Alice Munro

328 Pages·2012·2.53 MB·English

by  Charles E. May

C r i t iCa l
in s i g h t s
Alice Munro
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C r i t iCa l
in s i g h t s
Alice Munro

Editor
Charles E. May
California State University, Long Beach
SAleM PreSS
A Division of eBSCO Publishing
Ipswich, Massachusetts
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Cover Photo: © Paul Hawthorne/AP/Corbis
editor’s text © 2013 by Charles e. May
Copyright © 2013, by Salem Press, A Division of eBSCO Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any man-
ner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or me-
chanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retriev-
al system, without written permission from the copyright owner. For permissions
requests, contact [email protected].
∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard
for Permanence of Paper for Printed library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (r1997).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alice Munro / editor, Charles e. May.
p. cm. -- (Critical insights)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4298-3722-4 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-4298-3770-5 (ebook) 1.
Munro, Alice--Criticism and interpretation. I. May, Charles e. (Charles edward),
1941-
Pr9199.3.M8Z54 2013
813’.54--dc23
2012019661
priNTed iN The UNiTed STATeS of AmericA
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Contents
About This Volume, Charles E. May vii
Career, Life, and Influence
On Alice Munro, Charles E. May 3
Biography of Alice Munro, Charles E. May 19
Critical Contexts
Alice Munro: Critical reception, Robert Thacker 29
Doing Her Duty and Writing Her life: Alice Munro’s Cultural and
Historical Context, Timothy McIntyre 52
Seduction and Subjectivity: Psychoanalysis and the Fiction of
Alice Munro, Naomi Morgenstern 68
Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro: Writers, Women, Canadians,
Carol L. Beran 87
Critical Readings
“My Mother’s laocoon Inkwell”: Lives of Girls and Women and the
Classical Past, Medrie Purdham 109
Who does rose Think She is? Acting and Being in The Beggar Maid:
Stories of Flo and Rose, David Peck 128
Alice Munro’s The Progress of Love: Free (and) radical, Mark Levene 142
Friend of My Youth: Alice Munro and the Power of Narrativity,
Philip Coleman 160
in Search of the perfect metaphor: The Language of the Short Story
and Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung,” J. R. (Tim) Struthers 175
The complex Tangle of Secrets in Alice munro’s Open Secrets,
Michael Toolan 195
The houses That Alice munro Built: The community of The Love
of a Good Woman, Jeff Birkenstein 212
honest Tricks: Surrogate Authors in Alice munro’s Hateship,
Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, David Crouse 228
Narrative, Memory, and Contingency in Alice Munro’s Runaway,
Michael Trussler 242
v
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“Secretly Devoted to Nature”: Place Sense in Alice Munro’s
The View from Castle Rock, Caitlin Charman 259
“Age Could Be Her Ally”: late Style in Alice Munro’s Too Much
Happiness, Ailsa Cox 276
Resources
Chronology of Alice Munro’s life 293
Works by Alice Munro 296
Bibliography 297
About the editor 301
Contributors 303
vi Critical Insights
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About This Volume
Charles E. May
With remarkable unanimity, reviewers, critics, and fellow authors
agree that Alice Munro is the best short-story writer in the world to-
day. robert Thacker, who has done a marvelous job in this volume
of analyzing and synthesizing the vast amount of criticism that has il-
luminated the complex fiction of Alice munro, quite rightly points out
that throughout her distinguished career, Munro has stayed out of the
limelight of the literary world and the morass of social debate, instead
doing what she loves most and does best—writing.
many of the critics cited here by Thacker, and most of the reviewers
summarized by him in his authoritative biography, frequently justify
their praise of munro’s fiction by arguing that the numerous characters
and complexity of plot in her stories, especially her most recent ones,
make them somehow novelistic. Yet Munro has always insisted that
she does not write as a novelist does, that when she is writing a short
story she gets a kind of tension she needs, like pulling on a rope at-
tached to some definite place, whereas with a novel everything goes
“flabby.” characters and events do not really matter in her stories, she
says, for they are subordinated to an overall climate or mood. Munro’s
best work is usually about the hidden story of emotion and the secret
life, communicated by atmosphere and tone. Her greatest stories sim-
ply do not communicate as novels do.
As Ailsa Cox points out in her discussion of Munro’s last book, Too
Much Happiness (2009), the author, who recently celebrated her eight-
ieth birthday, has more than once threatened to give up writing. How-
ever, since the publication of Too Much Happiness, she has published
four new stories. As I try to explain in my own essay in this book, these
four stories demonstrate that the brilliance of Alice Munro’s work de-
rives not from any “novelistic” qualities but rather from their embodi-
ment of the short story’s singular method of exploring universal real-
ity. The true power of her stories lies in what can only happen in the
About This Volume vii
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imagination, where, as Munro wisely knows, paradoxes abound: truth
can develop out of lies, reality can derive from fantasy, and good can
result from bad.
Timothy mcintyre suggests in his examination of munro’s Scots
protestant cultural background that her fictional exploration of the
complex relationship between everyday reality and imaginative ar-
tifice developed, ironically, out of growing up in a culture in which
reading and writing were more tolerated than celebrated. McIntyre re-
minds us that although writing was the only thing Munro wanted to
do, it was something she was unable to explain or justify to her family.
Fortunately, although her love of literature was not actively fostered
