RESEARCH PAPER
Dr. Barbra Nightingale
ENC 1102.
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STUDENT
Dr. Barbra Nightingale
ENC 1102
Alice Munro’s Message
Alice Munro
reveals, through her female protagonists, that women can escape from their internal
turmoil, and become strong and independent, by learning from or accepting their
mistakes. It is easy, as a woman, to
identify with Munro’s characters. It is
easy to get lost as you navigate her words, all the while nodding in agreement
or smiling when you recognize yourself in either, “An Ounce of Cure,” “Wild
Swans,” “Prue,” or “
Munro draws upon her own life to create her fictitious short stories that force you to weigh the decisions you have made and how they characterize you. You reflect on the pieces of your own puzzle. The foundation for her short stories are not autobiographical, but, “she does claim an “emotional reality” for her characters that is drawn from her own life” (Meyer 448). This makes her words feel so real and believable. Munro’s experiences are not unlike experiences all women have lived themselves at one time or another. What woman has not loved the wrong man, or done something to cause embarrassment to herself? The road between adolescence and adulthood is a scary, lonely journey. What woman hasn’t felt vulnerable and yet defiant? What mother hasn’t felt that nagging maternal guilt penetrating her heart from a lapse in maternal responsibility, or from not being fully appreciative of her own beautiful life? We have all had second chances. It’s what we do with those second chances that define us. “Munro's talent lies in presenting these ordinary experiences so that they appear extraordinary, invested with a kind of magic” (Ross). Life is complex. Life, and living it to the fullest, is challenging. Munro makes you explore yourself on a sort of therapeutic journey.
These four short stories are classic Munro, “in their treatment of female characters who both long to be a part of a relationship or community and need to stand on their own in order to discover what is truly valuable to them” (Meyer 450). In “An Ounce of Cure” Munro depicts an adolescent girl in love who is distraught over being dumped for another girl by her boyfriend, and experiments with the heartbreak cure of alcohol. Time, and a tarnished reputation later, she realizes who she really is despite what others think of her. All that really matters is what you think of yourself. In time people forget and someone else becomes the gossip. This is a typical rite of passage, “a shameless, marvelous, shattering absurdity of life” (Munro 458). Munro shows this in a humorous way in “An Ounce of Cure”. Munro “maneuvers the vehicle of short story […] to illuminate her great themes: love’s mercurial spirit; the unexpectedness of passion, the chaos hovering just below the surface of things; the strange, often comical, desires of the human heart” (ACN).
“
“Munro’s protagonists tend to be women of her own generation, who found themselves caught between traditional gender roles and new possibilities in the wake of the ’sexual revolution.’ They battle against their own desire to accept the apparent security of conventional relationships with men. Munro’s stories undermine the apparent stability of traditional sexual relationships and chart their fragmentation” (McGill).
We can not be who others want us to be. We should not be a continuation of our spouse or children, we should compliment them.
In “Prue,” Munro’s female protagonist at first glance seems meek, but unlike her name Prudence, she is in charge of her sexuality and “seems to regard sex as a wholesome, slightly silly indulgence” (Munro 467). This character is not ambivalent. She accepts her life and enjoys it for what it is. She does not need a man to define her, and as long as her “indulgence” satisfies her, she will indulge him. Sometimes we indulge in things that are not healthy for us and we know it, but that is our choice. The relationship portrayed in this story would not seem a healthy relationship by any means. This is a two-timing man, one that is consumed with self, with little or no regard for anyone’s feelings but his own. Why does Prue allow him access to her? She wants him around because it makes her happy at that moment. Prue lives for the moment. I don’t feel like she is pining away for him. “In "Prue" […] women realize that they are the sensible choices of the men that they love, not very sensibly” (Ross). She herself tells her lover that, “nobody knows what can happen in a few years’ time” (Munro 469). She keeps her options open. She wants him to know there is a glimmer of hope in a future together so she doesn’t lose him forever. This is why she often takes a token after every tryst. She needs to keep a piece of him. She won’t let go as long as she is fulfilled on some level. Her life didn’t turn out the way she hoped or envisioned, but she is not bitter, she is accepting of it. Her life is not at a standstill, she lives freely, but she won’t break free. That is her right, and the fact that she is unabashedly open shows that she is stronger than we assume.
