Simon Says “Simmer Down”
Misogyny is the hatred of, or prejudice against, women. Historically, misogyny has been socially acceptable and systemically reinforced. Such injustice led to the concept of feminism: the advocacy for women’s rights and gender equality. Margaret Atwood’s novel, Alias Grace, is at its heart, a feminist novel. This may be surprising for some readers given the Victorian setting – in Victorian times, women had few rights, were uneducated, and thought to be essentially good for nothing except being wives and mothers: “an ideal woman is expected to give up her wishes and feelings for the men she loves and be ignorant and sacrifice herself for her family” (Gökçek 145; see full article for more details of women’s role in Victorian society).
Atwood’s portrayal of society during this era reflects the historical truth of the matter while simultaneously elevating women to true personhood. That is, Atwood’s narrative and narrative strategies serve the feminist agenda in striving to represent women in all their complexity by mocking and discrediting the reductive patriarchal (male-centered) worldview of the era.
For example, the character of Dr. Simon Jordan serves as the most obvious and frequent vehicle for misogyny. He consistently compares women to animals, or else food; he thinks of the servant Dora as “[sullen], brutish, vengeful; a mind that exists at a sub-rational level, yet cunning, slippery, evasive. There’s no way to corner her. She’s a greased pig” (Atwood 73).
Furthermore, Simon often entertains violent sexual fantasies involving the women around him (see Atwood 169 for an example). While he claims these visions to be “unbidden” and justifies them as something that “must occur… in the majority of men” (169), they nonetheless reveal the utter disregard for women that allow their very existence.
However, while such depictions of misogyny are indeed reprehensible, they still serve Atwood’s feminist agenda. As Joan Douglas Peters remarks in her essay on Alias Grace, the novel’s pervasive misogyny, especially that expressed through the narration of Simon, is an “exaggerated imitation, or parody, of patriarchal prose” (310), and serves as a parallel to Grace’s narrative:
The novel not only places Grace’s depictions of actual women against Simon’s paternalistic versions of them; it also juxtaposes these discursive representations to the historical passages that begin the chapters, dialogically placing her experiential discourse about women on equal footing with implicitly hostile, institutionalized prose. (Peters 314)
In other words, Alias Grace’s exaggerated misogyny (via Simon) mocks the patriarchal worldview while simultaneously elevating the feminist narrative (via Grace) due to its relative realism, putting Grace’s story “on equal footing” with Simon’s patriarchal worldview.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
Gökçek, Aycan. “Social Position of Victorian Women: Villette and Emma.” Comparative Literature–East & West, vol. 4, no. 2, 2020, pp. 143-155.
Peters, Joan D. “Feminist Narratology Revisited: Dialogizing Gendered Rhetorics in Alias Grace.” Style (University Park, PA), vol. 49, no. 3, 2015, pp. 299-320.
