From infancy, our expectations and desires are shaped by the media around us; from what we eat and how we dress, to what we expect from love. Young girls encounter numerous displays of the hapless woman, vulnerable and meek, with the guaranteed happy ending when she meets her white knight. Upon reaching adulthood this illusion can be quickly shattered upon meeting the real-life Nice Guy™. The Nice Guy™ goes by many different names (‘white knight’, ‘Florence Nightingale’, ‘romantic saviour’ – to name but a few) and looks just like anyone else, but they have the desperate need to save you from yourself.
The Nice Guy™ goes by many different names (‘white knight’, ‘Florence Nightingale’, ‘romantic saviour’ – to name but a few) and looks just like anyone else, but they have the desperate need to save you from yourself.
Following the success of HBO’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017, much attention has been given to another miniseries adapted from a Margaret Atwood novel: Alias Grace. The novel is based on the true story of the Irish-Canadian servant Grace Marks who was accused and convicted of murdering her master Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery with the help of the stable hand in 1843. It is a fictionalised version of events, with the addition of potential characters Grace might have encountered during the discussion of the case for sake of plot – namely our Nice Guy™, Dr. Jordan. The relationships that Grace develops with these characters, however, is reflective of the popular narratives that sprung up around her at the time.
Prisons in the 19th century were open to the public. Similar to a zoo, visitors would come and sit in front of murderers and debtors as if they were wild animals. The physical discomfort that this caused is well depicted at the beginning of the first episode, as Grace sits stiffly on her bed with Nice Guy™ psychologist, Dr. Jordan, peering in at her as he promises to help her case. The media has latched on to Grace’s story, focusing in particular on her youth and dire state of mind. While a vast majority of the contemporary public assumed Grace was guilty, there were a substantial number who believed her innocent. These people thought she had been manipulated into taking part in the murders by the stable hand who had taken advantage of her vulnerability. In a particularly sinister twist central to the plot of the series, Dr. Jordan is hired by members of this minority to discover if there is anything in her past that might indicate she is insane, or, at least, has been driven to insanity. If the doctor finds her to be insane, she may be pardoned. The public long for her to be insane, they relish in the image of a vulnerable young woman taken advantage of due to the lack of control over her own mind. This fetishisation of women with mental health issues goes hand in hand with the romantic saviour complex Dr. Jordan represents.
Dr. Jordan is as entranced by Grace’s story as the group who fight for her pardon. She recounts her life story to him, beginning with her voyage on the ship over from Ireland to her journey to Toronto on the day of the murder. He hangs on to her every word, his fascination with her struggle to make a living and overcome her traumatic childhood gradually developing into an obsession. He has sexually explicit dreams about her, where she is completely consenting and reciprocates all affections he gives her – but they do not have any real-life interactions that would suggest this ever happening. I admit that I may not be well-versed in mid-nineteenth-century standards of ethics for medical practitioners, but I doubt the spurring on of these dreams by graphic depictions of the torture Grace was subject to in prison was ever acceptable behaviour. The director of Alias Grace, Mary Harron (American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page), did little to mask the perverseness of his actions, with his final dream of them together taking place hours after she graphically tells him about a scar on her chest which she was left with after she fainted and almost impaled herself on the courtroom railing. The reason behind Dr. Jordan’s interest is as clear as day: he gets pleasure from her pain and at the possibility of him lessening it. Grace, however, does not escape the White Knight paradox by shaking off Dr. Jordan. She continues to be subjected to the same behaviour fifteen years later when she marries Jamie Walsh, a farmhand who testified against her in the trial – the proposal acting as a way of gaining her forgiveness. He uses Grace in a multitude of ways now he has “saved” her; he now has a woman to keep his home, to help on the farm, and to satisfy him sexually.
The romantic saviour has been exposed, the darkness of his reality and purpose laid bare. The white knight is dead.
It is important to note that it will take more than just six hour-long episodes of a Netflix original to expose and improve the structural problems of our society. This is most clear in a statement that actor Edward Holcroft who plays Dr. Jordan in the 2017 miniseries, made when questioned about the script. Holcroft said that, when he read it, he felt that “it was a love story… amongst all the sort of terrible events that happen around it, there was this, at the base of it, which I thought was moving.” Even the actor playing the role of “saviour” Dr. Jordan cannot break away from the White Knight complex and continues to see the fruition of this dysfunctional relationship as a potential happy ending for Grace.
It is impossible to tell who Grace Marks really was and what she did or did not do. Grace never gave another account to contradict the confession she gave in court. Though her collective and romantic saviours reveled in her victimhood and desired her innocence, Alias Grace and its fictionalised version of her case conveys a hope that society might be gradually ridding itself of its affection for men like Dr. Jordan – the self-designated saviour that the protagonist never wanted or requested – whilst also casting a critical eye on the fetishisation of mental health issues.