Munro, “reveals how life is nothing like novels, but instead full of chance, complicated choices, and layers of meaning” (ACN). “Wild Swans” take us on a baffling excursion: Life’s harsh lessons and innocence lost, the confusion between what you know is wrong, and how you act when confronted with a choice. Rose was “victim and accomplice” (Munro 465), for she had a “curiosity” that was stronger than “disgust,” as she allowed herself to be violated by a stranger. She was going to experience all that life had to offer, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the surprisingly satisfying. She would find her own way. She would be her own person, make her own decisions, and chart her own adventures. Rose was transformed on that train ride, liberated from Flo. Although she was influenced by Flo to be cautious, and heed her warnings about life in general, she had a greater need to explore.
“The reader's experience in reading Munro's stories is one of recognition. We say, yes, that is how life is; we recognize and acknowledge discoveries about our deepest selves. And this recognition is the purpose of the author's journeys into the past, undertaken with compassion and determination to ‘get it right’"(Ross). We do not have our path defined for us. We define our own path. Munro shows us that we all have lessons to be learned. Her stories make us delve deep into ourselves to find answers to our own questions. Munro reminded me that our experiences and mistakes, although individual, are not unique. We all have made the same mistakes. Have we all learned from them? Will we repeat them? That is the question. Good conclusion!
Works Cited
Alice
Munro. 23 July. 2003. Art and Culture Network (ACN).
McGill,
Robert, James. Munro,
Meyer,
Michael. The
Munro,
Ross,
Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro
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This essay written by Robert James McGill, University of
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The Canadian writer Alice Munro’s short stories have garnered numerous international honours, including a 1978 Booker Prize nomination. Among the outstanding attributes of her writing are its concern with women’s lives, its exploration of geography and identity, and its evocation of the mysterious, indeterminate character of everyday life.
Born Alice Ann Laidlaw in 1931, she grew up near
the small town of
Munro was brought up in the United Church of Canada and was a member of the
Canadian Girls in Training. Her father was a fox-farmer, a security guard at a
foundry, and then a turkey farmer who began to write at the end of his life.
His novel, The MacGregors, was published
posthumously in 1979. Anne Laidlaw, a former
schoolteacher, raised the children. As Munro describes it, the Laidlaws’ farm was in a “kind of little ghetto where all
the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived [...] It was a community
of outcasts”. This area would become the setting for much of her fiction. She
attended the
In 1949 Munro received a scholarship to attend the
She married Jim Munro, a fellow student from
The Munros moved to
So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits,
and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the
afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an
enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are
looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you
will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.
Dance of the Happy Shades won
Her next book, Lives of Girls and Women, was published in 1971 and
drew more considerable popular success. It has been marketed as a novel but
might also be seen as a set of linked stories. The book recounts the life of
the narrator, Del Jordan, whose rural upbringing is indicative of the book’s
autobiographical inflections. Early episodes of Lives of Girls and Women
are notable for their evocations of geography and local colour,
but as the title suggests, there is also sustained attention to the challenges
facing
In 1973 Alice and Jim Munro’s marriage ended and
Who Do You Think You Are? was published in
1978. Like Lives of Girls and Women, it presents a series of linked
stories chronicling the life of a young woman growing up in rural southwestern
In the period of 1977-81 Munro travelled often,
including a 1979 visit to
The first and last entries in the 1982 collection The Moons of Jupiter
are stories from Who Do You Think You Are? that Munro removed from the earlier book at the last moment.
Moons features more complex narratives and
wider time-frames than Munro’s previous work, as well as more characters. There
are also fewer first-person narrators and, as the title indicates, there is a
greater geographical expansiveness than before: the collection includes stories
set in
Munro’s 1986 book The Progress of Love continues to feature stories
set predominantly in rural southwestern
Munro’s 1990 collection Friend of My Youth is marked by a growing
interest in examining history, whether it be the title
story, in which the narrator considers her mother’s past, or Munro’s account of
a fictional nineteenth-century “poetess” in “Meneseteung”.
