Ethics and Affects in The Fiction of Alice Munro

ETHICS AND AFFECTS
IN THE FICTION OF
ALICE MUNRO
Edited by Amelia DeFalco
& Lorraine York
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN AFFECT THEORY

AND LITERARY CRITICISM
Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary
Criticism
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University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Joel Faflak
Western University
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non-Western literatures; examinations of historical and conceptual rela-
tions between major and minor philosophies of emotion and literary
experience; and studies of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and disability
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Amelia DeFalco · Lorraine York
Editors
Ethics and Affects

in the Fiction
of Alice Munro
Editors
Amelia DeFalco Lorraine York
University of Leeds McMaster University
Leeds, UK Hamilton, ON, Canada
Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism

ISBN 978-3-319-90643-0 ISBN 978-3-319-90644-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7
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Praise for Ethics and Affects in the
Fiction of Alice Munro
“Shame, guilt, envy, disgust and other negative affects recur in the sto-
ries of Alice Munro, who explores insoluble moral dilemmas with deep
compassion. In this groundbreaking collection, ten scholars respond
with an answering compassion, paying close attention to those conflicts
that relate to embodied female subjectivity. Focusing on a range of top-
ics, from breastfeeding to murder, these essays shed new light on ancient
human questions.”
—Magdalene Redekop, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Toronto,
Canada, and author of Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro
(1992)
v
Acknowledgements
Amelia DeFalco thanks Robert and Morris Hemmings for teaching her
new lessons in ethics and affects, and for reminding her that thinking
and feeling are never discrete. Additionally, she thanks Lorraine York for
making the process of collecting and editing this volume so congenial,
rewarding, and straight up fun! It’s been such a wonderful trip, Lorraine,
that reaching the destination is a little bittersweet.
Lorraine York thanks the editor of Studies in Canadian Literature,
Dr. Cynthia Sugars, for granting permission to reprint “‘A Sort of
Refusal:’ Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career” in this volume. The content
originally appeared in the journal’s 40th anniversary issue: volume 40,
number 1 (2016). She owes thanks as always to Michael Ross, for crit-
ical advice, seemingly infinite support, and devastatingly acute wit. She
also thanks Amelia DeFalco for collegiality and friendship that span the
Atlantic Ocean. It’s been such an honor to work with you, Amelia.
The editors wish to thank the contributors for their perceptive
insights into the ethical and affective complexities of Alice Munro’s
stories, and for their patience in taking on the various rounds of revi-
sions that encompass the creation of a volume such as this one. We also
wish to thank Allie Bochicchio, Literature Editor at Palgrave Macmillan
U.S. for her enthusiasm for the project and Emily Janakiram and Rachel
Jacobe, Editorial Assistants, Literature, for guiding us through the publi-
cation process and answering many a question along the way.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice Munro’s Fiction

of “Exquisite Shame” 1
Amelia DeFalco and Lorraine York
2 Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s Stories 13

Sara Jamieson
3 The Shame of Affect: Sensation and Susceptibility

in Alice Munro’s Fiction 35
Amelia DeFalco
4 Embodied Shame and the Resilient Ethics of

Representation in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over
the Mountain” 57
Ana María Fraile-Marcos
5 Alice Munro’s Dramatic Fictions: Challenging (Dis)

Ability by Playing with Oedipus the King and Embracing
the Queer Art of Failure 79
Marlene Goldman
ix
x Contents
6 “Chunks of Language Caught in Her Throat”: The

Problem of Other(ed) Minds in Alice Munro’s Stories of
Cognitive Disability 109
Heidi Tiedemann Darroch
7 Alice Munro and the Shame of Murder 127

Susan Warwick
8 Child’s Play: Ethical Uncertainty and Narrative Play in

the Work of Alice Munro 153
Katherine G. Sutherland
9 Gravel and Grief: Alice Munro’s Vulnerable Landscapes 177

Claire Omhovère
10 “A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career 195

