Saturday, June 16, 2007

Wives

"Post and Beam" gives us another example of a prison of a marriage.

Think about the marriages in "Floating Bridge" and "Comfort."

In "Nettles," the narrator talks about the enchantment she feels in leaving behind her marriage and its domesticity. In "Family Furnishings," Alfrida says that the narrator will soon be a married woman: By her tone, this could mean either 'I have to allow that you're grown up now' or 'Pretty soon you'll have to toe the line.'

And now we have Lorna, who's married to Brendan (another older man, another academic), but who has odd, seemingly platonic fantasies about one of his former students. I loved this paragraph:

She did not love him enough. She would say she loved him, and mean it to a certain extent, and she wanted to be loved by him, but there was a little hum of hate running along beside her love, nearly all the time.

There's no high drama here, or in any of the stories, really. There's no domestic violence, there's not even infidelity that we know about. But these women are unhappy, unfulfilled and desperate to escape.

3 comments:

kc said...

I know! That's why I said I'd like to see her write about a happy, passionate relationship, just to see what she would do with it!

Part of this theme is generational, I think. Munro is in her 70s and comes from an era where it was a genuine struggle for women to be full-fledged, interesting, educated individuals who had an identity apart from being someone's wife or mother or daughter. And she was in her 30s during the heart of the women's movement — an age when women who had married young, as most women did, were finding themselves with grown-up kids and seeking some liberation from domestic drudgery. I think it's natural that she would focus on this sort of theme because it was probably a huge part of her psyche, even though many of her characters are ostensibly from a younger generation. It was also an era when women were expected to save themselves for marriage or at least have very limited sexual exploration and to not be sexually demanding with their husbands but just primarily service him, and that seems to inform some of her stories and perhaps partially explain why so many of her characters seek extramarital attachments, or "escape," as Erin put it.

Many of Munro's characters end up with relatively enlightened partners, and their marriages seem like an advance over what their mothers may have had, but there's still an element of being stifled, making do, making bargains.

Or maybe there's still an unrealistic aura of romance hanging over marriage that clouds their vision. How many people still harbor and perpetuate the notion that marriage is somehow an emotional/physical end-all, be-all? Maybe she's slightly critical of these "dreamy and dissatisfied" women who more or less buy into that and then are inevitably disappointed.

Compare Polly and Johanna from the first story! These two women are a lot alike. Plain, hard-working, self-sufficient, rural. When Lorna is imagining Lionel wanting Polly, she thinks: Such a competent and sensible woman, pliant but solid. Someone not vain or dreamy or dissatisfied. That might well be the sort of person he would marry someday. A wife who could take over.

And Munro writes: Polly would marry, or not marry, but whichever way it was, the things that happened with men would not be what broke her heart.

The Johannas and the Pollys seem to be the truly "staunch women," to use Little Edie's phrase, in Munro's world.

Erin said...

I wonder if Munro has any stories like that, with happy, well-adjusted couples. That would be really interesting.

Excellent comparison of Polly and Johanna! I had not really noticed that paragraph much before, the one about Polly not being "dreamy or dissatisfied," but that is significant. I think Munro has sympathy for the dissatisfied women and their stifling marriages, but perhaps she loses patience with them, too, and finds the sturdier women to be better role models.

cl said...

"A little hum of hate" -- that line was so telling, such a zinger.