The book’s interest in adultery and relationships prompted Entertainment
Today teasingly to re-title the book “Sex Lives of Canadians”. It won the
Ontario Trillium Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (
In 1991 Munro was given the Molson Prize for her contribution to Canadian
letters, and three years later, her new collection Open Secrets won the
W.H. Smith Literary Award. Its stories are set predominantly in the fictional
town of
Munro has also written television scripts, including 1847: The Irish,
broadcast on CBC in 1977, and the television play “How I Met My Husband”. In
1984 a cinematic adaptation of Munro’s early story “Boys and Girls” won an
Academy Award in the live-action-short category. Munro and her husband
presently live in
Munro’s protagonists tend to be women of her own generation, who found themselves caught between traditional gender roles and new possibilities in the wake of the “sexual revolution”. They battle against their own desire to accept the apparent security of conventional relationships with men. But Munro’s stories undermine the apparent stability of traditional sexual relationships and chart their fragmentation. Her early writing, especially, is preoccupied with the politics of self-location, as her narrators struggle to make sense of their own lives in the context of their restrictive rural environment. They also seek to understand the relationship between the public sphere and a secret world of desire that threatens to become known and disrupt social order. The sense of a mysterious metaphysical world lurking just underneath the surface of everyday existence pervades her fiction, and characters like Del Jordan in Lives of Girls and Women realize that people’s lives are “deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum”.
It seems appropriate to Munro’s focus on local scandal and “open secrets”
that her own writing has caused controversy in
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Alice Munro Name: Alice Munro
Genre(s): Short stories; Television plays Biographical
and Critical Essay WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:BOOKS
TELEVISION
OTHER
PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS
Five books published in fourteen years have
firmly established Alice Munro among Munro, the daughter of Robert Eric Laidlaw and
Ann Chamney Laidlaw, was
born in Munro country is For this reason, Munro has been called nostalgic, old-fashioned,
interested in a past that has disappeared. It is more accurate to think of
her as a regional writer. The authors for whom she has expressed most
admiration are regional writers of the American South--Flannery O'Connor, Carson
McCullers, and, especially, Eudora
Welty. She has said in an early 1970s interview
with Mari Stainsby: "If I'm a regional writer,
the region I'm writing about has many things in common with the American
South.... [It is] Rural Munro's first published story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow,"
appeared in the Many of the stories that, with some revision, went into Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) had been first sold to the few available Canadian markets for short stories--the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the woman's magazine Chatelaine, and little magazines such as Tamarack Review, Canadian Forum, and Queen's Quarterly. These were years of constant rejections from publishers, but Munro's perseverance paid off. Dance of the Happy Shades won the Governor General's Award for fiction in 1969 and commanded for its author the recognition of a wider audience. The stories in Dance of the Happy Shades are not linked by common characters or by a common narrator. Nevertheless, taken together, they give a good idea of what it is like to grow up and come of age in a small town. The opening story, "Walker Brothers Cowboy," is about the young narrator's dawning awareness of the powerful shapes that lie behind routine life in Huron county. It introduces characters who, in various guises and under various names, are central figures in Munro's fiction: the female narrator, whose extraordinary powers of observation, analysis, and perception make her feel different from other people and rather isolated; her younger brother, who does not notice things and seems to belong comfortably in the world; their father, who is a silver-fox farmer defeated by poverty during the Depression but still preserving an imaginative vision; and their mother, who yearns for gentility and in this story is a figure of exhausted energy, although in other stories the mother is often rebellious, struggling ceaselessly against the confining values of the town. The autobiographical origin for many of these characters is evident,
though details have been altered or omitted. Munro's father, to whom Dance
of the Happy Shades is dedicated, raised silver foxes in the 1930s. The
family, which included Alice and her younger brother and sister, was very
poor. Their mother was hopeful and ambitious, wanting The technique, apparent in the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades,
of piling up exact details, of reconstructing ordinary life so that it
appears luminous, invites comparison with magic realist painters such as the
