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 in which the author passed (she was thirty). But what caught Alice Munro's attention was Bronte's vivid descriptions of the farm, the house, the fields, the little brooks where the snow was melting more than 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 13th May this year aged 92, releasing 14 collection of short stories, most of them a staggering 40 page long. (A. Muthuligam in his interview with Munro quips that her stories hardly featured in Tamil since its magazines hesitated 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 where 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 stated in 1982. True, her short stories don't start in one corner of the world and end in another, but it often would start at a pretty young age and end at an age where the protagonist is much wiser, sometimes the reverse also holds true, 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, catch 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, men maintain their homosexuality in their closets. Whereas in an urban setting, it is often a young woman struggling to meet her ends meet after eloping with an unsuitable suitor who decides to loom large over her existing insecurities. In her cities, there are enigmatic artists and wild children alongside lonely librarians worthy of secret admirer letters. 

"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 its peak in Canada in the 70s. This division led to both groups distrusting each other. The church in the "The Queer Streak' had two doors - one for the country people other for the town people. The "crazy" aunt in the story, as soon as she moves to the town door, switches to the town door and is one of the reasons why she is alienated by her family as she has compromised on the country pride. (Canada had become more or less completely urbanized by the 2000s so the brawl isn't as strong) But her stories were not always a warm read by the fireplace, with a warm soup in hand. There are children traumatized by mothers threatening suicide in order to teach their husbands a lesson, gory mishaps in factories that decapitate and thus decapacitate families, children drowning and exhaustive accounts of skinning animals and gutting turkeys.

The characters and the places often make recurring appearances though not necessarily in the same name. For example, the wild child aunt or the dropout who opts for an early marriage. This repetition I believe allows her to describe all the different shades of white and grey in them, like one's impulse to utter one's misgivings while talking about their merits in the same breath. Munro, was herself a dropout from university, she married a student, her husband who had supported her writing, and divorced him many years later. This fallout is a recurring plot in her works, where in the story of 'Carried Away' it takes a revolting form where a young woman tries to escape from her abusive husband and the same happens in an absolutely nonchalant way in the 'Beggar Maid' where the ostensibly rich young man the student chooses to marry pays more attention than due to her poor background by likening her to the beggar maid in the painting 'King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid' by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. She abhors this comparison and thus, him. She knows "she's destroying herself" for him but still decides to marry him. 

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 a 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 whether two people will fall in love or not is based on the matching letters of their names (more like FLAMES played in our country). 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's night dream, she doesn't hope to unite her with her father but only to mock Johanna's plainness and break her heart. Johanna runs away to see him with high hopes over the fake promise and meets an oblivious, ailing ken in a disheveled hotel. And the cards get reversed, the knight in the shining armour 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)

There are two types of women who stand out in her stories, the drowning woman and the crazy person, both the archetypes originally coined by fellow Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. The drowning women is an archetype that stood for women sinking in their lives, failing to meet the expectations set by the society, puts up a fight and ultimately loses them. The woman in 'Friend of my Youth' who loses her fiancé to her sister and shares a dwelling 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 Shakespeare's 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, deciding to end her life in the river Ouse at the age of 59.

Is Munro indeed one of the greatest writers who have ever lived or was she a writer from a commonwealth country who lived long enough to be considered for the highest award of 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 unhappiness where she found her voice. Literary critic Harold Bloom calls this "Ordinary unhappiness". Writers of today cannot control their urge to 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 put into the other. Munro was content writing about small towns and its 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.

Munro’s maiden visit to China in her fifties left her overwhelmed 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 was born in China, but it is evident that despite where life took her, Munro’s heart and mind remained rooted in the small rural town that shaped her life and writing. Rest in peace.

"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."