Myth and belief play as powerful forces that is held by everyone
and that partially determines their behaviour. Myth is defined in
dictionaries as a traditional story focusing on the deeds of gods or heroes.
It has often explained some natural phenomenon such as the origin of the
sun. Some other definition states that myth is a false opinion, belief or
idea. The first definition expresses, “acceptance of the truth or actuality
of anything without certain proof”, which is followed by “something held
to be true or actual”. Belief denotes “acceptance with or without proof
or strong emotional feelings”.
Myth and beliefs about gender have changed over time and vary
today in different cultures. Gender is a force and man was considered far
more superior to woman in earlier periods. Aristotle‟s views on women
are more important in woman‟s history. He believed that women are
colder and weaker than man and thus less perfect. For Aristotle women
were infertile than male because of their inability to produce semen. A
male is male in virtue of a particular ability and a female in virtue of a
particular inability. He considered femaleness as a deformity, one which
occurs in the ordinary course of nature. Woman is more compassionate
than man, while at the same time being more jealous, more querulous,
and more apt to scold and to strike. She is more prone to despondency
and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect. He
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declared women as physically inferior to men and then claimed that their
proper place is in the home, controlled by their husbands. He taught that
women should not be educated with or like men, but they should gain
training in domestic arts which would help them in households, to bear
and raise children and to please and be obedient to their husbands. For
him the relation of the male to the female is by nature one of superior to
inferior and of ruler to ruled. The male is more apt at leading than the
female. Both the male and the female have the deliberative capacity of
the soul, but in the female it lacks authority. Aristotle quoted a poetic
verse where a wife‟s sensible questions were dismissed by her husband
with the frequented phrase, “to a woman, silence brings ornament”. This
was the earlier scenario. Later this scenario began to change slowly and
today the scene is much different from earlier scenes.
Myth of gender is that man is the supreme power and a woman is
secondary to man as far as intellectual and biological perspectives are
concerned. But female writer busted out this contention by saying that
society has to recognize that woman is a creative force; she is not a
powerless creation. She can fight to find a lasting and prominent position
in the society. Now women have gone from homebound producers to
wage earning consumers to political and social reformers in this society.
Women‟s groups kept their identity independent from the men‟s group
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showing not only their independence but also their worth and ability to
work without working through men. These women worked to change the
face of social and political interaction, widening their role from
caretakers of the home and neighbourhood, to caretakers of society,
striving to make better various communities.
Women‟s roles were constantly changing, whether men saw it or
not. These changes continue in Alice Munro‟s stories also. Woman‟s
roles had evolved from inside the home to outside home and as active
members of society. With so many obstacles, such as men‟s disbelief and
disapproval in their ability to succeed in these roles, women‟s roles
evolved from local to widespread, from producer to consumer and from
the homebound to community oriented.
Munro‟s Stories are the study of feminism. In around 20th century,
literature is the main medium for expressing the view regarding women‟s
right and freedom. In this wave Munro used short story as a medium to
portray the sad plight of women particularly in Ontario. In Munro‟s
stories we can find out the emotional development of a girl to a woman.
Munro presents her stories in the ordinary experiences of life which
appears extraordinary because of its magical effect.
In her stories
Munro‟s confrontation with society is not only as a woman but also as a
female artist. Her quest is for free expression of imagination through the
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medium of art. Munro told that the surrounding and circumstances she
used to live have a greater influence on her, and her stories are evidence
of that. In an interview with Alan Twigg, Munro says:
“We lived outside the whole structure because we didn’t live in
the town and we didn’t live in the country. We lived in this kind of little
ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived.
Those were the people I knew. It was a community of outcasts. I had
that feeling about myself”1
Thus Munro believes that she is an outsider to the Patriarchal Society.
Still she thinks practically. She says:
“I always realized that I had a different view of the world, and
one that would bring me into great trouble and ridicule if it were
exposed”2
4.1 DANCE OF SEXES: A Feminist Odyssey
The protagonist of Munro‟s fiction is expressing the particular
features of the region, of South Western Ontario. It is needed to examine
her fiction from the feminist point of view. Alice Munro‟s stories are well
constructed and these stories are the account of a woman who made the
long journey and got much experience.
Her stories show the status of
women in patriarchal society. They show how patriarchy is a barrier to
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woman‟s individuality and her autonomy. Her stories seek liberation –
sexual liberation, economic liberation and cultural liberation. Munro tries
to show the impact of class and generation gap and the effect of
relationships on women. In Munro‟s fiction women appear as they are
taking the measure of their own unhappiness from the depth.
Her
younger characters distinguish the extremity of social and cultural
distance between men and women in society. Women in her stories are
the image of Freedom from the world of domesticity.
Her women
character is resisting this domesticity which is the evidence of the
seemingly unbreakable psychic and effective distance between men and
women.
Munro‟s stories are the collection of her childhood experiences
which she got in her small town. All those experiences initiated her to
unveil the plight of women in society, but her perspective is purely
feminist. As Rasporich says:
“In fact, Munro’s strength as a feminist writer is both this extra facet of
her female persona and the range of her portraits of women. Her gift
to us is a variety of female characters portrayed from childhood to old
age, whose hidden selves she explores beneath their artificial, disguised
or misinterpreted social faces ..... many of her characters belong to a
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dying or defunct faulknersque world of south western rural Ontario, a
world made immediate through remembrances of time past”. 3
Munro‟s stories speak about the collective experiences of women
in society at the same time dramatizes the compelled private life of
women in society. Munro‟s outer and inner voice includes the search for
freedom of imagination and expression through the medium of art. In
many of Munro‟s stories the developing feminist consciousness is
complicated by an expanding perception of the woman as artist.
Munro‟s women are characterized as childish and pompous
women, who are subjugated by an older patriarchal order. They are
deceived sublimated and suppressed by male. The poor white women of
rural Ontario who were attacked with gestures of primitive and frustrated
aggression are part of Munro‟s contemporary urban consciousness.
Munro is the sympathetic depositary of all conditions and images which a
woman encounters in her life. Living in a gothic milieu of the Victorian
small town, particularly the domestic aunties, grandmothers and spinsters
and their primitive sisters on the edge of civilization, they provide a
means of self-understanding for Munro and her questing persona. Munro
knows the importance of personal memory which plays an important role
in one‟s own life. She took it as a psychological clue to identity. She
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understands that like psychological drama man is always drawn back to
the past memories to orient himself for a better future.
In her first collection of short stories, “Dance of the Happy
Shades” (1967), Munro curiously explores the dependency of women.
The sense of voice is intensifying and multicoloured. The remarkable
feature is that in all stories three of them are told from the perspective of
childhood and adolescence and the rest of the six stories are told from the
first person female point of view in reminiscence. In this collection the
process of feminist self discovery is growing extensively. It is smashing
the boundaries between past and present and recommending emotional
and psychological growth. Most of these stories were written during the
Fifties and Sixties when Munro was just emerging from the period of her
life as a young mother and dependent wife. This period she delineates as
a „Kind of sleep‟ compelled by the “ceaseless activity of the care of small
children”.
4
She tries to address herself in the childhood and adolescent
characters of her fiction, which she admits becomes more meaningful to
her as it becomes more autobiographical as in “Boys and Girls”, “Walker
Brothers Cowboy”, “Images” and “Red Dress”.