American Edward Hopper or Canadians Alex This tension is variously expressed in the stories by the contrast between the way the unobservant younger brother sees things and the much more complex perception of his sister; by the contrast between those people who, as the title story puts it, "live in the world" and the misfits, the fatally ill, the people in love, the eccentrics, artists, and idiots who do not; or sometimes simply by the treachery of ordinary objects and events which suddenly present themselves in menacing or grotesque aspects, become bearers of astonishing messages, or take on legendary significance. Very often in Dance of the Happy Shades a story ends with a tilt in the narrator's perspective which allows her to feel the shadow of the other world. The wordsritual, ceremony, andlegendaryare resonant ones in Munro's stories, because they suggest the patterns of that other special world which can sometimes reveal themselves in this ordinary one. For the same reason, the central episode in several of the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades is a ritual event such as the "ritual of back-and front-seat seduction" in "Thanks for the Ride," the funeral in "The Time of Death," the birthday party for the dying Myra in "Day of the Butterfly," the high school dance in "Red Dress--1946," and the annual piano recital in the title work. Several of these early stories conclude with a grand final sentence containing some word or image that sums up the whole story--never more luminously than in those stories which, together with "Walker Brothers Cowboy," seem most central to Munro's vision: "Images," "Boys and Girls," "The Peace of Utrecht," and "Dance of the Happy Shades." The first two are rite-of-passage stories in which the transition from childhood accompanies recognition of the fact of death. The last two form a climax to the collection, presenting, in "The Peace of Utrecht," the entrapping world of guilt, materialism, unconsummated relationships, silences, and social taboos and, in "Dance of the Happy Shades," the possibility of a way out of this entrapment through art. "Dance of the Happy Shades" is about a piano recital at which a retarded girl plays what no one has expected to hear--real music, "something fragile, courtly and gay, that carries with it the freedom of a great unemotional happiness." There is perhaps the implication that such freedom and serenity are possible only in the world of the shades, the misfits, the mentally retarded, the artists. Thus Dance of the Happy Shades closes with a message from the country of art. The last words before the epilogue in Munro's second book, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), are "Real life." Indeed "Real Life" was the title that the author at one time favored for the book. This rejected title, surely at least in part ironic, suggests the book's form as a Bildungsroman or apprenticeship novel, at the end of which traditionally the protagonist has completed his or her education and is on the threshold of "real life." But the title may also suggest the continuing tension in this book between the ordinary world of "real life" and the special world inhabited by eccentrics, religious believers, lovers, and artists. Lives of Girls and Women was written in a year, during which Munro worked on the book for three hours every day. Before this, the author had the material in her head for nearly ten years. For Munro, the process of writing is partly invention, partly remembering the way something looked, the way somebody spoke, a certain feeling. It is not, as she has often said in interviews, a process directed by a theory of how to write. She never thinks about how to write her next story. She does not have a plan for a collection, preferring to write whatever story comes along and to respond to the demands of her material. She begins each story by writing a scene, revising it as many as thirty times to "get it right." It seems, she says, like an enormously "chancy thing" every time and not a process she can analyze. Lives of Girls and Women was written and marketed as a novel,
although its structure is more that of interlinked stories. In an interview with
Geoff Hancock published in 1982, Munro talked about her sense of the market
pressure to write novels: "For years and years I would convince myself
that I really had a novel there and I would take these ideas I had and bloat
them ... [but] they would just fall.... So it took me a long time to
reconcile myself to being a short story writer." But whatever its label,
critics and readers liked Lives of Girls and Women. It won the
1971-1972 Canadian Booksellers Award; the American edition sold out four
printings in a month; it was an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month
Club in both Lives of Girls and Women presents significant moments in Del Jordan's development from childhood to the point at which she plans to leave her hometown of Jubilee for a job in the outside world. Seven self-contained sections, chronologically arranged, and an epilogue make up Del's narration of her encounter with the world's outcasts and eccentrics, her growing awareness of death, her relationship with her mother, her experiences with religion, art, and sexual awakening, and her vocation as a writer. Section one, "The Flats Road," establishes the symbolic geography of the book in its contrast between Del's father's world of the Flats Road, home to a disreputable assortment of bootleggers, misfits, and idiots, and her mother's desired world of order, decency, and knowledge, as it is temporarily represented in her view by Jubilee. This first section focuses on what Del comes to understand about the lives of eccentrics like the Jordans' neighbor on the Flats Road, Uncle Benny, who lives in the mad world which is adjacent to the ordinary one, but chaotic and strange: "lying alongside our world was Uncle Benny's world like a troubling distorted reflection, the same but never at all the same." In subsequent sections, As might be expected in a book centered on the protagonist's education,
