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.