Priya

You can find the trial transcripts, and Grace's and McDermott's confessions at the link below. It's interesting to see just how skilfully Atwood wove the historical material into her fictional narrative: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=aeu.ark:/13960/t5hb0b571;view=1up;seq=6

I've got some thoughts about how Dr. Jordan is depicted in the book vs. the show, and his ultimate fate in both: In the book, Dr. Jordan is somewhat less gentlemanly than he is in the show. He's had dalliances with prostitutes and servant girls (so he's not so different from Mary's seducer or Kinnear), he flirts with Lydia and leads her on without ever intending to propose, his attitude towards Grace is ambivalent and somewhat predatory, and his relationship with his landlady isn't a one-time thing, it's a protracted, seedy affair that ends when he callously abandons her. In the show, he seems more upright and honorable. Perhaps this is partly because he has no voiceover, so we aren't privy to his more unpleasant thoughts, but it might be a deliberate choice on Polley's and Harron's part. While the voyeuristic element of his interest in Grace is retained, in the show he's more tender with her, and he never oversteps his professional boundaries. Also, he comes to an understanding of the plight of women in general, and Grace's plight in particular, that his book counterpart never achieves. So, how does this play into the ending? In the book, he goes off to fight in the civil war and sustains a head injury which causes memory loss. His mother then takes advantage of his physical and mental debility, and gets him married to a woman named Faith (whom he has already made clear he has no interest in). He never regains his faculties fully, and he continually confuses his wife with Grace. At the end of the show, he seems disabled to a greater degree than in the book. He's basically a comatose vegetable, until his mother reads him Grace's final letter, which causes him to respond by murmuring her name. Even though he's still in a pathetic state, the fact that he responds suggests to me that he might eventually be restored to himself. Considering that he had initially hoped to cure Grace of her amnesia, it would be nicely ironic if instead she helped to cure his.

This may not be such an unpopular opinion but I think the new adaptation is a failure from top to bottom. The abuse scenes are tedious, Amybeth McNulty's performance is strident and charmless, and all the small, quiet moments in the book have been overshadowed by heaps of manufactured drama (grifters, financial ruin, premature deaths, abortive suicide attempts, etc.). One major misstep was turning Anne into a proto-feminist (and even genuine feminists of that era wouldn't have uttered sentiments like, "A girl can do anything a boy can, and more."). Anne isn't really a story about a rebel, it's a story about an outsider who yearned for acceptance and eventually found it. Frankly, if Moira Walley-Beckett wanted to tell a dark, gritty story about late Victorian-era Canadian girlhood, she would have done better to adapt the Emily of New Moon novels, rather than twisting Anne of Green Gables into something it's not. There's far more genuine darkness and proto-feminism in the Emily books, and there hasn't been a good adaptation of them yet.