growth, and development, a central concern is The last section of Lives of Girls and Women, "Epilogue: The Photographer,"
invites the reader to stand back from the rest of the book to consider the
process of writing a novel and the relation between the observed world and
the fictional re-creation. The fictional character Del Jordan is writing a
novel, seeking, like Munro herself, to discover ways of presenting the truth
in fiction. Although Munro's perceptive rendering of the theme of growing up was
impressive, the similarities between her first two books raised questions
about the range and versatility of her talent. Why did she stop with the
adolescent experience in And indeed there were in Munro's third book, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell
You (1974). In several stories in this collection the familiar Munro
territory of the small southwestern One way in which this volume differs from the earlier books is that most all the stories in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, including the six set in Jubilee, have to do with the contemporary world. Even retrospective stories tend to end up in the final paragraph with the present. There are frequent topical allusions to activities and manners dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s: meditating in Uttar Pradesh, India; organic health food stores; hippies; Rosicrucians; earnest people who have been in growth groups, learned yoga, and looked into transcendental meditation. Although the stories in this collection are each separate, with more variety of setting, characters, and incident than the stories had in Dance of the Happy Shades, there are ways of grouping them together. Some of the stories, notably "Memorial," show the adult lives of people who have left Jubilee for the city, carrying with them Jubilee materialism and giving it wider scope and a more modern guise. June in "Memorial" has devoted her life to the informed purchase (using Consumer Reports) and orderly maintenance of material objects, but when her son dies in a car accident--suicide is suggested--these objects cannot fill up the emptiness. In three of the autobiographical stories, "Memorial,"
"Winter Wind," and "The Ottawa Valley," grownup daughters
wrestle unsuccessfully with the ghost of the mother and her still unmet
demands. In "Winter Wind" the narrator
recalls her mother as a sort of artist manquée. She
makes the same contrast between her mother's world and her grandmother's
world that Another important grouping of stories explores the deceptions and the reticences between lovers and ex-lovers. In the carefully modulated title story, Et weaves into a pattern of fatal attraction, doomed love, and possible poisonings certain events from the past involving her beautiful sister Char and the hotel owner's glamorous and ambitious son, Blaikie Noble. The reader is left wondering about Et's story (which she has "been meaning to tell" Char's widower), just as in "Tell Me Yes Or No" the reader is left to contemplate just how much of the story the narrator has made up as a tactic to deal with her absent lover's failure to write her a letter. The narrator of "Tell Me Yes or No" begins, "I persistently imagine you dead." In these stories, the communication suggested in the titles--"Meaning To Tell You" and "Tell Me"--is never realized. In other stories, characters await letters that never arrive and letters are written that cannot be sent. The narrator of "The Spanish Lady" begins by writing to her husband Hugh and her friend Margaret two different versions of a letter that she can never post: "if Hugh loves Margaret I should be glad," one version asserts, and "I despise you both," proclaims the other. In "Material" the narrator intends to write a graceful letter to her ex-husband Hugo, acknowledging the fineness of his story about Dotty, one of life's defeated people whom Hugo had never seemed to notice much at the time, even when he was deliberately causing her harm. Instead she writes, "This is not enough, Hugo. You Think it is, but it isn't. You are mistaken Hugo." In these stories, Munro's carefully balanced sentences are able to convey what the characters themselves despair of ever communicating: the layers of meaning; the implications in the lies, deceptions, and silences; the gap between what the characters mean and what they are able to tell. Despite such difficulties, several characters, especially older ones, share with the young narrators of the two earlier books a restless compulsion to look at everything and find significance in what they see. In "Walking on Water" a retired druggist, Mr. Lougheed, has resisted moving from a neighborhood and from an apartment house now taken over by young people and hippies. Thinking about things he has seen in that house--Rex and Calla in the apartment downstairs making love, for example--he cannot regret his new experiences, however alien they seem to the way things used to be in the time of his own youth: "Whatever he learned here, he was not sorry to have learned. He listened to his contemporaries talking and he thought that their brains would crack like eggs, if they knew one-tenth of what there was to know....