Motive, Maturity and Mary

At the end of Chapter 25, we start seeing that Grace might have some motive for killing Nancy Montgomery. When first arriving at Thomas Kinnear's house, Grace sees Nancy as someone who just seems to be looking out for her best interest and after losing her dear friend Mary, Grace looks up to her as the only support system she has left. However, the relationship between Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear is already being implied in this part of the book, and jealousy is getting in the way of Nancy and Grace's friendship. Grace begins to feel like a scapegoat and her labor is being abused when she is blamed for ironing and putting away a shirt with a button missing, when Grace recalls, "... Nancy had been in the wrong twice,f or that shirt must have been washed and ironed by her, before I was ever anywhere near; and so she gave me a list of chores as long as your arm, and went flouncing out of the room and down the stairs, and out into the yard, and began scolding McDermott for not cleaning her shoes properly that morning." (Atwood 262). This moment is almost heartbreaking for Grace because when she was hired by Nancy, she felt they were going to become good friends, almost like sisters, just as she had with Mary Whitney, but she quickly realizes that this isn't the way that things are going to be. The motive isn't as obvious in this scene, but it does demonstrate that Grace wasn't too fond of her and wouldn't be overly appalled if the idea of killing her was brought up by James McDermott.

Although Nancy no longer proves to have the potential of acting as Grace's sisterly figure, I began to see that Grace no longer needed one. During her stay at the Asylum, she's endured a lot of harassment which would seem  to make her even more fragile than she already is at her young age. However, during her sessions with Dr. Jordan, she appears to be very level-headed, and very mature. She's grown very quickly throughout the book, and I'm starting to see a bit of Mary Whitney in her personality, as she's beginning to see things the same way she did such as the why men act the way they do, and she's more aware of the unfairness of the gender roles and class structure put in place by society. I don't think that Grace's growth is over quite yet, and she still has many things to learn for herself and she still has many things to discover while at Thomas Kinnear's house.