Child-Women and Primitives In the Fiction

Al i ce Munro of Alice Munro

by Beverly J. Rasporich

terpreted social faces. Moreover, from

her first book, through her novelf L ives of Girls and Women, to her last collec• tion of short stories, Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You, the sense of female alienation has become increas• ingly more strident. In such recent short stories as "Material" and "The In his foreword to Alice Munro's first Spanish Lady," the emotions of the nar• book of short stories, Dance of the rators, provoked by unsatisfactory and Happy Shades, Hugh Garner writes in deceptive relations with men, are ex• praise of her authorial ability to vi• posed as more blatantly hostile and talize "ordinary people in ordinary threatening than they have been in earl• situations living ordinary lives."(1) ier situations. One compares, for ex• The danger in this comment is that, as a ample, the ironic and inept gesture of half-truth, it belies the grotesque and the jilted Helen in "Postcard," yelling hysterical reality of Munro's "other" and honking her car horn outside her world which constantly challenges the newly wed lover's home,(2)with the nar• quiet and often nostalgic calm of what rator's scathing denunciation and hatred appears to be a fiction of simple obser• of male authority in "Material." In vation. That edge is there, particular• this last collection, the questioning ly in Munro's exploration of the femin• underground voice of Munro's women has ine psyche and its authentic life, a become more vocal. concern which is at the heart of her fiction. In her various and subtle That is not to say that the author, as renderings of female characters from she articulates the dilemmas of female childhood to old age, she probes the sexual identity, preaches simplistic or nature of their true identities beneath futuristic solutions. For Munro's nov• their artificial, disguised or misin- el istic art rests both on a haunted awareness of the complexity of all hu• other, p. 177), is a continuum in man relationships and on her historical Munro's female domain. Many of her or social intuition. Hers is a histor• contemporary figures with their inter• ical sense which is not self-conscious nalized conflicts and existential or academic as in the case of earlier quests for self-identity are caught Canadian novelists such as Hugh Mac- in the grip of old value systems; they Lennan, but one which is implicit—the are immature and insecure person• artist's sensitive response to the alities in process. environment he or she knows best. And unlike her character, Gabe, in The childish, unfulfilled character of "Material," Munro cannot erase "the Munro's women is most obvious in her language of her childhood."(3) Many domesticated aunties, grandmothers and of her female characters belong to a spinsters who inhabit a decaying gothic dying or defunct Faulkneresque world milieu of the small town Victorian of small town Southwestern Ontario, a past. Their sense of self, like Auntie world which is often made immediate Lou and Aunt Annie in "The Peace of through the narrator's remembrances of Utrecht" from Dance of the Happy Shades times past. And in her assessment of or Auntie Grace and Aunt Elspeth in feminine roles, there is a continual Lives revolves about being a member of anachronistic collision of the past the fam?1y,(A) a responsibility which with the present. Her recurrent demands dutiful self-sacrifice to characterizations of childish and parents or masculine ambition. (Lives, decorous Victorian women who, as they p. 27) Victims of the Victorian "grave, are subordinated by an older patri• accusing, Protestant" code ("The Peace archal order, betray sublimated and of Utrecht," p. 206), they play out strangled discontent, or those poor the nineteenth-century role of "angels white women, the Snopeses of rural in the kitchen."(5) Their houses become Ontario, who lash out with gestures "tiny sealed off countries" (Lives, of primitive, frustrated aggression, p. 50) where honesty, intellect and are part of the psychological land• overt sexuality are forbidden. Instead, scape of the author's contemporary these women live an ordered life of urban female consciousness. The intricate domestic and private social "edge of hysteria" (Somethi ng I've ritual, of elaborate verbal games or Been Meaning to Tell You, p. 177) un- childish pranks. From the sensitive, derlying such an artificial relation• developing heroine's point of view in ship as that of the two "modern" women Lives, the traditional polarity be• in "The Spanish Lady," centring their tween the masculine and feminine roles lives about an unspoken competition in the house at Jenkins' Bend, supports for the narrator's husband (we were a grotesque masquerade. She under• attracted to each other because of the stands that after the death of their man, or to the man because of each brother, Craig, her aunts' existence becomes one of stagnant disorientation: Del assumes the appropriate behaviour by They told their same stories, they quietly drinking her tea. And although played their same jokes, which now Del will make in adolescence that active seemed dried out, brittle with decision to do as men, "to go out and use; in time every word, every ex• take on all kinds of experiences and pression of the face, every flut• shuck off what they