Lorraine York
11 Life After Life: Survival in the (Late) Fiction of Alice

Munro 219
Naomi Morgenstern
Index 245
Notes on Contributors
Heidi Tiedemann Darroch has taught at several universities and col-

leges and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Her article on
food imagery in Munro’s fiction and Mary Pratt’s paintings is forthcom-
ing in Canadian Culinary Imaginations. She is currently working in stu-
dent services at Camosun College in Victoria.
Amelia DeFalco is University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities
in the School of English, University of Leeds. She is the author of
Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (Ohio State
University Press, 2010), Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency,
and Canadian Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2016), as well as
essays on contemporary cultural representations of aging, disability, gen-
der, care, and the posthuman. Her current book project, Curious Kin:
Fictions of Posthuman Care, examines nonhuman care in literature, film,
and television.
Ana María Fraile-Marcos is Associate Professor of English at the
University of Salamanca where she teaches Canadian Literature. She is a
Lorna Marsden Fellow at the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York
University (Toronto, ON), and has been visiting scholar at various US,
Canadian, and European universities. Her articles have appeared in vari-
ous peer-reviewed journals (Canadian Literature, Journal for Canadian
Studies, MELUS, Atlantis, Open Letter, African American Review) and
as chapters of influential edited volumes. Among her recent publica-
tions is the edited collection Literature and the Glocal City: Reshaping
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
the English Canadian Imaginary (Routledge, 2014). She is currently the

Principal Investigator on the research project “Narratives of Resilience:
An Intersectional Approach to Literature and Other Contemporary
Cultural Representations” (FFI2015-63895-C2-2-R).
Dr. Marlene Goldman is a Professor in the Department of English at
the University of Toronto who specializes in Canadian literature, age
studies, and medical humanities. She recently completed a book enti-
tled Forgotten: Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s in Canadian
Literature on the correlation between narrative and pathological modes
of forgetting associated with trauma, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease
(McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017). She is currently writing a book entitled
Performing Shame: Simulating Stigmatized Minds and Bodies. In addi-
tion to her scholarly work, she has also written, directed, and produced
a short film about dementia entitled “Piano Lessons” based on Alice
Munro’s short story “In Sight of the Lake” from her collection Dear
Life (2004). She is currently adapting the story “Torching the Dusties”
about aging and intergenerational warfare from Margaret Atwood’s
recent collection Stone Mattress (2014) into a short film. She is the
author of Paths of Desire (University of Toronto Press, 1997), Rewriting
Apocalypse (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2005), and (Dis)Possession (McGill-
Queen’s Press, 2011).
Sara Jamieson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at
Carleton University, where she teaches Canadian literature. Her research
is focused on representations of aging in contemporary Canadian writ-
ing, and includes publications on Alice Munro, Paul Quarrington, Joan
Barfoot, and Margaret Atwood. She is currently working on a project on
midlife in Canadian fiction.
Naomi Morgenstern is Associate Professor of English and American
Literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto.
She specializes in psychoanalytic and post-structuralist critical theory and
gender studies and teaches courses in nineteenth, twentieth, and twen-
ty-first century American literature. She is the author of Wild Child:
Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics in Contemporary North
American Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) as well as essays
on a range of American writers (Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, David
Mamet, among others) and on the short stories of Alice Munro.
Notes on Contributors xiii
Claire Omhovère is a Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature

at University Paul Valéry–Montpellier 3 (France). Her research inter-
ests are broadly based on perceptions and representations of space in
postcolonial literatures with a specific interest in the aesthetic and eth-
ical dimensions of landscape writing in settler-invader colonies such as
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. She is the author of several arti-
cles and her books include Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in
Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2007) and the col-
lection of essays L’Art du paysage (Michel Houdiard, 2014).
Katherine G. Sutherland retired in 2017 after a 25-year career
of teaching and administration at Thompson Rivers University in
Kamloops, B.C. She continues to do research and write about affect the-
ory, postcolonial literature, and motorcycle literature from her home in
East Sooke on Vancouver Island.
Susan Warwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Humanities and the Graduate Program in English at York University,
Toronto. She teaches in the fields of North American literature and
culture, contemporary fiction, and crime writing. Her publications and
presentations include works on Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Willa
Cather, James M. Cain, Canadian crime fiction, and Canadian war litera-
ture.
Lorraine York is Distinguished University Professor and Senator
William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture in the
Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.
She is the author of Literary Celebrity in Canada (University of Toronto
Press, 2007), Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity
(University of Toronto, 2013), and Celebrity Cultures in Canada,
co-edited with Katja Lee (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016).
Her new book, Reluctant Celebrity, examines public displays of celeb-
rity reluctance as forms of privilege intertwined with race, gender, and
sexuality, appeared in 2018 from Palgrave Macmillan.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice

Munro’s Fiction of “Exquisite Shame”
Amelia DeFalco and Lorraine York
We can pinpoint the origins of this collection with unusual preci-

sion. In 2003, in an essay entitled “The Baby or the Violin? Ethics
and Femininity in the Fiction of Alice Munro,” Naomi Morgenstern
observed that “Munro’s stories have much to contribute to contempo-
rary efforts to think about literariness and ethics.”1 Indeed, although
previous critics of Munro had by no means ignored the ethical—or the
affective—dimensions of her work (Redekop, Howells, Heble), the
steadfast focus on those dimensions afforded by the affective and ethical
“turns” in literary studies during and since the time of Morgenstern’s
comment has allowed, and indeed called out for a dedicated analysis of
Alice Munro’s stories from the intertwined perspectives of ethics and
affects. Indeed, in that same 2003 essay, Morgenstern’s perception that
“Munro’s stories represent the risks of the ethical”2 made it clear that the
affective dimension—risk and its associated feeling of vulnerability—is
A. DeFalco (*) 
School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
L. York 
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. DeFalco and L. York (eds.), Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice
Munro, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_1
2 A. DeFALCO AND L. YORK
fully engaged in any discussion of the ethical. The two can hardly be dis-
articulated for, as Brian Massumi pronounces, “Ethics are about how we
inhabit uncertainty together.”3
The title of this introduction is inspired by the story “What Is
Remembered” (2001), one of many Munro stories suffused with duplic-
itous, conflicting, often mysterious affects, most prominently, a seduc-
tive but unbearable, erotic, yet despicable “exquisite shame.”4 The story
is a compelling entry point for an investigation of affects and ethics via
shame since the word itself occurs no less than five times in the 24-page
story. In fact, shame is in many ways central to the story’s exploration
of marriage, motherhood, and infidelity as experiences of embodiment
intricately bound to affect, aging, and mortality. The story concerns
Meriel, a young wife and mother chafing at the strictures of heteronor-
mative family life: “Young husbands were stern, in those days…Off to
work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days
spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical
glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up
between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and
emotions, the babies.”5 This vision of “ailments and emotions” as the
unseemly, contagious burden of cohabitation and home that masculine
power erects bulwarks against is central to our collection, which con-
siders how illness, disability, and affective embodiment destabilize the
illusion of the able-bodied, masculine, rational, unaffected subject that
underlies neoliberal political discourse. Meanwhile, in Munro’s work,
the wives of those young husbands, thrust into the “stunning respon-
sibility” of wifedom and motherhood succumb to, balk at, and shirk
(sometimes simultaneously) the oppressive demands of femininity,
indulging in “dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits”
that threaten to transgress the “newspaper” barriers that their husbands
have erected.6 Shared, “subversive” ribaldry is just one of the many rad-
ical, even dangerous affects that permeate Munro’s fiction. In Munro’s
work, affects expose and destabilize, threaten and transgress prevailing
gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective econ-
omies. Munro’s characters grapple with the risk of emotionality, the
undertow of affect that can, at its most extreme, produce selfish and
cruel indulgences of desire and “ugly feelings” such as disgust, shame,
and repulsion. At the other end of the spectrum is the exercise of self-
effacing “prudence” that maintains affective economies, as Meriel does,
despite her fleeting indulgence of extramarital desire. In the end, she
1 INTRODUCTION: RISKING FEELING: ALICE MUNRO’S FICTION … 3
pursues “some economical sort of emotional management” that carefully

balances risks and rewards, forgoing the radical happiness that suffused
her, momentarily, in her brief affair.7 The problem of affectivity recurs
throughout Munro’s oeuvre, which pays close attention to the economy
of emotions. As the character Joyce muses in the more recent story
“Fiction” (2009), “It almost seemed as if there must be some random
and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if
the great happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one person
could come out of the great unhappiness of another.”8 Affects are never
solitary, never without consequence, never apolitical. They are always
shifting, transmitting, transforming, at once exposing and creating dense,
unpredictable, invisible but palpable networks between bodies. Affects
are, in effect, always affecting, at once noun and verb, being and doing
simultaneously.
In “What is Remembered,” Meriel’s brief evasion of the “stunning
responsibility” of wifedom manifests in an unexpected, thrilling sexual
infidelity with a stranger she meets at a funeral. Guilt9 and shame are
the dominant affects associated with the “power and delight”10 of the
escapade. The association between eroticism and shame is not unusual,
but Munro complicates the straightforward shameful thrill, and thrill-
ing shame, of illicit sexual adventure with intimations of aging, disability,
and death. The opportunity for infidelity is afforded by Meriel’s plan to
visit her elderly namesake, