Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1996

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Part XII, Chapters 45-47Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part XII: "Solomon’s Temple"

Chapter 45 Summary

Simon meets with Kenneth MacKenzie. Grace’s case was his first, and it made his career. He’s a prosperous and well-known lawyer now.

Simon explains to MacKenzie that he’s looking for information that can help him understand if Grace was insane at the time of the murders. MacKenzie replies that Grace never said anything to him that amounted to a confession, and that she was very troubled and melancholy in prison. Simon asks how MacKenzie managed to save Grace’s life. MacKenzie takes him through the court case and the arguments that he made. He was James McDermott’s lawyer too, though there was very little that he could do for McDermott.

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He believes that Grace’s motivation in appearing to open up to Simon is love: she must be in love with him. Simon is appalled when MacKenzie’s encourages him to take advantage of Grace’s supposed feelings for him, mentally calling him a “conceited little troll” (377). MacKenzie got Grace off in the Kinnear case because it was clear that she didn’t have anything to do with shooting Kinnear. She wasn’t tried for Nancy’s case because she had already been sentenced to death. If she had been tried for Nancy’s case, she surely would have been hanged. MacKenzie believes that Grace is guilty of killing Nancy.

Chapter 46 Summary

Grace guesses that Simon has gone off to Toronto to talk with people to discover if she is guilty or innocent. She knows that he will not find out anything. Graces relates that Jeremiah the peddler, alias Dr. DuPont, is to perform a hypnotism when Simon returns from Toronto. The Governor’s wife tells her the purpose of the hypnotic session is to recover Grace’s memory.

Chapter 47 Summary

Simon travels from Toronto to Richmond Hill to visit Thomas Kinnear’s house. The housekeeper takes him on a tour, initially thinking he’s a potential buyer for the property. He is disturbed at himself for visiting the house and acknowledges that he’s behaving like a voyeur. He even visits Thomas Kinnear’s and Nancy Montgomery’s graves. He visits Mary Whitney’s grave to make sure that she exists. He finds a gravestone exactly as Grace described it.

Returning to Toronto on the train, Simon realizes that Thomas Kinnear’s life would have been very pleasant and that Grace is the only woman he’s met who he thinks he could marry. She would fulfill all of his mother’s requirements, except that Grace is not rich, while also meeting his own requirements for wit and passion. He has not been able to confirm or deny any part of Grace’s story.

Part XII, Chapters 45-47 Analysis

Simon is a voyeur—that’s a large part of his personality and his attraction to psychiatry. He enjoys imagining the lives of others, particularly others who are lower on the social scale than he is. Once he’s satisfied his voyeurism, he returns to his safe, upper-class life. That’s part of his attraction to Grace, on many levels, both professional and personal. He’s doing the same thing with Rachel Humphrey; trying on another type of life, seeing what she is made of, then safely escaping back to his life of male privilege. Simon acknowledges the “perverse fantasy” that is his fleeting desire to marry a convicted murderess (389). Though he does not seem aware of it, he has lost all objectivity where Grace is concerned.