didn't want and ter of the hands came to seem come back proud," (p. 1^7) Munro leaves something learned long ago, per• her character, at the conclusion of the fectly remembered, and each of novel, distracted and indecisive—in an their two selves was seen to be elusive mental state, which, while something constructed with ter• lyrically satisfying to the reader, rible care; the older they got the still implies the old impotence in the more frail and admirable and in• lives of girls and women. human the construction appeared. This was what became of them when In "The Peace of Utrecht," a story iden• they no longer had a man with them, tified by Munro herself as autobiograph• to nourish and admire, and when ical, (6)the Young Mother, Helen, also they were removed from the place finds herself at the mercy of the past. where their artificiality bloomed Having escaped the restrictions of naturally. (Lives, p. 50) Jubilee, she returns to visit her un• married sister, Maddy, only to discover While Del is in revolt against those in a moment of angst that they too, like conventions which demand that she be Aunt Annie and Auntie Lou, may be trapped passive and puritan, she is not un• in the old insular and stylized relation• touched by their authority. At the ship: funeral of Uncle Craig she is particu• I have a fascinated glimpse of Maddy larly affected and defeated by the re• and myself, grown old, caught back pressive Calvinist denial of the life of in the web of sisterhood after the body. In response to the artifici• everything else has disappeared, ality and unnatura1ness of the funeral making tea for some young,loved and ritual, she exercises her "freedom" by essentially unimportant relative-- desperately biting her cousin. Yet, and exhibiting just such a polished not only does Del interpret her own relationship; what will anyone know physical act as one of evil alienation, of us? (p. 203) she also gives in to feelings of shame, Of Maddy we know very little except to an overwhelming horrible and obscene that in her secretive sexual rela• vision that: "To be made of flesh was tionship with Fred Powell and her own a humiliation." (p. 48) The "Fathers teasing ritualistic games, she has be• of Confederation " and the puritan Irish come absorbed by that country of family have their way when the child "quiet decaying side streets where old maids live and have bird baths and blue Here, the Victorian "web of sisterhood" delphiniums in their gardens." (p. 196) turns in upon itself with ghastly reper• In this story, the "feelings of hys• cussions. The old maid Et, who has al• teria" (p. 201) which once character• ways lived an ordered, watchful life on ized both sisters in their reaction to the fringes of her sister Char's, is their ailing "Gothic mother" and to overcome by her desire to protect, and Jubilee, has been dissipated in Maddy possess as her own, ,ier sister's hus• to the point of brittle nervousness and band. In Et, who begins to suspect replaced in the estranged Helen by a Char of slowly poisoning the husband, melancholic horror--a horror which is Arthur, Munro suggests the roots of a substantiated by the ancient faces of primal, immature female imagination: the old aunts who are childish virgins "She did think maybe she was going a locked into crumbling bodies. All four little strange, as old maids did; this women are overcome by the past in the fear of hers was like the absurd and insufficiency of their identities and harmless fears young girls sometimes the guilt they experience for their have, that they will jump out a window, failures and lack of responsibility in or strangle a baby, sitting in its family relationships. buggy." (p. 14) When Et, through an intimate knowledge of her sister's While Munro tends not to explore the psychology, occasions, or, at the very inner life of the Victorian child- least, thinks she has occasioned, her women i n Dance of the Happy Shades, i n sister's suicide, the reader is left Lives, she scratches the surface illu• with a grotesque insight into the con• sion of their personalities. Beneath fused, aggressive and hysterical spirit the facade of Grace's and Elspeth's of an old woman, whose emotional iden• girlish innocence, Del discovers an tity is frozen in her childish past. undercurrent of hostile emotion. They That easy transition from a girl turning have acquiesced to their civilized and cartwheels to a respectable town fix• subordinate positions but in their jokes ture has only been a superficial one, and conversations they betray "tiny for Et's desire to annihilate Char pro• razor cuts" (p. 31) of malice and a ceeds also from a vengeful childhood murderous disposition. The primitive jealousy. The awful irony in "Something motivation of Elspeth who playfully took I've Been Meaning To Tell You" is that the town's interpretation of Et as a the butcher knife, the "long wicked joking "terror" is, in fact, a serious knife" to the German immigrant, who had indication of a potent hostility. "the very devil of a temper, excuse my language" (p. 28) is more fully reali• zed in the chilling tale of her last For Alice Munro, the question of female volume, "Something I've Been Meaning To innocence is an ambiguous one. On the Tell You." one hand, the false Victorian code in its moral absolutism creates only its children whose retardation is of no con• fiction. When