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“A Washing Away, a Vanishing”: Living with and Dying From

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“A Washing Away, a Vanishing”: Living with and Dying From Master of Arts – Integrated Studies “A WASHING AWAY, A VANISHING”: LIVING WITH AND DYING FROM CANCER IN THE SHORT FICTION OF ALICE MUNRO By JENNIFER JANE BETTIOL Integrated Studies Project submitted to Dr. Jolene Armstrong in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts – Integrated Studies Athabasca, Alberta June 2016 Bettiol 1 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 3 Dedication 4 Body of Paper 5 Bibliography 27 Bettiol 2 Abstract While twenty-three of Alice Munro’s short stories mention cancer, this disease is an important theme in the ten stories that form the basis of this paper. Munro admits that her fiction is often based on autobiography. As Munro has aged, her stories have increasingly focused on illness and dying. Half of the ten cancer stories considered in this paper were published after Munro’s 1993 cancer scare, while three of these tales were published after she had cancer around 2009. The ten stories reviewed for this paper reflect Munro’s overarching literary style. While seemingly realistic on the surface, these multi-layered tales are often ambiguous, open to interpretation, elusive, and lacking in closure. However, in her portrayal of the effect of cancer on patients and on their families, Munro puts aside much of her customary ambiguity, and depicts the emotional journey of the terminally-ill – such as their wavering will to live, contemplation of suicide, need for reconciliation, and ultimate acceptance of death – as well as the inadmissible thoughts of family members and friends in an honest and persuasive manner. Due to Munro’s masterful understanding of human psychology and her careful use of narrative viewpoint, her depiction of the emotional effect of the cancer is consistent with medical and psychological research and with the experiences of my family and friends who have had cancer. Whether writing about her own encounters with cancer or from her creative imagination, Munro grasps the emotional effects of cancer on the patient and on the patient’s family and acquaintances. Bettiol 3 Acknowledgements Thanks to my wonderful professors in the MAIS program, Drs. Cornelia Burian, Carolyn Greene, Gregory Johnson, Lisa Micheelsen, Josipa Petrunic, Joseph Pivato, Lynda Ross, and Veronica Thompson. I am especially grateful for Dr. Jolene Armstrong’s kind guidance with this project. Many thanks to my online “study buddy,” Tori MacLean, my friends, my sisters, Liz, Casey, Gillian, and Margot Ready, and my sons, David and Michael, for your encouragement and support during my three years in this program. Jiro and Abby, you are the best “study dog” and “study cat” ever. Special thanks to my husband, Dennis, who, after seeing me through my Chartered Accountancy exams more than three decades ago, suddenly had to endure living with a student again. Thanks for delivering all the cups of tea and glasses of wine to my desk, and for making so many delicious meals. Most of all, many thanks for your unfailing support and encouragement. Bettiol 4 Dedication This paper is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Nancy Jane Grant Ready and Charles Bennett Ready, who instilled in me a love of reading and a desire to learn at an early age, and to my dear friend, Anastasia (Tessy) Perri, who recently passed away. Bettiol 5 After reading fourteen volumes of Alice Munro’s collected works last summer, I was transfixed by her talent to craft captivating short fiction. However, I also felt emotionally raw and almost depressed, for Munro’s writing “is often intensely uncomfortable to read” (Carrington 5). Part of this discomfort comes from the “underlying sadness” (Smythe “Sad” 495) in her stories, with illness and “the inevitability of death hover[ing] over much of Munro’s fiction” (Carrington 38). I found her stories that touch on cancer especially compelling, since they echoed the experiences of my father, other family members, and friends who have lived with and often died from this disease. In keeping with Munro’s reputation as “one of the foremost writers of psychological fiction in English” (Awano 180), her depiction of the emotional effect of cancer on patients and their families is consistent with medical and psychological research. Known for carefully choosing the narrative point of view of her stories (Duncan 1), Munro uses viewpoint to enhance her portrayal of a disease that has “a powerful, deadly hold over the collective imagination” of modern society (Mitchell 11). Although Alice Munro once admitted that “all her writing was ‘in essence autobiographical’ ” (Alice Munro qtd. in Sheila Munro 38), her cancer scare occurred in 1993 (Thacker Writing 473) and her cancer battle happened within the last decade (The Globe and Mail). Therefore, in crafting her believable portraits of living with