ones. I scattered the petals of them over her as well, and I slipped in the needle-case I’d made for her, but out of sight, as it might look wrong otherwise, being red…” (197)

“All the same, Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word—musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.” (22-3)

“But the sun cannot be stopped in its path, except by God, and he has done that only once, and will not do it again until the end of the world; and on this night it went down as usual, leaving behind it a deep-red sunset; and for a few moments the front of the house was all pink with it.” (230)

• Red is symbolic of violence and blood. This is when Grace sees Nancy dead. The red, here, is symbolic of Grace’s violent side.
• White is symbolic of innocence, faith, light, and goodness, and the color of the flowers they place on the coffin are white.
• The pink color is a mixture of both because red and white make pink. The red of the sunset serves as a forewarning, and the pink comes about as a merger between the good from within the house and the trouble to come.
• Grace places the flowers directly onto a coffin, which gives the two close proximity. Flowers function as symbols for women. They are, like women, connected to their biological functions and simplified to only have affinities pertaining to granting and sustaining life; thus flowers are often used to symbolize one’s fertility. Despite the traditional role flowers fill when describing a woman’s attributes, in “Alias Grace” flowers are used to show not only a woman’s ability to bring life but also her ability to be a voluntary vessel for death. Life and death do not operate independently, and women are shown to fully embody this dichotomy.

“All the same, Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word—musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.”

Flowers in “Alias Grace” are symbols for women. They are often, like women, connected to their biological functions and simplified to only have affinities pertaining to pollination, procreation, and fruit; thus flowers are often used to symbolize one’s fertility. Despite the traditional role flowers fill when describing a woman’s attributes, in “Alias Grace” flowers are used to show not only a woman’s ability to bring life but also her ability to be a voluntary vessel for death. Women in “Alias Grace” are shown to fully embody this dichotomy whether consciously or not.

Something I noticed while reading Midnight’s Children was the connection between creation and destruction as seen through Saleem and Shiva. The to mirror each other (having been born simultaneously and switched at birth) and represent creation and destruction respectively. Saleem as the narrator must create the story while Shiva’s namesake is the Hindu god of destruction. Though the two are oppositional forces, they are connected by nature. 

I also noticed this in connection with Saleem’s favorite childhood game, Snakes and Ladders. He notices that for every move he makes, there is an inverse reaction: if something goes up, something must go down. The game is formulaic and only depicts a one-dimensional perspective of good and evil, which Saleem later realizes to be more ambiguous in nature.

In my Carribean Literature class, we learned about the concepts of roots and rhizomes (Glissant) and their presence in postcolonial texts. He states: “In the course of this journey, identity… consolidates itself implicitly at first (‘my root is the strongest’) and then is explicitly exported as a value (‘a person’s worth is determined by his root’). The conquered or visited peoples are thus forced into a long and painful quest after an identity…” What I find so interesting about Midnight’s Children are the many ways in which Saleem parallels himself to India. In The Kolynos Kid, Saleem says, “I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively…” (272). Saleem never chooses to prove the worth of his root through outward expansion or selling aspects of India as cultural capital, rather his root functions as a self-identifier. It is in this way that Saleem is able to feel that his very being embodies the whole of India.

Taylor Holmes, Oubah Dougsiyeh, Courtney Parks, Tiffany Pollock

How does Rushdee use of a unreliable narrator emphasize the postmodern narrative structure?

“The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I can-not say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric?”

• What is this actually about? Can we trust anything Saleem the narrator tells us?

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems… but as you approach the present… I become a sort of radio (189)”

“In accordance with my lotus’s wishes, I insert, forthwith, a brief paean to Dung.”

• Define postmodern themes and structures
• Identify how Midnight’s Children displays these traits
  • Saleem’s inability to remember details correctly
  • Saleem’s fragmented thoughts that are to be taken as fact
  • The clear bias that alters the reading of the novel