[H]e kept on, with an odd apprehension of a message that could flash out almost too quick for the eye to catch it, like some commercials he had heard about on television." Similarly, in "Marrakesh," Dorothy, a retired Jubilee schoolteacher, has given up her earlier nostalgia for "old mossy rotten picturesque things" and developed an "irritable, baffled concentration" bent on seeing everything, including shopping centers, cars, flashing signs, and supermarkets: "Anything would do for her to look at; beautiful or ugly had ceased to matter, because there was in everything something to be discovered." As in earlier books, characters sometimes feel that they are on the threshold of making discoveries. They look for signs, try to penetrate beneath surfaces, and puzzle over messages, although sometimes the language seems hard to interpret. Dorothy looks at the spare brown body of her granddaughter lying in the sun "as if it were a hieroglyph on her grass." The narrator in "The Spanish Lady" says about the cry of rage of a dying derelict at the railway station: "This is a message; I really believe it is; but I don't see how I can deliver it." In "Winter Wind" the narrator, who is a writer trying to capture the shape of the lives of her mother, aunts, and grandmother, says that she knows things about these people beyond what the facts themselves would bear out: "Yet I have not invented it, I really believe it. Without any proof I believe it, and so I must believe that we get messages another way, that we have connections that cannot be investigated, but have to be relied on." The stories in this collection sharpen one's sense of differences by juxtaposing
two ways of life or two ways of being in the world: past and present; old and
young; town and city; male and female; and, in almost every story, outcasts
and those who, to quote the narrator of "Executioners," succeed
with "luck and good management" in turning out "to seem like
anybody else." Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You makes the
journey from the small southwestern By the time Munro was writing the stories collected in Who Do You Think You Are?, she was living in Like Munro, Rose, the
central character in Who Do You Think You Are?, makes a journey away from her small town only to return.
She leaves Throughout the 1970s, Munro was consolidating her reputation as a story
writer. Robert Thacker lists, in The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's
Major Authors (1984), fourteen theses and dissertations written on
Munro's work in the decade between 1972 and 1982. Reviewers and literary
critics were discovering her carefully wrought style with its appearance of
artlessness and spontaneity. They admired her ear for accurately recording the way people talk,
her unsentimental treatment of female sexuality, her creation of
exceptionally perceptive narrators as filters for experience, and her ability
to reveal the strange or paradoxical in the apparently ordinary. There
were honors and awards. In 1977 Munro became the first Canadian winner of the
Canada-Australia Literary Prize. Who Do You Think You Are? won the Governor's General's Award for fiction in 1979 and
was runner-up for Among the generally positive reviews of Who Do You Think You Are? were two curious early notices published in Books in
Canada (October 1978) and Chatelaine (November 1978). These two
notices described a book of short stories about two characters: Rose from The idea for another Rose story came on a Friday night. Munro wrote it in
two days and took it the following Monday to Macmillan in Some readers have suggested that the vision of life presented in Who Do You Think You Are? is
unusually grim, with a more relentless attention given to unconsummated
relationships, unfulfilled lives, isolated characters, imprisonment,
victimization, freakishness, and the failure of communication. During the
pre-World War II years, Rose grows up on the wrong side of the bridge in Maimed characters, misfits, and the fatally ill continue to appear in the stories as grotesque reminders of the close presence of this other disturbing world: Becky Tyde, dwarfed and twisted by polio; poor, abused Franny McGill; the senile old woman in "Spelling" who is lost in her "emptiness or confusion that nobody on this side can do more that guess at"; Milton Homer, the town fool who lives without social inhibitions and with no sense of precaution; crippled Ralph Gillespie, whose skillful imitations of Milton Homer are eventually mistaken by newcomers to Hanratty as his own idiocy; Rose's father, who dies of lung cancer; and Rose's lover Simon in "Simon's Luck," who dies of cancer of the pancreas. The stories themselves present small moments of illumination and recnition as Rose perceives this irrational world in her various encounters with those least rational of human experiences: death and sexual love. Rose's life and circumstances may sound depressing, but she does not find
them so. She is busy observing things and learning: "Learning to
survive, no matter with what cravenness and caution, what shocks and forebodings, is not the same as being miserable. It is too
interesting." Like Munro's other central characters, Rose is always an
outsider, all the more capable on that account of making discriminations and
finding significance in ordinary things. In the "Author's
Commentary" on "An Ounce of Cure" in John
Metcalf's Sixteen By Twelve (1970), Munro remarks about that story
from Dance of the Happy Shades: "when the girl's circumstances
become hopelessly messy, when nothing is going to go right for her, she gets
out of it by looking at the way things happen--by changing from a participant
into an observer. This is what I used to do myself,
it is what a writer does." It is what Rose does too. At parties, among
sophisticated people, she turns her past--the outhouse, One of the themes explored most fully in this book, as in the previous
books, is the relation between the past and the present. In the title story,
