Analysis of major characters

Axis by Alice Munro encapsulates all of her major ideas regarding female
issues, thematic ideas as well as stylistic representation of her art. The first few
paragraphs of the story introduces the major characters, their attitudes and
perspectives, the sitting of the story, and their struggles and conflicts in a way
which shows Munro’s awareness of the compactness of the short story form. These
first passages introduce the two major characters, Grace and Avie. We, as readers,
first meet them fifty years earlier when they were waiting the bus to go home in
their summer vacation. They are history major, and as the story shows, they have
been enrolled in college just to find the perfect partner and future husband. Each
one of these two girls has her own features. Whereas Grace is somehow weak,
coward, and easily led, Avie seems to be strong, challenging, and lively. As two
adolescent girls, sex and love making occupy a great deal of their thoughts and
form an apparent paradox. Avie wants to live this experience and always urges her
boyfriend Huge to have sex with her because she believes that this would make
him more manly. From her attitude, it is clear that she is not in love but wishes to
be and she thinks sex might be the solution. On the other side of the spectrum,
Grace wishes to keep her virginity to maintain the interest of her boyfriend, Royce,
intact. She is deeply in love with him and in a constant fear of losing him. Through
the summer vacation, Royce visits Grace in her parents’ farm. On his way, he sees
Avie and feels a strong urge to get out of the bus and talks to her because she
appears to him as lively and beautiful as he wishes. Royce’s only aim from this
visit is to have sex with Grace who declined his offers a lot. We get to experience
his ambivalence toward Grace: “Favorite trees. What next? Favorite flower?
Favorite windmill? Did she have a favorite fence post?” (p. 9) He is clearly not in
love with her and is controlled by his sexual desires toward her. From a mature
perspective, we can see the true nature of Royce from Grace’s mother perspective:
“Royce here is the type to spoil a woman,” she said. “Anybody with him around
would be getting the work done whiz-band and then be enjoying ice cream every
day. We’d be spoiled.” (p. 11) When they were left alone, they started to “make
out” only to be caught by Grace’s mother. Royce leaves the farm ignoring the
demands of Grace to take her with him. After that, we learn that Grace had colitis,
and her vulnerable character could not handle this harsh situation. After that, the
story moves fifty years where we see Avie in her late sixties, married to Huge who
died earlier, and had six children from him. Suddenly, she meets Royce who tells
her about the time when he saw her on his way to Grace’s farm and reveals his
attraction toward her. He then asks if she would have accepted to meet him and,
without hesitation, she answers yes. The two main characters appear disappointed
by their choices in life. Avie’s response to Royce’s question alludes to her
unhappiness in her marriage where she confessed that she prefers, if life gave her
another chance, Royce over Huge. Likewise, Grace seems unable to recover from
her past shock when Royce left her and even refused to take her with him.

Main themes

Within the few pages of her short story, Munro discussed complex and rich
themes concerned with the inner and outer worlds of the characters. Grace’s
suffering from separation anxiety constitutes the psychological theme of the story.
Her weak character could not accept the shock when Royce turned his back on her,
and she seems to have been vanished from the whole framework of the story as if
her identity is deeply connected with Royce’s. She continues her life as a ghost
where the reader only sees her through her letters to her friend Avie. In a
flashback, we learn that Avie received a letter from Grace telling her that she
dropped out of college, “due to some troubles I have had with my health and my
nerves.” (p. 15) Her whole world has been shattered into pieces due to Royce
abandonment. Furthermore, the story happens to be paradoxical in its essence
where we see ideas, characters, themes, and interests are set against another. Axis
depicts two opposing female characters: Avie as a representation of feminism and
Grace as a prototype of femininity. The headstrong, independent Avie is a fine
example of the new spirit of feminism to the extent that she can be considered as a
representation of Munro herself. We see Avie as the dominant party in her
relationship with Huge; moreover, she is completely an independent young
woman. On the other hand, the weak, dependent Grace exemplifies the traditional
role of womanhood. She depends utterly on her boyfriend Royce, and has lost her
mind, spirit, and body after he left her. The story also portrays a significant facet of
the human nature which is dissatisfaction. The general mode of the story is
pessimistic and depressing, especially the finale of the story where we see all the
characters dissatisfied with their choices in life. As a feminist writer, Munro’s
main theme in Axis is undeniably the unending battle of the sexes. Grace and
Avie's primary objective in life is to find men who will be their husbands. But this
is not either woman's choice. It is a consequence of their environment and
socioeconomic status. As the opening part of the story declares:

“They understood—everybody understood—that having any sort of job after

graduation would be a defeat. Like the sorority girls, they were enrolled here
to find somebody to marry. First a boyfriend, then a husband. It wasn’t
spoken of in those terms, but there you were.” (p. 1)

Munro as a feminist writer

Feminism appeared as a political, economic, and social movement at the

beginning of the 20th century demanding an affective change in the status que of
the male-dominant society and a just equality between the sexes. Munro is widely
regarded as one of the most acclaimed feminist writer in our current age. Her
stories encapsulate the main tenants of feminism, and her depiction of female
struggles and problems summarizes the ongoing struggle between the sexes.
Munro frequently uses a unique style of narration where she depicts realistic
characters and occurrences to make her stories more affective. Catherine Sheldrick
says that Munro presents her stories in “ordinary experiences so that they appear
extraordinary, invested with a kind of magic” (Sheldrick283). In Axis, Munro
blinds together the present and the past, the outer and the inner, the city and the
countryside to widen her scoop of the observable life. As typical to most of
Munro’s works, Axis focuses on a particular region which makes Munro a sort of
regional novelist with her characters as chroniclers of the events, social status, and
traditions of that region, which is mostly rural. Besides, her frequent use of the free
movement in time and the flashback techniques enable her to narrate and trace her
female characters and their changing struggles between childhood to maturation
and into some sort of old age. Axis represents this technique quit clearly where
Munro moves here readers back and forth in time to trace the psychological and
social status of her two female heroines.

“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 dying or
defunct Faulkneresque world of southwestern rural Ontario, a world made
immediate through remembrances of time past” (Rasporich 33).

Throughout her various works, Munro is truly the defender on the behalf of all
women, the great orator of the new spirit of the age, a sincere revolutionist against
the unfairness and misdeed toward women, and an honest observer and recorder of
the contemporary age.
 Works Cited

Rasporich, J. Beverly. Dances of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice
Munro .Alberta, Canada:

The University of Alberta P, 1980.

Sheldrick, Catherine. “Alice Munro”. Contemporary Literary Criticism 95(1997):

282-283.

Munro, Alice. “Axis.” The New Yorker,

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/11/Axis-2.