In stories like “Day of the Butterfly”, “Boys and Girls” and “Red
Dress”, Munro in first person reminiscences about childhood and
adolescence and makes the most explicit statements about society‟s
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expectations of girls. These three were seminal to the theme of feminism.
“Day of the Butterfly” is a story about a dying child (Myra) in the
narrator‟s grade six class and it is the description of child‟s first
experience with death. This story expresses the elementary anguish
towards the social authority of the small town, towards those who make
the unjust rules, regulations and conditions of lives. The narrator comes
to realize that the social status of girls and women is determined by their
fathers and husbands in the society. The occasion of Myra‟s last birthday
party in hospital where she got many gifts, symbolizes the artificial,
decorative function of women. In “Boys and Girls” Munro records the
humiliated and anguished psychology of a child who is being conditioned
by society to become a definition – „a girl‟. The child finds herself
illegible to help her father outside and compelled to take the conventional
role of homemaker. The climax occurs when she frees a horse who is
about to be shot and thus demonstrates that she is „only a girl‟. Here
Munro is analysing the psychology of a young girl in western society who
is torn between her status as a real human being and her vocation as a
female. She is torn between the past and the future.
Moreover the
conflict arises between her original claim to be a subject, active, free and
on the other hand, her sexual urges and the social pressure to accept
herself as a passive object. Hallvard Dahlia wrote in one of his article
“The fiction of Alice Munro”:
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“Though emanating from a recognizable sociological reality the
situations that are characteristically depicted in her fiction frequently
transcend the literal bounds of our conscious realisation, and leave us
with a residual uncertainty, puzzlement, or even despair.”5
In these stories Munro is not offering any solutions for women.
Somehow, her feminism appears as it‟s based on melancholy social
determinism. In her interview with Barbara Frum in 1973, she reveals her
own uncertainty about social conditioning and what constitutes being
female:
“This emotional dependency I feel in myself. I don’t know where
it comes
from. I don’t know if it is a conditioned thing in women
and I don’t think we’ll know for another generation. I think you have
to be open to all possibilities”6
In “Dance of the Happy Shades” certainly Munro is exploring these other
possibilities when she presents to her readers a number of unmarried,
unchosen women as solitary dancer laminated in a variety of interesting
and uncertain poses. We can feel the privilege in the status of these
women who, despite the limitations of their cut off circumstances, seem
emotionally free at the very least. They do not have to conform to the
rules for married women.
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Munro had examined the process of development of women
repeatedly in its early stages in the stories about childhood and
adolescence as in “Dance of the Happy Shades”.
She brought it to its
maturity in “Lives of Girls and Women (1971)”. In this novel Munro
showed how Del Jordan advances to the edge of adulthood which is both
a truthful, psychological and social investigation of North American
adolescence. The novel is structured as a series of episodes in which Del
confronted some crucial problems and finds her way through. She deals
with the limited vision of ignorance and near madness in a chapter called
“The Flats Road”, with death and families in “Heirs of the Living Body”,
with God in “Age of Faith”, with role playing and reality in “Changes
and Ceremonies”, with the beginning of sex in “Lives of Girls and
Women” and with love and sexuality, power and knowledge in
“Baptizing”. Detecting Del Jordan‟s interest in fiction as a child with
Uncle Benny‟s gothic tabloids to her final artistic vision in the final
chapter, “Epilogue: The photographer”, Munro gives us a sense of Del as
a developing artist. Furthermore the echoes of Munro‟s own voice can be
heard in Del‟s double perspective as the narrator of her own fiction, as
child and adolescent seen through mature memory.
As a feminist, Del‟s quest for identity and freedom passes through
several stages in which she learns to cope before the destructive social
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order to possess herself. Munro also depicted some formative female
influences, particularly the primitive and spinster types which she has
already introduced earlier in “Dance of the Happy Shades”.
Close to nature and the primitive imagination of its native, Del‟s
concept of womanhood is influenced by one of Munro‟s most striking
models of female brutality that is Madeleine of the “The Flats Road”.
Madeleine is Uncle Benny‟s bride who is a fascinating character of
unrestrainable fury, raging against her unchosen status of the wife of
Uncle Benny and mother of the illegal child Diane. She refuses to adapt
to even the minimal social expectations of the Flats Road. Despite all this
attitude of Madeline, Del is impressed by her triumph, her raging acts
against all, including men. For Del Jordon, Madeline, a castrating figure
is victorious, at least in comparison to the Calvinist figure like her aunts
who practice the proper domestic rituals, accept the division between
women‟s work and important male enterprise, who centre their lives
about a man and deny the authority of the flesh.
The motif of
enslavement is strong in “Lives of Girls and Women”. Del understands
during the funeral of Uncle Craig, that despite the falsification of being in
control at the funeral, the aunts Elspeth and Grace are in their ordered and
perplexed formal world, displayed through preparation of enormous
quantities of food and fluttering femininity. In fact, they are the slave of
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the faked male code which keeps them out of touch with nature, including
their own.
Del‟s mother has a major influence over her than any other women.
In “Age of Faith” Del accept religion. In subsequent chapters we can see
the strong presence and influence of the mother over Del. Instead of
focusing much on the Mother - Daughter relation, Munro investigates the
influence of the mother in the growth of her heroine.
Addie, Del‟s
mother is a door-to-door salesperson of encyclopaedias. She writes
editorials for local newspapers, makes speeches on birth control, and thus
she offers to Del a very different face of woman from either Madeline or
the aunts. Addie, likes this job because it allows her freedom, affords
her, and because it satisfies her need to explain and categorize the world
in a rational fashion. The world of intellect, reason and the arts are her
muse. She does not conform any ideal of motherhood in a small town
which is a lifelong embarrassment and a social humiliation to a
conforming Del. Del‟s Mother is the essence of mysterious, powerful
female as well as a model of intellectual womanhood.
For the rest of the novel Munro is concerned with Del‟s struggle
towards the authority of the intellectual life. Man has traditionally been
considered as the controlling head and women as the passive and
seductive heart. But Del‟s problem is something different as man can
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either reject or incorporate woman into his private odyssey. Woman is
forced by conventional society to choose between sexual union, which
lessen her role and bring to an end her creative potential through which
she can express herself.
“Once you make that mistake, of being-distracted, over a man, your life
will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always
does,”7 is a threatening warning from Del‟s mother. For Munro, Del is
the living portrait of the social and psychological tensions of this female
condition and its choices.
In Munro‟s thirteen stories collection “Something I‟ve Been
Meaning to Tell You (1974)” we can see stories about remembered
adolescence
and
childhood
sexuality,
grandmothers
and
their
granddaughters, kinship in the “Ottawa Valley”. We can see the spirit of
search of identity here too but it is not optimistic as in “Lives of the Girls
and women” instead it remains obscure and unresolved. In this volume
Munro with middle aged narrator, is moving backwards because the clear
answers to the feminist odyssey do not become concrete, in fact, there is a
long way to get the awe in human relationships, especially the stories of
generation gap, of old lady confronting, contemporary human behaviour.
