Alice Munro and her Drowning Women

Emily Bronte's 1847 classic Wuthering Heights, released under the male pseudonym "Ellis Bell," is remembered for its complex protagonists, its gothic elements, and the young age at which the author passed (she was thirty). But what caught Alice Munro's attention were the vivid descriptions of the farm, the house, the fields, and the little brooks brimming with melting snow (more than the lengthy accounts of the dark, brooding Heathcliff or the sad, eerie Cathy, who caught mine). Canadian short story writer and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro passed away on May 13th this year, aged 92. Over her lifetime, she published a total of fourteen short story collections, with most of them a staggering 40 pages long. (While interviewing Munro, Tamil writer A. Muthulingam quipped that her stories rarely appeared in Tamil magazines due to their reluctance to publish lengthy works.) Her works revolved around the lives of ordinary men, women, and children in rural or small-town Canada, mirroring the regions in which she grew up.

‘I don’t take up a story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere, with views and neat diversions along the way. I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while,’ she remarked in a 1982 interview. Indeed, her stories do not traverse from one end of the world to another. Instead, they begin at a rather young age of the lead character (more likely, a sweet innocent thing) and end at an age when the protagonist is much wiser, and sometimes the reverse holds true too--good for reflecting on the past.

Rather plain two-storied houses are interspersed in a sparsely populated Canadian landscape where people farm, tend to their horses, skin foxes, butcher meat, and run after goats. Inside, young kids get disciplined harshly by their fathers, provoked by stepmothers. Soon-to-be ex-husbands and wives discreetly carry on with their affairs. Teenage girls whisper stuff to each other they are not supposed to know. Indifferent spouses act as caretakers to their sick better halves, while Men maintain their homosexuality in their closets. 

Whereas in an urban setting, it is often a young woman struggling to make ends meet after hastily eloping with an unsuitable suitor (whom she decides looms large over her existing insecurities). There are also enigmatic artists (aka wild children) who coinhabit a world where lonely librarians receive letters from secret admirers.

"When I was young, there seemed to be never a childbirth, or a burst appendix, or any other drastic physical event that did not occur simultaneously with a snowstorm." (Night)

Munro wrote at a time when the urban-rural divide was at its peak in Canada in the 70s. This division led to both groups distrusting each other. The church in The Queer Streak had two doors--one for the country people, the other for the town people. The "crazy" aunt in the story, as soon as she moves to the town, switches to the town door and is promptly alienated by her family. The reason, we learn, is that she has wounded their fragile country pride. (Canada had become more or less completely urbanized by the 2000s, so the brawl isn't as strong now.)

Are all of Munro’s stories meant to be read with a cosy blanket and a warm bowl of soup? The slow pacing and the storyteller’s intimate tone might suggest so. However, her narratives feature wives threatening to commit suicide in front of their children, innocent chaps losing their heads in factory machinery, and children drowning in water (There are also detailed, uncomfortable descriptions of animals getting skinned and turkeys being gutted). Yet in most stories, these tragic events are revealed after they have occurred, often through letters or memories. As a result, the sorrow reaches us in a somewhat diluted form.

Certain characters and settings recur throughout Munro’s writing. The “crazy” aunt and the young woman dropping out of college are examples of recurring characters. This repetition allows the author to explore the flaws and virtues of a single character across different narrative contexts (much like the human tendency to mention one’s faults along with one’s praise in the same breath).

Munro herself dropped out of college, marrying a fellow student and abandoning her studies. This marriage later ended in divorce, an experience that resonates in many of her stories. In “Carried Away,” a young woman tries to escape from her abusive husband but ultimately returns to him. In “The Beggar Maid,” the protagonist feels a surge of anger toward her classmate and lover, who belittles her background. He doesn’t say it directly but implies it by likening her to the beggar maid in Edward Jones’s painting “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” which wounds her deeply. Despite knowing he is “slowly destroying her,” she decides to drop out of college and marry him, consoling herself by saying, “Well, he is no King Cophetua.”