by her parents, neither was it strongly discouraged, for her father har-
bored a secret wish to write and her mother was drawn to the theatrical.
forced to leave school for financial reasons, munro got married and
had little time to read and write while performing the domestic chores
of wife and mother; fortunately, however, her husband was liberated
and educated enough to believe that his wife’s creative efforts were
worthwhile. As McIntyre notes, one does not have to be familiar with
the lower-class Scots Irish inhabitants of southwestern Ontario in the
mid-twentieth century to appreciate Munro’s work. Indeed, as many of
the essays in this volume suggest, it is her love and knowledge of lit-
erature—storytelling, narrative technique, metaphor making, classical
myths, fantasies, and fairy tales—that provide the most illuminating
context for her brilliant fiction.
In a preface to The View from Castle Rock (2006), arguably the most
intimate book she has ever written, Munro says that when she was in
her mid-sixties and beginning to put together research about her fam-
ily, she was also writing a “special set of stories” that she did not in-
clude in her previous four books of fiction, for although they were not
memoirs, they were closer to her own life than other stories she had
written. All the stories in this “special set,” which appear in the second
section of The View from Castle Rock, point to Munro’s life devoted
to being a writer. As a young woman in “Lying under the Apple Tree,”
viii Critical Insights
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she has secret poetic ideas about looking up through apple blossoms,
which has an irresistible formality for her, like kneeling in church. Af-
ter an interruption of what was almost her first sexual encounter, mun-
ro says that over the next few years, sardonic, ferocious men in books,
like Heathcliff and rhett Butler, became her only lovers. In “Hired
Girl,” when Munro, seventeen, takes a summer job with a family, she
has erotic and romantic fantasies about them and the glamorous people
who visit them. When the summer is over, the husband gives her a
copy of Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales (1934), and as soon as she
begins to read, she loses herself in the book, believing that this gift of
literature has always belonged to her. These are Alice munro’s most
personal stories, portraits of the artist as a young woman.
Medrie Purdham’s discussion of Lives of Girls and Women (1971),
Munro’s only novel and the closest thing to a Künstlerroman she has
ever written, convincingly shows how, in spite of the ostensible realism
of her early fiction, an important context of munro’s work is a classi-
cal literary tradition, not a tradition of simple mimesis. When Del’s
mother, Addie, dips her pen into her laocoon inkwell, she provides
a striking metaphor of Munro the artist dipping her own pen into the
classical fount of Greek, roman, and Christian mythos. likewise,
Purdham suggests that Del (and therefore Munro), drawn as she is to
the formality of rituals and rites and the metaphorical nature of Chris-
tian narratives, is more interested in the aesthetics of religion than its
ethics and more fascinated by the theatrical than the theological. Simi-
larly, David Peck shows how in the stories of Flo and rose in The Beg-
gar Maid (1979), Munro explores the relationship between real life and
role-playing, suggesting that as characters get caught up in pretense
and become what they play, they not only discover who they are but
also create their own identity. Mark levene discusses the importance
of metaphor in Munro’s stories in The Progress of Love (1986), which
in its exploration of the relationship between surface and depth is, like
theater, another literary means by which one thing “stands in” for an-
other in order to reveal its significant identity. And Naomi morgenstern
About This Volume ix
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applies a sophisticated aspect of psychoanalysis to munro’s fiction to
discuss the story “Trespasses” as an exploration of the importance of
storytelling and role-playing as keys to the ultimate secret of identity,
the age-old oedipal question: who am i?
Philip Coleman persuasively argues that Munro pushes her focus
on the literary means that characters use to create their identities even
further in Friend of My Youth (1990), by developing the self-reflexive
narrative method of using short stories to think about the existential
and emotional importance of narrative in human life. Coleman notes
that although munro has not discussed theoretical aspects of her fic-
tion in discursive form, she reflects on narrative in her fictional work.
Although Munro is concerned with the issues that confront women,
Coleman reminds us, she is not what one would call a feminist writer.
Although she is concerned with the social life of small-town Ontario,
she is not what one would call a regional writer. rather, as Coleman
points out, Munro most often turns to literature to make sense of the
self and the world in which one lives. As evidence of Munro’s focus
on the language of literature to discover the nature of human reality,
J. r. (Tim) Struthers tackles the complexity of munro’s best-known
and most analyzed story, “Meneseteung,” paying particular attention
to the nature of metaphor and the multilayered contexts that create the
significance of the story.
Probing the often-theatrical complexity of what Munro’s characters
try to conceal in her turning-point collection, Open Secrets (1994),
michael Toolan argues that even as her stories take on the ambition of
novels in their psychological depth and complexity of plot, they con-
tinue to be built on the basic characteristics of the short-story form:
brevity, density, and intensity. Jeff Birkenstein approaches the issue of
whether Munro’s stories primarily exhibit the characteristics of short
stories or the qualities of novels by examining the relationship between
stories in Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman (1998). Synthesizing
the thematic issue of a community of women with the generic issue of
x Critical Insights
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