Margaret Atwood's novel, Alias Grace
tells the story of a murder from the perspective of one of the accused murderers. Grace
Marks has been institutionalized because she has no recollection of participating in the
murder. A young doctor interviews her in the hopes of discovering her innocence, and we
learn the story through her words and memories.
The images
you mention, those of jellyfish and birdcages, occur in the first chapter of the book.
Grace is describing the ladies that come to visit the home of the Governor. She is in
charge of cleaning up the parlor after the visiting ladies have left, a job that she was
given because of her good behavior at the institution. Grace describes the ladies in
their billowing dresses, saying:
They are like swans, drifting along on unseen
feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our
house.
She first thinks of
jellyfish because its shape is like that of the skirts of the upper-class ladies. But
she extends the metaphor:
They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully
waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the
sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly
water.
The ladies, like
jellyfish, are delicate and only able to survive in a very contained environment. The
metaphor of the birdcage is similar. Grace begins by using the birdcage to describe the
ladies' crinolines and underclothes, then extends the metaphor
again:
They
are like birdcages; but what is being caged in? Legs, the legs of ladies; legs penned
in so they cannot get out and go rubbing up against the gentlemen's
trousers.
Again, the image of
the birdcage is used to emphasize the ladies confinement, both physically in the hooped
skirts, and metaphorically into a certain mode of behavior.
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