Munro‟s search of identity is not yet completed as she is getting
more and more experience which is developing the complexity of female
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identity. She feels that in this general atmosphere much more is yet to be
explored. This volume has a market tone of female alienation. In few
stories the emotions of mature, middle-class narrators, provoked by
unsatisfactory relationships with men,
are frankly threatening and
disapproving.
“The Executioners” is the most terrorizing and lustful
in its
expression of secret female fury. In this story Munro‟s heroine Helena is
a middle class sensitive girl. She is only in company with the brothers
and sisters of Robina who live in a poor house out in the county. She is
deeply afraid of another poor country boy, Howard Troy, who frequently
hides himself on her way to home and asks tauntingly “you want to
fuck?”. She has fantasised as if she is injuring him and witnessing the
eruption of poison he had. One night Howard Troy‟s house is set on fire
and he and his crippled father, Stump Troy perished in this fire. Helena‟s
fantasy about Howard Troy is fulfilled when she becomes a psychological
conspirator in the murder of both the bootlegger father and the son.
If we minutely observe the lead story, “Something I‟ve Been
Meaning to Tell You”, we can find that murder is close to the female
psychology. Munro‟s Vision moves round the small town ladies of a
passing generation. She never tries to search beneath the emotional life
of the Victorian Spinsters in “Dance of the Happy Shades”, but in “Lives
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of the Girls and women” she begins to observe the surface illusions of
their personalities.
It seems that these spinsters have accepted their
Civilized and subordinate positions, but literally they are having
potentially murderous dispositions, and this kind of woman is exposed by
Munro in this story.
In “Something I‟ve Been Meaning to Tell You”, sisterhood is rolled
in upon itself with terrifying impact. The old maid Et is overcome by her
desire to have and hold, her sister‟s husband, as her own. Et is aware of
her sister‟s psychology, which gives her chance to provoke, her sister for
suicide. We are left with the impression of the distracted, barbaric and
frenzied spirit of an old woman, whose emotional identity is turned to
stone in her childish past. Et‟s desire to ruin Char is because of her
vengeful envy of her sister‟s ability to captivate men.
The narrator of “The Spanish Lady” is a matured, modern and
sophisticated lady, but as her best friend and husband deceived her as
they are having an affair, converts her as aggressive angry and alienated
spirit. This competition of woman for a man is a social design which
Munro discloses as self- destructive, with female dumping another female
into the endless gulf. The situation becomes worse by the intellectualism
and the modern codes of the narrator, who is having the overconfidence
that she can control the situation with her modern, rational and civilized
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understanding and also with her psychological self-counselling which
mostly victimizes her.
In Munro‟s fiction female is caught up in the grip of past memory
and past values and becomes helpless to grab the present. Though there
is some security in the old ideal, as the old role is comfortable and rejects
the risk of coming to know oneself as a woman. It provides order and
limits to life without which women board on ship which is moving on the
lonely route leading towards its wreckage.
The feminist quest of Munro is one of the underlying problematic
questions of “Something I‟ve Been Meaning to Tell You”. The battle of
establishing feminine identity is honestly here, but it cannot be
established by Munro‟s narrators. It seems that they are destined to
accept the feminist code of behaviour. Men are still exploitative end but
women still nurture.
Munro demonstrates that she is quietly but
cautiously in touch with the vibration of the great social climate. The
scope of this volume is that of the shifting sexual relationship and
definitions, sexual liberation, educated woman of the urban middle class
in the late sixties.
Another collection “The Moons of Jupiter” is a collection of
twelve stories published in 1983, received much praise by readers and
critics. All the stories are told from a female perspective and compass the
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female consciousness of her earlier work.
In this collection female
lineage provide emotional stability and strength for the contemporary
women. In this collection we can see the ways in which characters are
transformed over time. They view their past selves with an anger, regret
and infinite compassion. They communicate themselves to us with
electrifying force. Munro‟s heroines are usually, women nearing or in
their 40‟s who are negotiating difficult passages in domestic or sexual
life. In Munro‟s development of the heroines, we are never away from
the continuous facts of their physical bodies. These facts which are
painfully true in her collection “The Moons of Jupiter”. Here aging
women feel forced to assess themselves through their declining
physicality.
In spite of this anxiety and suppressed hysteria of their recognitions
of their declining age, their emotional attitude is controlled and mature.
These women are ready to face their new physical boundaries and
changing sexuality. Munro‟s heroines are adventurous in accepting this
transformation and changes in their life.
In this collection Munro‟s
heroines with their approaching wisdom begin to accommodate their
approaching transformation and appreciating this changing design of their
life.
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Despite all these adjustments, Munro‟s heroines remained
unadjusted with their male partners. They are still struggling in exploring
and recognizing true love, but their author carries them in explaining the
traditional dance which puts women at the male mercy, even more than
ever.
In “Bardon Bus”, the middle aged narrator has an affair with X, a
man who is having relation with many other women. He is not bothered
about social customs and its consequences and enjoying full advantage of
this freedom. As an X‟s friend, Dennis tells the narrator with “malicious
sympathy”:
“Think of the way your life would be, if you were a man. The
choices you would have. I mean sexual choices. You could start all
over. Men do. It’s in all the novels and it’s in life too. Men fall in love
with younger women.
Men want
younger women. Men can get
younger women........”. “A woman your age can’t compete,” says
Dennis urgently. “You can’t compete with younger women. I used to
think that was so rottenly unfair.”8
Lydia in “Dulse” and Prue of the story of the same title are similar
heroines, in middle aged transition. Lydia in her trip to the Maritimes
recognizes her new condition:
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“She hadn’t got fatter or thinner, her looks had not deteriorated
in any alarming way, but nevertheless she had stopped being one sort of
woman and had become another”9
Her affair with Duncan is traditional.
As a traditional lover she is
following not leading, is a victim to Duncan‟s monstrous power as he
subjects her to abuse and humiliation. Prue in her forties loves Gordon,
who is an egotistical and insensitive man professionally a neurologist. He
decided to love younger women. Later she realizes that he does not
intend to marry her in a few year‟s time. Similarly Roberta in “Labor
Day Dinner” is having affair with George which is more routine and
domestic, but still she suffers his malice about her aging:
“Your armpits are flabby”,
“Are they? I’ll put on something with sleeves”.
“In the truck, now that she knows he isn’t going to make up, she lets
herself hear him say that. A harsh satisfaction in his voice. The
satisfaction of airing disgust. He is disgusted by her aging body”10
In all these stories we can notice that Munro‟s heroines face
depression due to the loss of attractive sexuality, still they are brave
enough to retain their calmness and resurface with some more
confidence. The narrator of “Bardon Bus” remains confused due to the
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pain of her affair‟s consequences. She recognizes the possible shift of her
splendour towards gaudy foolishness:
“Even the buttercup woman I saw a few days ago on the streetcar, the
little, stout, sixtyish woman in a frilly yellow dress well above the
knees, a straw hat with yellow ribbons, yellow pumps dyed-to-match on
her little fat feet- even she doesn’t aim for comedy. She sees a flower in
the mirror: the generous petals, the lovely buttery light.”11
The narrator cached and arrested even slowly that she herself is
quitting to be the “fertility doll”. She begins to re-establish herself
towards new possibilities, to new definition of luck which includes life
itself. Being in a state of uncertainty Lydia, Prue and Roberta begin to
accept life as a spectator sports. But still for these women sexual control
is an unresolved issue. And now they realise that they will recover from
male ill treatment. They are happy because of the approaching new life.