Munro's mother, who died slowly of Parkinson’s disease, is another recurring figure in her stories. The narrator around the sick female takes on various avatars--a little girl (The Progress of Love), an aging husband (The Bear Came Over the Mountain), and in some stories, the sick female takes the role of a sick father (The Moons of Jupiter) or a sick husband (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage). But the emotions aren't always sickly. Take, for instance, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage--the name stands for a guessing game on whether two people will fall in love or not, based on the matching letters of their names. Middle-aged Johanna's hopes come alive when the teenager Sabitha plays matchmaker by sending fake love letters in the name of her distant father, Ken. Sabitha is no Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; she doesn’t hope to unite Johanna with her father but only intends to mock Johanna's plainness and thus break her heart. Johanna runs away to see him with high hopes and meets an oblivious, ailing Ken in a dishevelled hotel. And the cards get reversed. The knight in shining armor is not Ken, as Johanna once believed, but Johanna herself, who nurses him to health and ultimately marries him. It's the other Bronte sister that comes to mind here, Jane saving Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

"She had questions for Fern, but Fern did not know as much about operas as you would think she might; she would even get mixed up about which one it was they were listening to. But sometimes she would lean forward with her elbows on the table, not now relaxed, but alertly supported, and sing, scorning the foreign words." (Lives of Girls and Women)

Is feminism the key aspect in Munro's work? You can't say so. Often in her world, men and women are accorded the same empathy or dislike, though she often writes in first person account of the female and provides relative accounts of events. Asked whether she thought it important that a story was told from a woman’s perspective, she answers: ‘I never thought of it being important, but I never thought of myself as being anything but a woman.. . . . When I was a young girl, I had no feeling of inferiority at all for being a woman. And this may have been because I lived in a part of Ontario where … women did most of the reading, women did most of the telling of stories — the men were outside doing “important” things and they didn’t go in for the stories. So I felt quite at home.’

"When I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter." (Dear Life)

Two types of women stand out in her stories – “the drowning woman” and “the madwoman.” Margaret Atwood has written extensively about the archetype of “the drowning woman.” Who are these drowning women? They are those who fail to meet societal expectations, struggle against them, and lose. The woman in 'Friend of my Youth' who loses her fiancé to her sister and willingly(?) shares her home with them is an example. 

Why use the picture of a drowning woman rather than a bleeding woman or a crying woman? There is something tragic yet romantic about a drowning woman. One can think of the famous Ophelia painting by Sir John Everett Millais. Ophelia is the first major tragic figure to have lost her life by drowning, hurt by the likes of a rabid Hamlet. Unlike the drowning woman, the crazy woman is the name given to one who dares to disobey the expectations set by society and does the opposite of what is dictated to her. The young poet from Mensenteung in one. In real life though, you can say Virginia Woolf embodied both -- she grew depressed and decided to end her life in the river Ouse at the age of 59.

Is Munro indeed one of the greatest writers who ever lived, or was she a writer from a Commonwealth country who lived long enough to be considered for the highest award in literature? Munro's forte was realism, she was successful in providing an intimate, up view close of the women in the family, their insecurities, their guilt, and the stream of thought that seeks to explain often impulsive actions. It was not in the 'happiness' but rather 'the absence of it' where she found her voice. Literary critic Harold Bloom calls this "Ordinary unhappiness". Writers of today cannot help but share memories of their aunts, mothers, and grandmothers when talking about Munro, for her stories strongly reeked of their scents.

The criticism that belied her stories was that most of the stories could diffuse into one another if they wanted to, the lands, the themes, the men and the women can easily be taken from one story and merged into another. Moreover, Munro was content writing about small towns and their drowning women in most of her work. According to Bloom, this singularity made her lose out on the literary madness shared by great writers, who expanded the limits of art, say DH Lawrence.

After gaining fame as a writer, Munro travelled to countries like China and Australia. On her fiftieth birthday, she was in China, flummoxed by the sheer number of people. 

"The first week when I was back in Ontario and would look into a field and see one enormous machine instead of a hundred people, it seemed very strange; and the streets seemed terribly empty." Makes one wonder how Munro's stories would have been if she had been born in China, but it is evident that mo matter where life took her, Munro’s heart and mind remained rooted in the small rural town that shaped her life and writing. She will be missed.

"I want the reader to feel something is astonishing - not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me."