the last in the collection, when Rose has come back to Stories the publisher had originally intended for Who Do You Think You Are? frame this collection of twelve stories. The opening section, "Chaddeleys and Flemings," is made up of two stories narrated by Janet, an exile from Dalgleish. "Connection" focuses on the women of her mother's side of the family, while "The Stone in the Field" focuses on the very different sort of women who were her father's sisters. The very fine concluding story, "The Moons of Jupiter," centers on the complexity of Janet's feeling during her father's last days in hospital before his unsuccessful heart operation. These framing stories achieve their effects through juxtapositions: the contrast between the self-dramatizing, traveling Chaddeley cousins, with their high self-esteem and their view of life in terms of "change and possibility," and the painfully shy and self-effacing Fleming aunts, with their Presbyterian lives circumscribed by the unchanging routines of farm work; Janet's memories of how she perceived these female figures when she was a child and her altered perceptions of them now; Janet in the planetarium hearing about the unimaginable immensities of the universe, the "Innumerable repetitions, innumerable variations," while she is thinking painfully not only of her father's life but also of the lives of her grown daughters, all finally separate from her and ultimately unknowable; Janet's indissoluble connection with Dalgleish life and her husband Richard's contempt for her "background" ("Background was Richard's word. Your background. A drop in his voice, a warning. Or was that what I heard, not what he meant?"); and, throughout, the narrator's version of events poised always against her sense that her reconstructions can be only provisional efforts to render what is ultimately mysterious. Apart from the framing stories, the stories in the collection are separate and stand on their own. Having experimented with a "novel" in Lives of Girls and Women and with "linked stories" in Who Do You Think You Are?, Munro seems to be returning in her latest book to the form that best suits her sense of experience as fragmentary and unconnected. In her interview with Geoff Hancock, Munro makes this comment: "I like looking at people's lives over a number of years, without continuity. Like catching them in snapshots. And I like the way people relate, or don't relate, to the people they were earlier.... I think this is why I'm not drawn to writing novels. Because I don't see that people develop and arrive somewhere. I just see people living in flashes. From time to time. And this is something you do become aware of as you go into middle age. Before that, you really haven't got enough time experience. But you meet people who were a certain kind of character ten years ago and they're someone completely different today. They may tell you a story of what their life was like ten years ago that is different again from what you saw at the time. None of these stories will seem to connect. There are all these realities.... Mostly in my stories I like to look at what people don't understand. What we don't understand. What we think is happening and what we understand later on." Bringing together stories that are separate and unlinked helps convey Munro's sense of multitudinous, competing realities. As she remarked to Hancock, why not a collection of stories "just like a tray with a lot of different sandwiches on it. And what on earth is this feeling that somehow things have to connect or they have to be part of a larger whole?" Hence the assortment offered in The Moons of Jupiter: some first-person narratives and some third-person narratives; a retrospective story like "The Turkey Season," about a young girl's feelings for a man who may or may not have been homosexual; stories centering on old age such as "Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd" and "Visitors"; and stories about women in their forties, acknowledging uncomfortable discoveries about themselves and their unruly emotional lives. The focus, as always, is on human relationships: between daughter and father or mother, wife and husband; between friends; between lovers. Perhaps all the stories can be said to be about what Munro calls in "The Stone in the Field" "the pain of human contact." There are memorable depictions of women of all kinds. In "Visitors," Grace and Vera, "dried-out, brown-spotted, gray-haired" sisters, sit outside in the shade on hot summer afternoons crocheting their tablecloths. In"The Turkey Season," two more sisters, Lily and Marjorie, gut turkeys with fast and capable hands and talk about what is wrong with young people: "They said that ninety per cent of the young girls nowadays drank, and swore, and took it lying down. They did not have daughters, but if they did and caught them at anything like that they would beat them raw." The Chaddeley cousins have had lives without sexual passion: "In those days it seemed to be the thing for women's bodies to swell and ripen to a good size twenty, if they were getting anything out of life at all; then, according to class and aspirations, they would either sag and loosen, go wobbly as custard under pale print dresses and damp aprons, or be girded into shapes whose firm curves and proud slopes had nothing to do with sex, everything to do with rights and power. My mother and her cousins were the second sort of woman." Finally, Munro's gallery includes the narrators and characters in "Dulse," "Accident," "Bardon Bus," "Labor Day Dinner," and "Hard-Luck Stories," all variously caught up in voluptuous delight, hysterical eroticism, tearfulness, recriminations, and power struggles involved in love relationships. The collection as a whole conveys powerfully the experience of women,
vulnerable and at the mercy of life. Many of these women have left safe
marriages to take risks of living alone or of finding new love relationships.