Although Munro‟s heroines are victims of love in “The Moons of
Jupiter,” still they are having established intuition, a self positiveness,
and a new control. This is evident, from the way the seven stories begin.
In these stories these women are having defined occupation.
“Connection” begins with “cousin Iris” from Philadelphia who was a
nurse, Lydia from “Dulse” who is an “editor, for a publisher in Toronto”,
Frances is a teacher in “Accident”. These heroines are modern in their
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behaviour and boldness. They are good enough to live outside the home;
they are good risk takers who can harmonize themselves with changing
social customs and sexual rituals. Being standing between generations,
they are having the capacity to encounter, to retrieve and to find a new
way to survive in this world. It seems that Munro is approaching towards
traditional religious vision. She illustrates this, with her heroines who are
developing optimistic perspective. She is illustrating hopeful traditional
Christian faith in eternal life and light as opposed to darkness.
In this Collection the feminist odyssey has moved forward to a
considerable extent. The waiting for many of Munro‟s earlier female
characters is now solved. The women of this collection like Frances,
Lydia, Prue and the narrator of “Bardon Bus” may be the victim of
female circumstances, but they are portrayed as crafty women who
impress us with their survival. These heroines are an answer to the
question of change in the lives of girls and women. We can witness the
impression of victory in their confidence to live.
4.2 PARADIGM SHIFT:
When the question of defining sexuality became serious, then
many attempts had been made in Western Literature to define sexuality.
With the entry of feminist writer, the basic of defining sexuality became
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all the more critical.
Earlier in the Western Countries and in their
literature, sexuality was the exclusive right of the Phallocentric Society.
But with the women‟s Movement a drastic change had taken place.
Cultural Feminism is a theory which prescribes that there are
fundamental personality differences between men and women and that
women‟s differences are celebrating women‟s special qualities, women‟s
ways and women‟s experiences. This story brought forth the idea of a
society of strong women guided by essentially female concerns and
values. Now the world has began to feel that women too have justifiable
urges, drives and desires. Feminists came out with the contention of the
female eroticism.
Sex and sexuality have remained a favourite theme for novelists
and they used to view it from a male perspective. As the time passed
many writers began to revolt against this approach and strove for a
paradigm shift by confirming the woman‟s feelings and looking at it
basically from a female point of view and Alice Munro is one of the
prominent writers who is supporting this contention.
Alice Munro became an acknowledged writer with the publication
of her first collection of short stories “The Dance of the Happy Shades”
in 1968. From this work onwards the theme of sexuality has been
repeatedly used by her.
It seems that she is in search of Feminine
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Sexuality. Her works, it may be her short stories or linked short stories
are the manifestation of maintained female libido. She has portrayed the
sexuality of a teenager, a middle aged woman and also an old woman.
Rasporich rightly point out that:
“She belongs to a growing tradition of female authors who
are beginning to fuse the realistic, the mythological and the
metaphysical. Like Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood among
others. Alice Munro begins “With the traditional female concerns
with personal relationships and the details of daily life” and
expands these concerns “to include a wider and wider swath of
human experiences” (Snitow 174). In the progress of Love, the
touchstone of human experiences is the physical, psychological,
mythic and cultural dimensions of female sexuality”.12
With short stories and especially with her female characters Munro
is supporting the contention that Sex can never be an absolute domain of
man but women also equally posses this feeling. Women‟s sexual drive
is as powerful as that of men‟s. Munro in her stories wants to revolt
against the subjugation of sexual feelings. This is the reason, why we
come across incidents where her heroines make sexual advances,
experience sexual pleasure and confirm her sexual identity without any
remorse. As for example we can see Rose who takes initiatives in “Who
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Do You Think You Are?”, Del in “Lives of Girls and Women”. These
women celebrate the glory and marvel of sexuality by transforming
themselves through Sex.
Her first published work “The Dance of the Happy Shades” is an
account of the author‟s memories of childhood and girlhood.
Here
Munro choses grownups to portray feminine Sexuality and also presents
the domain of the teenagers‟ curiosity. The longing for sexual connection
inflicts psyche as well as physical provocation in Munro‟s fiction. The
story “ An Ounce of Cure” is an excellent piece portraying the life of a
teenage girl. This story explores the theme of growing up. In it the
narrator presents her recollection of
Martin Collingwood takes her out
for the first time and kissing her on the mouth:
“I am sure it was the first time anybody had ever kissed me
effectively and I know that I did not wash my face that night or the next
morning, in order to keep the imprint of these Kisses intact. Two
Months and a few amatory stages later, he dropped me”.13
Here the narrator tells this story about herself when she was a
young and immature girl, living in a small town. But now she is a mature
and intelligent woman recollecting the memories of her girlhood with
ironic amusement and with girlhood stupidities. In “Red Dress” and
another story from the “The Dance of the Happy Shades” Munro shows
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the reader the awareness of the narrator‟s adolescence. This can be
shown by the dirty Kleenex given to Raymond Bolting by the narrator,
which shows that the narrator is maturing, falling in love through her
sexual advances. The Kleenex given to Raymond Bolting shows the
narrator‟s acceptance and advances towards opposite Sex.
Both the
narrator and Raymond were in need of a Kleenex, unfortunately only the
narrator had one and that too not clean. She shared dirty Kleenex with
someone of the opposite sex without any hesitation. This shows her
sexual feeling and its acceptance with full courage. On another occasion
when
Raymond
Bolting takes the narrator home after a dance, she
wishes him good night, he leans forward her and kisses her briefly, “with
the air of one who knew his job when he saw it, on the corner of my
mouth. Then he turned back to town, never knowing he had been my
rescuer, that he had brought me from Mary Fortune’s territory into the
ordinary world”.14
Through all these experiences Munro‟s heroines getting maturity and able
to succeed in establishing their individuality.
The questioning of
girls on Sex and eroticism is universal and
Munro presents it not only as natural but also as the fulfilment of growing
girl‟s assertion of her female identity. Instances of teenagers‟ curiosity
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regarding sexuality can be seen in many of Munro‟s Stories. As the
narrator in “Red Dress” talks about what adolescent girls do in company:
“We read articles on frigidity of the menopause, abortion
and why husbands seek satisfaction away from home. When we
were not doing school work, we were occupied most of the time
with garnering passing on and discussing sexual information.
We had made a pact to tell each other everything.”15
In the same way Rose‟s curiosity regarding sexuality is presented
in “Wild Swans” (Who do you think you Are?) by Munro. Here Rose is
molested by an elderly minister in her first journey by train. But here
Munro‟s heroine takes it as a matter of curiosity and enjoyes the erotic
memories.
As the scenery from the train window is erotically
transforming, all her fear has gone. W.R. Martin remarks that in her first
sexual encounter, Rose revealed a “Complex and the ambiguous
attitude”. 16
In “Lives of Girls and Women” Del quenches her thirst for
sexuality by reading encyclopedias related to sex and her erotic
discussion with Naomi and ultimately through her own affairs and
experiences, imagined or actual.