Del Jordan in Lives mis• sequence to her, she expresses her takenly prefers to interpret the saintliness. In her natural charity prostitute Peggy as either being in a Miss Marsalles hauntingly speaks to the condition of "perfect depravity" or more sophisticated narrator, and to the "sainthood" (p. 128), she ignores the reader, "from the other country where natural, ordinary, human character of she lives." (p. 224) Peggy's life. Later, Del will realize that all human relationships are much This "other country" as underlined by more complex and relative, that Munro has greater implications both for "People's lives in Jubilee, as else• her own philosophical view of reality where were du'l, simple, amazing and and the collective Canadian conscious• unfathomable~-deep caves paved with ness. In his "Conclusion" to a Li terary . kitchen linoleum." (p. 210) While History of Canada, Northrop Frye identi• Munro, in a great many of her stories fies the heart of all social mythology and particularly those which celebrate as the pastoral myth, the vision of a female sexual awakening, is denying the social ideal which romanticizes child• old strictures of a puritan value hood, nature or an earlier social con• system, she is also inclined to apoth• dition such as pioneer life, the small eosize and mourn the passing of the town, the habitant experience—that can Victorian ideal. be identified with chi1dhood.(7) He expla i ns: In her earlier short story, "Dance of The nostalgia for a world of peace the Happy Shades," Miss Marsalles, the and protection, with a spontaneous music teacher, and her sister are gen• response to the nature around it, uine innocents, "babies" (p. 218) who with a leisure and composure not to were "gay as invulnerable and childish be found today, is particularly people are; they appeared sexless, wild strong in Canada. It is overpower• and gentle creatures, bizarre yet domes• ing in our popular literature, from tic, living in their house in Rosedale Anne of Green Gables to Leacock's outside the complications of time" Mar? posa, and from Maria Chap- (p. 214); and who are able to give of delaine to Jake and the Kid. It is themselves in a way the cynical, middle present in all the fiction that class narrator cannot. Although Miss deals with small towns as collec• Marsalles is a grotesque and her way of tions of characters in search of an life a social masquerade, her commitment author, (p. 840) to musical integrity and her ideal view In "Dance of the Happy Shades" Munro is of children is generous. Ultimately, it in the process of exorcising this ghost is even truthful. In the "miracle" she and not without some regret. The women works with the "idiots," the retarded who patronize Miss Marsalles are drawn together by an allegiance to the One compares, for example, the child "ceremonies of their childhood, to a on the verge of becoming a girl in more exacting pattern of life which had "Boys and Girls" in the first volume been breaking apart even then but which of stories with the child Helena in survived, and unaccountably still sur• "The Executioners" of Someth i ng I've vived, in Miss Marsalles1 living room." Been Meaning To Tell You. In both (p. 215) There is for them,then, a stories the rural bush environment certain security in the naive parlour is not that of the Hudson's Bay Com• world of the music teacher, with her pany calendar with its scenes of heroic tidily wrapped year end gift-books, adventurers and magnificent noble sav• Northern Lakes and Rivers, Knowing the ages, but that of practical living, of Bi rds , More Tales by Grey Owl, Li ttle skinning foxes, of shooting unproductive Mission Friends and her pictures of ten• horses, of landscapes where "ribbons of der childish nudity, "Cupid Awake and dog urine ran down by the shoveled Cupid Asleep," "After the Bath," "The paths." ("The Executioners," p. 142) In Little Vigilantes." (p. 216) In fact, the first story, the child who rebels these romantic attitudes may even be against becoming "only a girl" (p. 127) displays a malevolent intention in dan• preferable to the narrator's perspec• gerously tricking her brother onto a tive which is ironically displayed rafter, but finally assumes the sen• as an ugly new puritanism, a "sophis• timental ideal role of sensitive and ticated prudery" which interprets life-giving female, when she allows the tenderness as ridiculous and dis• horse, who is about to be shot, to go gusting, (p. 216) free. Neither the girl, nor the reader, nor Munro herself knows, at the conclu• Yet finally, Munro must reject Miss Mar• sion of the story, whether this positive salles' country. Although the author is romantic gesture is natural or has been still in a sense influenced by the bred into her. The second story is much romantic tradition in her idealization more menacing. Here, children are of childhood memory and in her posture "deadly innocent" (p. 138), the natural of exposing the restrictive unnatural- world is one where wolves eat babies ness of social conventions, she prefers (p. 143), and the social one of revenge not to sentimentalize nature, childhood and murder. The child, Helena, becomes and primitive responses. Instead she a psychological accomplice of the exe• espouses a Darwinian naturalism which cutioners, Jimmy and Duval, who are re• may be frightening but which for her sponsible for the