cancer, Munro has had to draw upon her ability to “imagine[] reality accurately” (Kent Thompson qtd. in Sheila Munro 38), especially in her earlier fiction. The stories on cancer reviewed for this paper are representative of Munro’s overarching literary style. They are often open to interpretation (Michael Ravitch qtd. in Blin 46), full of “paradoxes” (W. R. Martin qtd. in Nunes 14), replete with “cryptically expressed reality” (Duncan 18), and lacking in “closure” (Heller). However, in her portrayal of the effect of cancer on patients, their Bettiol 6 families, and their acquaintances, Munro puts aside much of her customary elusiveness, and depicts their emotional journey in a persuasive manner. Munro’s twelve original collections of short fiction1 and her two “ ‘open-form’ novels” (Carrington 3)2 contain 148 stories3 in total. Since her fiction is characteristically multi-layered, with at least one “story-within-the-story” (Smythe “Sad” 503), a Munro tale rarely has just one theme. Since many Munro stories have multiple instances of illness, dying, and death, the following thematic analysis is based on selecting cancer as the theme in any story where it is mentioned. For example, although “Free Radicals” contains a heart attack death, a triple murder, a car-accident death, and a patient with terminal cancer, it has been classified as a story where “cancer is mentioned.” Number of Story Theme Stories Does not mention death or aging 44 Deaths only from murder or suicide 10 Comments on aging without reference to death 6 Includes death from natural causes (other than cancer), or accidental death, or terminal illness without death 65 Cancer is mentioned 23 Total number of stories 148 1 Dance of the Happy Shades, Dear Life, Friend of My Youth, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Love of a Good Woman, The Moons of Jupiter, Open Secrets, The Progress of Love, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, Too Much Happiness, and The View from Castle Rock. 2 Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are? 3 This total includes the quasi-autobiographical essays in The View from Castle Rock. Bettiol 7 In some of Munro’s stories where cancer is mentioned, it is merely noted in passing. Therefore, the analysis of Munro’s depiction of living with and dying from cancer in this paper will be based on ten stories where cancer is a fairly important theme (“Child’s Play,” “Day of the Butterfly,” “Floating Bridge,” “Free Radicals,” “Goodness and Mercy,” “Half a Grapefruit,” “Oranges and Apples,” “Princess Ida,” “Some Women,” and “Train”). Occasional references will also be made to three additional stories where cancer is mentioned (“Friend of My Youth,” “In Sight of the Lake,” and “Night”) and to the autobiographical story, “What Do You Want to Know For?” Munro is acclaimed for the seeming realism of her stories. Magdalene Redekop suggests that, after reading a Munro tale, a reader will think, “Aha . she’s got it just right . .” (Mothers 3). However, Karen Smythe cautions that “what seems to be reality on the surface of Munro’s texts is not necessarily real” (“Sad” 496). Is Munro’s fictive portrayal of the experience of living with and dying from cancer lifelike . or is it just superficially realistic? Like Munro’s complex and multi-layered fiction, cancer is a multi-faceted illness, since “cancer” is an “umbrella term for about 200 different diseases all triggered by a rapaciously cloning cell” (Mitchell 71). Cancer is “more feared than heart disease” since dying from heart disease “can be instantaneous, an easy death” (Susan Sontag qtd. in Vrinten and Wardle 173)4. Better cancer treatments (Vrinten and Wardle 172) have led to a “prolongation of life in the face of death” (Nissim et al. 361), as well as to “long and protracted” deaths from the disease (Vrinten 4 However, Vrinten and Wardle report that 40% of the participants in their survey of middle- aged and older adults felt that “cancer could be ‘the best way to die’ ” (176; emphasis removed) since it gives the person time to prepare for death (173). Bettiol 8 and Wardle 172). It is not surprising, therefore, that a study in the UK in 2005 found that the fear of cancer has not declined (Mitchell 12). As Munro points out in “Night,” even the word cancer has alarming connotations, making “you think of some dark rotting ill-smelling creature that you would not look at even while you kicked it out of the way” (273). In “Train,” Belle is so frightened of a potential cancer diagnosis that she has to be “persuaded to pay attention to” (190) a suspicious lump in her breast. Belle may be afraid of more than impending death. She may fear how cancer will change her life. Life is never the same after a cancer diagnosis. Even a non-life-threatening cancer diagnosis – such as the one that a member of my family received seven years ago – is incredibly disturbing, and may leave the patient (and family) feeling vulnerable and unsafe (Willig 417).
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