In the Title Story of “Hateship,
Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” the same curiosity is
expressed where some older girls, including Sabitha had thrilling fights:
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“They would gang upon someone and tickle her till she
shrieked for mercy and agreed to pull her pajama pants down to
show if she had hair. They told stories about girls at boarding
school who did things with hair brush handles, toothbrush
handles. Ugga – Ugga. Once a couple of cousins put on a show
– one girl got on top of the other and pretended to be the boy and
they wound their legs around each other and groaned and panted
and carried on.
Uncle Clerk’s sister and her husband came to visit on their
honeymoon and he was seen to put his hand inside her swim
suit”.17
Munro in her writing celebrates female libido. Munro‟s Social
world is like so many other societies where silence and secrecy are the
norm in sexual matters. It carries a high erotic charges, which leaves its
influence not only over each character, but landscapes, rooms and objects
also. In Munro‟s stories a crushed bed is louder than any graphic in-out.
Falling in love, fulfilling lust, deceiving spouses and enjoying it, telling
sexual lies, doing shameful things all these acts have been done due to
their irresistible sexual desire.
Munro‟s women are pushing sexual
boundaries and enjoying it fully. In order to invade the boundaries these
women must know where the fence is, and Munro‟s universe is criss
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crossed with exactly defined borders. In this regard Munro‟s Vision is
similar with Feminist thinker Ellen Wills , who says:
“A Sexual Liberation must involve not only the abolition of restrictions
but the positive presence of social and psychological, conditions that
can foster satisfying sexual relations. Sexual freedom, will only exist
within a coherent feminist politics, when individuals are not oppressed
by a socially constructed sexuality based on biologically – determined
definitions of sexuality”.18
Though Munro‟s heroines represent independent sensual life,
overpowered by desire, willing for close relationship, but they are still
aware of the dangerous face of man which can wreck their lives.
As in
“Royal Beating” (who do you think you Are?) we can see Flo narrating a
story to Rose about a cripple Girl Becky Tyde whose father used to beat
and abuse her and made her pregnant. Rose is thinking about Frannie and
her brother Shortie and she is fully aware that she is not safe with them as
brother can do harm to her. Another situation in “Floating Bridge”
(Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage)
where Neal,
introduced Helen to Jinny by saying that she (Helen) came out from an
unbelievable situation from exactly brutal family. At the age of fourteen
she had run away from her home after beating up a tyrannical incestuous
old man, who is her father.
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Alice Munro wants to show that in this world women are unsafe
and they become victims of Men‟s lust and their sexual supremacy. In
School also girls have to bear the slangs and sexual attacks of the big
boys. Which is reducing the normalcy of girls- boys relationship in
school atmosphere. Boys are a threat to these girl‟s safety. Rose learns
so many things from this type of experience. She “learned never to go
near the school basement …., to avoid the dark place under the step …..
not to attract the attention of big boys, who seemed like wild dogs to
her, just as quick and strong, capricious, jubilant in attack”.19
Brutal behaviour of male towards women is expressed in so many places
in Alice Munro‟s Stories. As in “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Love
ship, Marriage” the writer design sexual discrimination, violence against
women, and sexual objectification which allows a man to view a woman
as an object of sex. Sabitha in the title story about one of her cousins‟
experience:
“One of her cousins had already done it with a boy …….. He took her
out in a boat and threatened to push her out until she agreed to
let him do it. So it wasn’t her fault”.20
Munro tries to bring forth the subjugation of women. For
this purpose she exalts the virginity and purity of women and also the
threat of pregnancy.
Virginity, chastity and legal pregnancy are the
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demand and expectation of society from a woman. But Munro raised her
voice against such concepts, that‟s why in her stories she portrays sex
outside marriage. As in “Walking on Water” a story in “Something I‟ve
been Meaning To Tell You”, a simple and honest girl Edie married to an
old man, feels deep fascination for a pilot. The pilot expresses all his
love and treat her passionately but later flies away from her.
His
separation is painful still she is having enough courage to accept the truth
and embraces the life with full energy. Here lies her victory as she
expressed:
“If there were women all through life waiting and women busy and
not waiting, I know which I had to be even though there might be
things the second kind of women have to pass up and never know
about, it is still better”. 21
It seems that in some stories Munro is opposing marriage as an
institution which sanctions sex life of a woman but at the same time
restricts and confines women‟s sex life within a boundary. As in “Who
Do you Think You Are?” Rose fully, enjoys her sexual life with Patrick
before marriage who is a graduate student from a wealthy family and
equally romantic and believes that he is rescuing a damsel in distress. But
when it comes sex within marriage, it starts to irritate her. As Shulamith
Firestone says in “The Dialectic of Sex”. “As long as we have the
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institution (of marriage) we shall have the oppressive conditions at its
base. We need to start talking about new alternatives that will satisfy
the emotional and physical needs that marriage, archaic as it is, still
satisfies, but that will satisfy them better.”22
Rose wants to fulfil her sexual desires through extra maritial
relationships. “Mischief” (Who Do You Think You Are) is a story of
Rose‟s marriage to Patrick and her affair with Clifford.
With this
extramarital affair Rose wants to escape from marriage and Patrick and
want to get an exotic and incredible self- fulfilment which would consist
of “tricks, a flattering secret, a tender celebration of lust, a regular
conflagration of adultery”23.
Here Rose is seen as breaking the
boundaries imposed over her gender by society. Though she is enduring
the emotional threat due to the breaking of these social boundaries still
she is happy because she is able to maintain her identity and her Power in
Sex. She is standing against the role society expected from a woman that
is a passive repository of male sexual urge.
After analysing women‟s attitude to sex and love as demonstrated
in these stories W.R. Martin says, “there are other bases than sexual for
close relationship”24 which becomes evident in later stories. As her
attitude towards Feminine Sex and Sexuality which is present in “The
Dance of the Happy Shades” to “Hateship, Friendship, Love ship,
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Courtship, Marriage” collections have changed to a great extent. At the
same time Munro asserts the right of the women and her magnificent role
transcending the limits of a physical union to satisfy the sensual needs,
especially of a man. Now mere “Kiss” becomes more touching, relevant
and apt compared with a lifelong sexual union, even though the
protagonists may be middle-aged and old female.
As in “Nettles”
(“Hateship, Friendship, Love ship, Courtship, Marriage”) concerns the
reunion of childhood sweethearts and their decision not to initiate a
passionate side to their new but brief relationship. Here the narrator met
her childhood friend Mike McCallum and they fill with lots of affection.
In between rain and storm they press together tightly and Kiss each other.
This was more of a ritual rather than of their bodies‟ inclinations. In
“Comfort” (“Hateship, Friendship, Love ship, Courtship, Marriage”), as
Nina recollects her Past, “Her memory of Ed Shor’s Kiss outside the
Kitchen door did, however, become a treasure”.25
In “Floating Bridge”, as Ricky kisses Jinny, a sick woman:
“He slipped his arm around her as if there was no question at all
about what he was doing and he could take all the time he wanted
to do it. He kissed her mouth. It seemed to her that this was an
event itself. The whole story, all by itself. A tender prologue, an
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efficient pressure, a whole hearted probing and receiving, a
lingering thanks and drawing away satisfied.”26
This way Alice Munro‟s analysis of the sexuality in “Hateship,
Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” has lost all its eroticism and
reaches to the culmination where eroticism lost its physical nature to
some extent. Woman‟s need of sexuality crosses the age limit and now
sensuality is the need of not only young woman but also of aged woman.
As in “Floating Bridge” Jinny who is a cancer patient faces her husband
Neal‟s indifference in this condition. She loses all her charm in life and
waits for her last breath. In this condition the single kiss from the young
Ricky enables her to find a new meaning in life. What she felt:
“A lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter.
A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and
hollows, for the time given”27
In this story Munro showed how a mere kiss that too from a young
man to elderly Jinny fulfils the sexual needs. Similarly in another story
“The Bear Came over the Mountain” (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage) where Fiona who is supposed to be an Alzheimer
patient, loses memory of her husband Grant who is a seducer, and seeks a
lasting solemn companionship with her childhood friend Aubrey. In this
story Sexuality is beyond the confines of physical union and for the old
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lady Fiona the fulfilment lies outside marriage where eroticism has no
role to play. See Fiona‟s words:
“I am happy to see you”, she said and pulled his earlobes.
“You could have just driven away”, she said. “Just driven away
without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me.
Forsaken”.
He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her
sweetly shaped skull. He said, Not a chance”.28
It began to feel amongst Feminist writer that woman should be
revolutionary as a sexual participiant.
Alice Munro allowed her
protagonists to be liberated themselves from all men-prescribed concepts
and restrictions of sexuality.
Famous Canadian Feminist Journalist
Joanne Kates acknowledges that woman‟s right to get sexual pleasure can
be considered as a landmark achievement of Women Liberation
Movement. That's why she told:
“A powerful woman is a sexual woman. Our new power is
the power to demand. Our pleasure, to say: “ I want …….”, to
say: “Touch me here …….”, to say: “Not like that”. These are
words I never uttered ten years ago and now, in this bed of
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struggle, I say them often. And it is the power vested in those
words that is awakening my sexuality”29.
When some male authors writes a text, he delineates the female
characters as passive object and her eroticism is considered as something
shameful. But, writings by woman are balancing this contention as they
are celebrating women‟s sexuality and expressing the pleasure and beauty
of the female sexuality without any shame and Alice Munro is one of
such writer. Her Protagonists are mature enough and they are not ready
to be “Passive objects” in fact they are exalting their eroticism. We can
say that by bringing a paradigm shift in females‟ attitude towards
sexuality, Alice Munro is celebrating womanhood in her full voice.
4.3 SIMILARITY WITH INDIAN VIEW POINT:
Many myths inform us about the origin of Patriarchal Society.
Before
written records, it is found that society was centered around
women and their value and societies thoughts move round feminists.
It
is supposed by Cynthia Ellen that at certain times some drastic changes
occurred which changed the society and that time onwards society has
been dominated by men.
Now, Feminist uses this myth of matriarchal pre-history to develop
an affirming historical authority. This matriarchal myth presents female
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identity as something universal, timeless and biologically determined.
The reverence of woman in pre-historical society is demonstrated by the
capacity of the female body to bear children. This way the matriarchal
myth presents an archetypal picture of feminity that connects women
inescapably and stereotypically to their bodies, childbearing and the life
giving force of nature.
All these developments gave birth to “Earth Mother” concept. The
“Earth Mother” is a motif that appears in many world mythologies. The
“Earth Mother” is considered as a fertility goddess embodying the fertile
earth and the mother of other deities. This Earth Mother is considered as
patroness of Motherhood. This is considered so because the earth was
seen as being the mother from whom all life sprang. Thus when equated
with the Earth or the natural phenomenon such goddesses are sometimes
referred to as “Mother Earth” or as the “Earth Mother”. Many different
goddesses used to represent motherhood in one or associated with the
birth of humanity as a whole. Others have represented the fertility of the
earth. If we are given a look back to history and old pages of tradition
and culture we can see the image of women representing Earth Mother
and Mother Nature. The term “Mother Goddesses” is used to present the
female form of divinity associated with motherhood, creation or is
perceived as the ample manifestation of earth itself.
In the Incan,
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Babylonian, Roman, Greek, Indian religious practices, women priests
used to play superior role prior to the rise of Patriarchal Traditions.
In Greek mythology the Earth Mother has the power to deny
humankind, but in Slavic world she was one of the most important
deities. With the adoption of Christianity in all the Slavic lands, Mother
Earth was identified with Mary, the Mother of Jesus.
Nevertheless
medieval Christian thinkers considered nature as the creation of God over
Earth. For the medieval Christian, she was a personification and not a
goddess. From ancient time to present time, so many instances of mother
goddesses have been found and they include deities like ancient Greek
“Gaia”, and the Hindu “Ma”.
In Greek Mythology the first Greek god was a goddess and she is
Gaia i.e. Mother Earth. She was created herself out of primordial chaos, a
dark, silent formless and infinity oddity with no trace of life. Gaia was
the great mother of all. The heavenly gods and Titans were descended
from her union with Uranus (the sky), the sea-gods from her union with
Pontus (the sea) the Giants from her mating with Tartaros (The hell - pit)
and mortal creatures were sprung or born from her earthy flesh. As
Mother Nature, Gaia represents the entire eco-system of planet earth. As
a mother she is always working to achieve and maintain harmony,
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integrity and balance within the environment. Mother Nature cures, cares
and supports all life on this planet and all life and health depend on Her.
In Indian Mythology the concept of Mother Earth can be traced in
ancient scripture of Reg Veda, where Mother Earth or “ Prithvi ” is
described as the Primordial goddess. Mother Earth is also known by the
names of Bhumi, Dhra, Dharti, Dharani all of which is associated with
her sustaining grace as “that which holds everything”. Sky, Wind, Fire,
Water and Earth are considered as the five great elemental states of the
material Nature or PRAKRITI. In it Earth represents the female principle
of fertility and is the source of all vegetation and is responsible for
valuable and plentiful crops and fruits that it yields. She is the supporter
and the preserver of the universal balance. She raises her voice to the
rights of the living creatures and protects them from Universal Forces and
Powers. She is conjoined with the perception of just and strong cosmos.
She is witnessing to all our actions and particularly the actions of sinners
and evildoers who violate the rights of weak and innocent people living in
her province. “She endures all kinds of suffering with calmness and
display a great quality of patience. However, there are natural limits to
her forbearance. When stressed beyond her limits of threshold and
particularly to uphold the vital principle of Dharma, She cries out
aloud, calls for the attention of the Divine Protector”.30
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Indians believe that Mother Earth develops in them the sense of
endurance in the time of trials and tribulation of different types. They
believe that Mother Earth can see their pain and suffering and so provides
man comfort and help them to face these suffering by filling them with a
sense of hope and an expectation of redemption. Indians are able to face
the trials and tribulations of life with full patience and stability as they
hope that Mother Earth would mediate on their behalf. The qualities of
perseverance, calmness and patience are imparted to the human being by
Mother Earth.
The prejudice of gender is that which is existing from the very
beginning. This prejudice is seen to exist in myths, legends, laws and
books.
Man is shown to have a privilege over woman from the
beginning. For Munro her literature is an attempt to formulate and find
solutions to existing problems. With her acute social intuition based on
her personal response to the environment, she filters and bends society
through the Prism of her vision and experience. In her stories we can see
her sensitivity to social history and psychology. She has recorded this
sensitivity in the depictions of the fading world of the North American
town of the forties and fifties. This sensitivity is also marked in the
childhood experiences and adolescent pains connected to this time and
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place, which fights to shake her free of conventional sexual roles in order
to achieve independence and maturity in a modern, urban context.
The transformation of this voice can be seen in the stories of
Munro. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novels are stuffed
with
masculine
Christian
interpretation
of
a
woman,
largely
acknowledging the Western middle-class society. Its view of women is as
dependent guardian of the domestic keep, of children and of morality.
Sometimes she is considered as a saint, or sometimes as the provocative
old Eve. Whatsoever may be the combination of functions of the saint or
whore women have played in fiction, they used to consider as a material
dependent on male‟s mercy.
For establishing woman‟s voice in society Munro uses different
myths, legends and primordial concepts. Her stories are loaded with the
use of myths. Her heroines inspire us though their psychological journeys
that is replete with myths and feminist design.
The writer and her
heroines try to establish female experiences as something very crucial and
for that Munro is taking her heroines to the old days and charges them
with primal energy. She then colours them with Pagan and mythic
characteristic, and creates such a text where we can see the female
goddess in the guise of her heroines. All these forms take us to the
pantheistic religions of the ancient world. It seems that Munro in her
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stories is attracted more towards Pagan religious context of Astarte who
is the goddess of fertility, sexuality and war and Isis who is the goddess
of
motherhood, magic and fertility. With this Munro is adjoining the
life giving powers of women and the earth. This way Munro is avoids the
established masculine Christian context to which she belongs.
Munro through her stories associates the feminist struggle against
the Christian concept of male authority where the god - head become
male. For this she exalts the power of primitive and pagan woman.
Munro is turns away in her stories from the monotheistic belief to
primordial birth which super imposes the divine will of a male deity on
the act of reproduction. Rasporich said that “If the maternal principle
was retained by Christianity in a secondary way, that is as it was
sanctioned by marriage, maternity was desexualised and erotic women
were conceptualized through Eve, as a danger. As Mary Magdalene
and the vampish archetype of the Romantic poets, the woman of sexual
passion became the pagan seductress, the prostitute outside of moral
order and Patriarchal familial structures”. 31
Thus the ancient mythical world was conforming woman‟s fertility, her
amorousness and her power, but on the contrary Christianity invalidated
all these traits of a woman.
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Munro in her stories tries to retell the mythos and does great effort
to establish female genesis. In her stories, Christian mythology‟s Eve and
Semitic mythology‟s Lilith figure functions as Pagan
archetypes. As
Beryl of “The Progress of Love” and Nile in “Lives of Girls and Women”
perfectly use their feminity.
These women are prostitutes in their
behaviour with men. For Munro these women are the perfect models of
behaviour or we can say a substitute to sexless Motherhood. Beryl in
“The progress of Love” is openly outside of the conventional marriage
and maternal definition, as for the church is not her kind of religion. For
Munro, Beryl is one of minor goddesses because she is tempting glamour,
a carol to feminity and a power to move men.
As Munro‟s stories began to develop in their context, she began to
picture strongly her characters with an extra primitive and mythic range,
especially in her earlier fiction like “Dance of the Happy Shades”, “Lives
of Girls and women” the later “The progress of Love”. During the
progress of her expression of the feminist quest as mythic subtext, it is
not clear whether the author is trying to establish a new religious or social
order for women. Munro in her sixth work “The progress of Love”
realizes a truly effective and glorifying female muse.
Munro in “While Dump” of “The Progress of Love” portrays
Sophie as Venus and thus presents herself as determined
mythogizer.
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Aged Sophie is portrayed as Venus by Munro, as she came out of the
water to exhibit her weaken and wrinkled body which is the ironic
reversion of the male perception of the goddess of love and of woman
created in her image. Actually Sophie of “While Dump” is somehow
Munro‟s symbolic appearance and re-inception of the concept of the
Mother Goddess. In this way she is the symbol of fertility, sexuality and
power. Sophie is presented as enlightened in the clear light of the day.
She appears as the Roman Goddess of love and fertility.
In “While
Dump” Sophie is portrayed as a female genesis myth with amazing
assertion.
Munro‟s first collection of short stories “Dance of the Happy
Shades (1967)”, is the questioning exploration of the dependency of
women. These stories are written from the point of view of a child or
adolescent and which is modified to some extent as the time passes. In
each, the characters are presented vividly in rural or small town settings
in which “The surfaces of Life”, its textures, sounds, scenes, smells all
are described with exactness of observation. These stories capture the
spirit and stagnation of rural and small town life especially of 30s and
40s. These stories presents the barriers between the young and the old,
the poor and the rich, the sick and the well. In this collection, the two
stories “Walker Brother Cowboy” and “Images “are based on childhood
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experiences. Nora Cronin of “Walker Brother Cowboy and Mary
Mcquade of “Images” are two characters who are unmarried women
and belong to earth-mother concept. These women are presented vividly
and evoked through the child‟s eye. They become forceful totemic even
in their single authorities. Nora of “Walker Brother Cowboy” is a
middle-aged, crude and coarse lady who survives alone on a poor farm
with her old blind mother.
Nora is presented as a vibrant flash,
beautifully dressed with brilliance and a sincere woman capable of
unrestrained behaviour and active invitation.
Another woman Mary
Mcquade of “Images” is a spinster who is living by moving from house
to house nursing the family sick. She may be gloomy and complaining
and temporary mistress of the house she stays for a short span of time,
still she is a character to be considered. She allowed her virginal power
loose in the house and remains, within the community of the father‟s
family and feeling proud of being an old maid. We can see a kind of
authorization in the, status and behaviour of these women, as in spite of
the restraints of their cutoff circumstances, these women seems
emotionally free, as they do not have to adjust to the rules of married
women.
Munro touched and heightened Nora and Mary as a primitive and
ancestral source.
These women, as viewed through child‟s eye are
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mythic figures who dominate like great goddesses. Mary, though she is a
violent figure, she is still having closeness to animal life. If the girl in
both stories is attracted and scared of these two women and their
virginity, so they are very capturing characters who belong to a
complexity of sisterhood. This is championed by Munro through Mrs.
Fullerton of “The shining House”, who is an earth-mother type.
“The shining Houses” is a classic story which shows the idea of
conflict between „old‟ and „new‟ and the human reaction to everyday
changes. The general conflict in this story is Mary‟s dilemma. She listens
to both conflicting perspectives within her community, Mrs. Fullerton
and her neighbours. The neighbours represent the present and the future
of the community. They want a more modern, advanced area to live in
but don‟t even consider Mrs. Fullerton‟s view. Mrs. Fullerton represents
the community‟s history. She‟s unable to adapt to the changes of society
and keeps to her barn, animals and crop-growing as opposed to new
roads, market produce and houses. Both sides (old and new) of the story
have very strong feelings of what they expect to be done which leads to a
fierce and controversial conflict between the two parties.