death of Stump Troy is more realistic—especially as it and his son. But if Helena becomes the relates to the female identity. The "bad seed" in her vision of revenge on reader senses as well that this attit• Howard Troy, ude has become gradually stronger in the development of her fiction. Punishments. I thought of myself walking on Howard Troy's eyes. (Dance of the Happy Shades, p. 51) Driving spikes into his eyes. The Girls and women like Lois in this story, spikes would be on the soles of my the grandmother in "A Trip To The Coast" shoes, they would be long and from Dance of the Happy Shades, Uncle sharp. His eyeballs would bulge Benny's child-wife in Lives and Robina out, unprotected, as big as over• of "The Executioners" are not without turned basins, and I would walk on artifice and pathetic illusions but them, puncturing, flattening, when, in their various defeats, they bloodying, at a calm pace- ... I respond like trapped animals, they seem would have liked his head torn to exercise for Munro a base and primal from his body, flesh pulpy and dignity. Their hysterical responses are dripping like watermelon, limbs as insufficient and as immature as those wrenched away; axes, saws, knives of the maiden aunts and Victorian and hammers applied to him. ladies, but somehow, they are actively (p. 149) satisfying. it is because, as a girl, she is frustrated and powerless to deny his Lois "shows those guys" whom she allows supercilious sexual threats. to take class and sexual advantage of her, when she calls out abusively, In Munro's country innocence is "Thanks for the ride!" (p. 58) The neither inherent nor affordable by grandmother in "A Trip To The Coast," is those "primitive" females living in not garishly disguised by her clothes unprotected natural conflict with man or wel1-turned out as many of the and animal on the edge of civilization. "ladies" are, but what she seems, she is: In "Thanks For the Ride," the narrator, a monkeyish, malevolent old woman. In a man, discovers in the home of Lois in her confrontation with death, she dies "Mission Creek - Gateway to the Bruce," fearful, but willfully victorious. a primitive knowledge that is not part Madeline of the Flats Road in Lives, of his decorous world: with her string of oaths directed at I noticed an old woman .... Some Del and her weapon, a Kotex box, thrown of the smell in the house seemed in temper at Charlie Buckle, expresses to come from her. It was the a crazy, raging power. Similarly, the smell of hidden decay, such as one-armed Robina in "The Executioners" there is when some obscure little who slaps Helena into complicity, may animal has died under the verandah be from an adult viewpoint, "absurd, .... I thought: my mother, obsessed, not very clean" (p. 154) but George's mother, they are inno• she retains a sense of her own author• cent. Even George, George is in• ity. She is "a chief." (p. 144) Un• nocent. But these others are born like Helena, who will ironically and sly and sad and knowing. predictably grow up to be a civil ser- vant, or Del Jordan, or for that mat• aged woman in "Tell Me Yes or No," who ter, the prevailing self-conscious understands in retrospect that her un• voice of Munro's narrators, these questioning domestic life of the fifties women are not complicated by Calvinist was rooted in the old way, in "a love of guilt or by convoluted mental lives. limits" (Something I've Been Meaning To And it seems that for Munro's modern Tell You, p. 107), is looking, confused• urban female characters this kind of ly, for something else. But with freedom gesture may be their only active de• comes the dangers and terrors of chaos-- fense. The betrayed wife in "The of letting loose and facing our most Spanish Lady" imagines her expression of elemental and undisguised selves. The hatred as that of the wife in God's hopeful fear of the young girl, May, Little Acre, kicking, screaming and in "A Trip To The Coast," who watches slapping the bare bodies of her husband to see if her grandmother's dominant and her fr'end. Finally, she is able will can be broken by the hypnotist, to release her rage by howling in "amaz• may be seen as a central informing ing protest" and "I put my arm across my metaphor in the writer's conception open mouth and to stop the pain I bite of the female crisis: "If her grand• it, I bite my a rm,. . ." (Somethi ng I've mother capitulated it would be as un• Been Meaning To Tell You, p~. 181) settling an event as an earthquake or flood; it would crack the foundations The central feminine dilemma in Munro's of her life and set her terrifyingly literature is that of being caught in free." (p. 188) Without order, limits the grip of past memory and past value and roles, we are inviting the hazard• systems and thus, of being unable to ous and lonely existential quest of enact meaningfully the present or re• self-determination; with them, we have construct the future. The security of in the past been victimized by mascu• the old ideal which interprets such a line control and had our instinctive character as the elderly Aunt Madge in emotional lives retarded. "Winter Wind," "she could have been held up as an example, an ideal wife, except Ironically, in her most immediate por• that she gave no impression of sacri• trayals of present woman, the "terr- fice, of resignation, of doing one's fying freedom" has evolved