Migration and Mental Health by Marjory Harper

Author:Marjory Harper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Thus Grace believes she may have been victimized because of being Irish, but resists such victimization in her own self-identity. In the novel, Grace’s experiences as an immigrant and a young woman, more than her Irish identity, are linked to her possible mental breakdown.

Writing in the nineteenth century, Moodie turned to religion to find hope for Grace’s soul and portrayed madness as the work of the devil. Writing in the twentieth century, Atwood explores the efforts of the medical community to treat Grace’s mind and body. Most of the novel consists of Grace recounting her life to a fictional Dr Simon Jordan, an American alienist with European training who is brought to Kingston in 1859 to try to restore Grace’s memory and thereby secure her release from the penitentiary. Atwood empowers Grace by making her the main narrator of her story, as opposed to using the views of male journalists, or the interpretations of the male medical community found in most institutional records. At the same time, Grace’s story becomes highly nuanced and ambiguous, with issues of memory acquiring a central importance. The silences are as significant as the words. Does Grace not remember, or simply claim not to remember? Is she insane, or feigning insanity to obtain better treatment? Did she become temporarily insane as a result of being confined in the penitentiary, or did her mental instability have earlier origins, as her visions might indicate? Whatever the answers, it becomes clear that Dr Jordan is not going to obtain them through either talk therapy or the analysis of dreams, considered to be the manifestation of subconscious memory. His repeated presentation of various vegetables to Grace in an attempt to restore her memory of bodies in the root cellar is useless. Another doctor tries neuro-hypnotism, reputedly more scientific than the mesmerism or séances that were rapidly gaining popularity in the mid-nineteenth century.20 Readers, however, know that this supposed doctor is actually Grace’s friend, an itinerant peddler who is an accomplished ventriloquist and who has practised his art at fairs. The voice heard during the hypnotic session is his own. In the end Grace is granted a pardon and released from prison, but, in Atwood’s version at least, not because of any success achieved by the medical community in treating her. As Atwood notes, ‘the true character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma’.21

One aspect of the enigma of Grace Marks is partially explained by historical research regarding state asylums in Ontario. The brief period that Grace spent in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum in Toronto coincided with an intense conflict within the Ontario medical community concerning the proper treatment of the criminally insane. In 1850 the surgeon at the Kingston penitentiary was alarmed by the increase in insanity cases, almost an epidemic that he believed could not be adequately treated by a reformatory regime that still included considerable physical punishment. When legislation in 1851 authorized the removal of insane persons from any prison to the public lunatic asylum, he

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