The main
character, Mary is trapped in the middle of the argument forcing her to
make and take on an opinion, a forced opinion that everyone will
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encounter at some point of their life. The role of the “Old” in the story is
shown by Mrs. Fullerton, the longest living residence in the community.
Mary is a mature and urbane narrator of “The shining Houses”, but
Mrs. Fullerton rightfully belongs to the 'Old Wilderness City', under the
new subdivision they both live in. Except Mary, the other neighbouring
people of Mrs. Fullerton consider her property, cottage, garden and
animals as a filthy eyesore, which is bringing down the property value of
that place, but narrator supports the old lady. She appreciates her socially
unmanageable nature and her self-sufficiency, her attachment to her own
place after the death of one husband and abandonment by another. For
Munro she is a female deity. She represents the chaotic powers of nature
and of pre- civilization when nature for the human being was fertile and
magically female. The narrator is willing for Mrs. Fullerton to represent
some supreme victorious state of society which somehow the modern
community denies.
But she herself cannot win and knows herself
sacrificed to masculine gods. For her Mrs. Fullerton has been folded
together into memory and emerged as an inspirational subject.
Munro in her stories tries to adjust herself with present and future.
For that she chooses women and brings forth her strength as a woman and
shades them with mythic tones.
Munro was brought up in rural
surroundings which influenced her much, from these surroundings; she
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caught the agrarian earth-mother myth and thus shaded some of her rural
types with aspects of divinity or mystical power.
From her own
memories Munro tries to bring forth women whose austerity,
primitiveness is their home and their authority. Munro‟s these women are
usually alone, poor, needy and ferocious but having their own sad and
poignant desires. Still in their failures their responses are like shared
animals, which provide for Munro‟s stories a kind of nobility which is
basic as well as central also.
In another story collection “Dance of Happy Shades”, Munro
presents the earth- mothers and primitives in some decorous spinsters
who are playing their roles in stylized and simplified way which is
popular in Calvinist order of the small town. As in one story of this
collection that is in “The Peace of Utrecht”, Munro‟s narrator introduces
many aunties who present a pattern of life which Munro used to think
about with some anguish. In their attitude these women behave like
children, they are discontented and live ordered lives which is filled with
complicated domestic and private traditions. For Munro‟s
protagonist
the possibility of communicating with Aunt Annie and Aunt Lou is very
difficult as they are held together in the Virginal web of sisterhood. They
become older and like a dummy with little or no substance but full of
clever devices. The other character Miss. Marsalles in “Dance of the
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Happy Shades” is more grotesque, childish, wild, bizarre yet domestic
who is living in Rosedale. Outside the complications of time she is
wholly unrealistic. She used to wear a brocaded dress with different
hairstyles and seems as if she is disguising herself. It seems that she does
not belong to any man and thus suggesting an independent and an
uncivilized feminist magic. Like a divine power she is able to teach to
play Piano to a retarded child miraculously.
In “Dance of the Happy Shades” Munro portrays the women who
are alone and colored them by the ancient mythology and equated them
with nature and its primal power
All her women, the earth-mothers, spinster, primitives all are in
relief. Though they are living outside the society, they still like the old
goddesses.
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REFERENCES:
1. Alan
Twigg,
“Interview
with
Alice
Munro”,
<http://www.abcbookworld.com/view_essay.php?id=78>, 1978.
2. Graene Gibson, “Interview with Alice Munro”, Eleven Canadian
Novelist. Toronto: Anansi, 1973. p. 246.
3. Beverly Jean Rasporich, Dance of Sexes: Art and Gender in the
Fiction of Alice Munro, Canada: The University of Alberta Press,
1990, p. 33.
4. An interview with Alice Munro, 15 February 1981.
5. Hallvard Dahlia The fiction of Alice Munro Ploughshares No.3
(summer 1978) p.57.
6. Barbara Frum, Great Danes, Maclean‟s , 1973, p.30.
7. Alice Munro, Lives of the Girls and Women, Toronto: The New
American Library of Canada Ltd., 1974, p. 147.
8. Alice Munro, “Bardon Bus” The Moons of Juptier, Toronto:
Macmillan of Canada, 1982, p. 121.
9. Alice Munro, “Dulse” The Moons of Juptier, Toronto: Macmillan of
Canada, 1982, Page 36.
10.Alice Munro, “Labour Day Dinner” The Moons of Juptier, Toronto:
Macmillan of Canada, 1982, p. 137.
171
11.Alice Munro, “Bardon Bus” The Moons of Juptier, Toronto:
Macmillan of Canada, 1982, p.125.
12. Beverly J. Resporich, Dance of the Sexes; Art and gender in the
fiction of Alice Munro, Edmonton: University of Alberta Press,
1990, p.88.
13. Alice Munro, “An Ounce Of Cure” Dance of the Happy
Shades,
Toronto Ryerson publishing, 1968, p. 76.
14. Alice Munro, “Red Dress” Dance of the Happy Shades,
Toronto
Ryerson publishing, 1968, p. 160.
15. Ibid., p.149.
16.W.R. Martin, Paradox and Parallel, Canada: University of Alberta
Press, 1987, p.108.
17.Alice Munro, “Hate ship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship,
Marriage”, Hate ship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,
Canada: Penguin Canada 2001, p.35.
18.Maggie Human, The Dictionary of Feminist Theory. Columbus;
Ohio State University Press 1990, p.226.
19. Alice Munro, Who do you Think You Are? Toronto: Macmillon,
1978, p.33.
20.Alice Munro,
“Hate ship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship,
Marriage” Hate ship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Canada: Penguin Canada 2001, p.36.
172
21.Alice Munro, “Walking On Water” Something I‟ve Been Meaning to
Tell you Toronto: McGraw- Hill Ryerson, 1974, p.65.
22.Miriam Schneir, Ed. The Vintage Book of Feminism. London:
Random House 1995,p.256
23.Alice Munro, “Mischief”, Who do you Think You Are? Toronto:
Macmillon, 1978, p.138
24.W.R. Martin, Paradox and Parallel, Canada: University of Alberta
Press, 1987, p.63.
25.Alice
Munro,
“Comfort”,
Hateship,
Friendship,
Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage, Canada: Penguin Canada 2001, p.149.
26.Alice Munro, “Floating Bridge”, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage Canada: Penguin Canada 2001, p. 84.
27.Ibid., p. 84.
28.Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over The Mountain”, Hateship,
Friendship, Courtship, Loveship,
Marriage” Canada:
Penguin
Canada 2001, p. 327.
29. Jonne Kates. Once More With Feeling Hetero Sexuality and
Feminist Consciousness, Maureen Fitz Gerald, Connie Guberman,
Marge Wolfe Ed. Still ain‟t satisfied! Canadian Feminism) Today.
Canada: woman‟s Press, 1982. p.76.
173
30.Rudra R. Narasimhan, “Patience In Suffering- Earth Day
Celebration.” 3 March 2012 <www.bhavanajagat.com) tag /
goddess-bhu-devi > (21 April, 2009).
31.Beverly J. Rasporich, Dance of the Sexes; Art and Gender, In the
fiction of Alice Munro Canada; The University of Alberta Press,
1990, p.34.
174