regressively duty, such as is looked for in ideals" into the same static design of the (Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You, past. With a melancholic eye, Munro p. 199~n is comfortable, because it dis- dramatizes characters who have adopted allows the risks of coming to knowone- a new set of unnatural rituals and dis• self. In the last analysis, however, guises. The mother June in "Memorial" comfort and order pall. Old Et in with her sense of social obligation at "Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You" her son's memorial service is no less finally hungers for chaos and the middle- bizarre than the old aunts at Uncle Craig's funeral in Lives. In her desire hood. Jeanette was the first one to fend off chaos by imposing order, she had seen close up and in the June has simply substituted new fashions flesh. It used to be that young and ideology for old. Garments of boys and girls would try to look "exotic poverty" (Something I've Been like grown up men and women, often Meaning To Tell You, p. 214) have re- with ridiculous results. Now placed the carefully constructed dress there were grown men and women who of the older generation; a mechanical tried to look like teenagers, un- Freudian psychology operates in lieu of ti,l, presumably, they woke up on the Calvinist code, and the "morality of the brink of old age. It was a consumerism" has replaced the old Protes• strange thing to see the child al• tant materialism, (p. 210) Even the ready meeting the old woman in knowing older sister Eileen, who welcomes Jeanette's face . . . with a disorder and natural expression, is change of light or mood or body gravely impaired in her search for the chemistry this same face showed authentic life: itself bruised, bluish, sharp, skin She discovered in herself these days more than a little shriveled under an unattractive finickiness about the eyes. A great deal had simply some things, about clothes, for in• been skipped out. (Something I' ve stance and decoration. A wish to Been Meaning To Tell You, p. 160) Jeanette, a thirtyish woman in childish avoid fraud, not to appropriate dress, who relates with suppressed hys• serious things for trivial uses, teria the fiction of Marrakesh is an un• not to mock things by making them developed horror equal to Munro's most into fashions. A doomed wish. She gothie Victorian child-women. And cer• herself offended, (p. 211) tainly her masquerade is far more in• Perhaps Munro's most damning portrait of sidious than that of her grandmother's self-mockery is of the career woman, who, puritanical and convention-ridden, Jeanette in "Marrakesh." As she juxta• at least has a sense of self- poses the old school teacher, the preservation . grandmother Dorothy, with her grand• daughter, the college professor, Munro indicates an ironic, repetitious pat• If Alice Munro, as she seeks to unmask tern of immaturity and posturing. With the fraudulent lives of girls and women, the wisdom of experience and the older fails to determine either what women by virtue of common sense, Dorothy attempts nature are, or what they could be, it is to unravel the "heiroglyph" (p. 166) of because, by her own reckoning, she is her granddaughter's identity: not a "problem solver."(8) Moreover, Dorothy had seen pictures in maga• the shifting perspectives of her femin• zines of this new type of adult who ine voice may undermine a logical or appeared to have discarded adult• consistent philosophy, but in a histor- ical sense, they are an evocative and In her short stories and her novel, instinctive articulation of society in Alice Munro's "connections" convinc• transition, and of women in search of ingly interpret people and "the themselves. Neither can a sophisticated stories they carry around with them." reader demand of an artist casual so• (Something I've Been Meaning To Tell lutions to the question of human iden• You, p. 201) tity. As Munro herself realizes, the pursuit of psychological truth and, indeed, the artistic dilemma itself, of imposing a subjective fictional order on objective reality, is

fraught with the perils of distortion NOTES and deception. One can easily accept 1. Hugh Garner, "Foreword," Dance of the Happy Shades (Toronto, 1968), vl1. her artistic credo, however, which she expresses in the short story, 2. Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades, p. 143. 3. Alice Hunro, Someth i ngi I ' ve Been Meaning To Tell You (Toronto, 1971!), "Winter Wind." While the author may P- 25- be a master trickster, shaping and 4. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (New York, 1971), p. W. altering people and experience to 5- This is an expression used by Walter Houghton in The Victorian Frame of Hind (New Haven, 1957), p. 352. It refers to the Victorian Ideal of suit her purpose, facts themselves woman wherein sexuality and emotions were repressed as motherhood, In• are secondary to the writer's secret dustry and domesticity were elevated. 6. Alice Munro in Eleven Canadian Novelists, Interviewed by Graeme Gibson insight into human nature, to her belief (Toronto, 1973), p. 258- that "we get messages another way, that 7. Northrop Frye (n Literary History of Canada, ed. Carl F. Kllnck (Toronto, we have connections that cannot be in• 1965), p. 840. vestigated but have to be relied on." 8. Alice Munro in Eleven Canadian Novelists, p. 242.