An artist of discontinuity and disarrangement, Munro has always distrusted forms that move toward resolutions and final explanations. Therefore not new in The Moons of Jupiter, but perhaps more urgently presented, is the sense of life's randomness. This theme is explored directly in the story "Accident," in which the death of a child under the wheels of a car is the crisis that breaks up one marriage and initiates another. In "Labor Day Dinner" George and Roberta are driving home after dark when suddenly a car without headlights, traveling through a stop sign at eighty miles an hour, "flashes before them, a huge, dark flash, without lights, seemingly without sound." What they feel is not terror or thanksgiving, but strangeness: "They feel as strange, as flattened out and borne aloft, as unconnected with previous and future events as the ghost car was, the black fish." In other stories, such as"Bardon Bus" and "Hard-Luck Stories," people's lives meet at accidental crossings and intersections. Throughout, what intersects are the different ways in which people manage--the methods they have of getting through the mischances, lucky changes and unexpected turns of their lives. The reader's experience in reading Munro's stories is one of recognition. We say, yes, that is how life is; we recognize and acknowledge discoveries about our deepest selves. And this recognition is the purpose of the author's journeys into the past, undertaken with compassion and determination to "get it right," to get down the tones, textures, and appearances of things. Instead of plots, Munro's work offers arrangements of materials that shift our perceptions of ordinary events and make us see the ordinary in an extraordinary way. Her books are a demonstration of her sense that "at some level these things open; fragments, moments, suggestions, open full of power." Papers: Alice Munro's papers from 1951 to 1977, including
correspondence with various Canadian writers and drafts of her fiction, are
held by the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, FURTHER
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Rosemary’s Reaction Page
What would I have done differently? Well, for one, I would have put my ideas down on paper as they came to me. I found myself searching for words or ideas I had when I first read the stories and developed my thesis. I should have been more organized in that respect. I spent a lot of time developing my thesis and I felt I lost some of my ideas or wasted time trying to recover them from the depths of my brain. Tylenol helped that! I found myself trying so hard to not to re-tell the stories I would get confused and lose focus. For my next research paper I will formulate my thesis and simultaneously takes notes, then use my outline to keep me flowing smoothly.
I learned a lot about Alice Munro. I read articles about Alice Munro that had no bearing on the topic of this research paper, and I can’t wait until this class is over to read about Flo and Rose. The short story “Wild Swans” is one of many, almost a soap opera spanning 40 years. I got a glimpse of an event in Rose’s life that was significant. I want to see what happened, and how she grew from that experience.
Alice Munro gave me a lot to think about. I am proud of myself for having the courage to continue my education at the ripe old age of 35. I am proud I could do this research paper and enjoy in the struggles and not give up. I learned that I want to learn, that you are never too old to learn, and that you can make yourself proud at any age!
Research is not easy. It is time consuming and even though you have the ideas of others to help support your conclusions, putting it all together is a daunting task and trying to make sense at the same time is a challenge. Whew!