Atwood explores the mysteries of memory through the narration of both Grace and Simon. Both have issues with their memories: Grace claims to have no memory of the murders of Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear, and as Simon works with Grace, he loses his focus, sense of purpose, and his memory for the details of what Grace tells him. The longer he works with her, the more confused he gets.

Grace has many traumatic memories: the death of her mother on the Atlantic crossing, Mary Whitney’s death after a botched abortion, and the murders of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery. Though she remembers her mother and Mary’s deaths, both deaths are followed by long periods of unconsciousness and memory loss. Grace’s inability to remember the murders speaks to the trauma she endured in the past and her current inability to cope with what is happening to her.

According to the psychological understanding of the times, which was beginning to grasp the workings of the mind that post-Freud, twentieth-century culture takes for granted, Grace is either shamming for attention or insane. There is no middle ground. Simon’s approach in trying to help her recover her actual memories without judgment is a modern one, though fitting for the cutting-edge of the time.

Furthermore, Simon’s interest in dreams as a window into the unconscious is a modern idea. The exploration of dreams for clues as to what memories may be hidden in the unconscious forms a thread that Atwood uses throughout the novel to reveal the workings of both Grace’s and Simon’s minds and memories.

Significantly, Simon receives a head injury during the Civil War that takes away his memory, along with his belief that he wants to work with lunatics or to build an asylum. After his experience with Grace, it’s as if he cannot bear to remember the blows dealt to both his career and his private reputation in Kingston. 

Victorian society as presented in this novel retains a rigid code of behavior and constraining social rules that proscribe the interactions between all people, but particularly between men and women, and between and within social classes. In this novel, Simon’s narrations frequently reveal differences in standards between women of his social class and women of lower social classes. Simon also frequently chafes against the social constraints he experiences as a “gentleman.” Women of the upper class, without a doubt, are constrained within an extremely narrow range of acceptable behavior. Grace’s narration displays the expectations for working-class women and the serious consequences for any women who stray outside of those expectations.

Women, such as Lydia and Mrs. Humphrey, transgress against their sphere, and to an extent their social position saves them. Rachel Humphrey pays a social price for her affair with Simon, but soon enough becomes a widow. With time, people may forget what order those events came in; meanwhile her social position saves her from complete disaster. Working-class women, such as Mary Whitney and Nancy Montgomery, transgress and pay with their lives. That message is clear.

Men transgress, whatever their social class, and rarely pay the price that women do. For example, Simon Jordan loses his reputation, but not his life or livelihood, through his affair with Rachel Humphrey. Thomas Kinnear loses the respect of his friend’s wives, but not his friends, through his affair with Nancy Montgomery. With position and money, social transgressions amongst the upper class can be smoothed over.

As Atwood’s title reveals, Grace has many aliases, or identities, in this novel. Some identities she creates for herself: the personality she displays with Simon Jordan, the impression she deliberately creates the many times she says things that she believes Mary Whitney would say, and even perhaps the identity she portrays to the Tuesday evening crowd under hypnosis. However, Grace is also given multiple, powerful identities by others: murderess, innocent dupe, idiot, beautiful sexual object, and cunning, deceitful manipulator. Virtually everyone who meets Grace, both before and after her arrest, has a vision of who they believe she is.

As a result, Grace has trouble identifying herself independently; for example, several times she calls herself a murderess. Such a self-identification could be a form of confession or simply a weakness in allowing others to define her. Through Grace’s struggle to define herself, Atwood holds a mirror to the ways in which identity is constructed. Partly self-determined, partly socially derived, and always at the mercy of inner conflict and emotion, identity seems to be a fluid, evolving entity. In the end, Jamie Walsh’s romantic vision of sixteen-year-old Grace with a daisy chain in her hair “saves” her. Her last identity is a respectable wife, and perhaps, mother.

The only successful “rebel” is Jeremiah the peddler, who remakes himself two more times during the novel. He completely transforms into his alias identities, surviving and moving on to another identity at will. His character proves that an identity is merely an alias, put on at will and just as easily changed.

The other characters, however, remain trapped within their proscribed identities. Simon Jordan exemplifies such a “trapped” identity. Unable to resolve the conflicts within himself, he collapses and then loses his memory of who he is. At the end of the novel, it seems that he is completely only his mother’s son. He has no independent identity left.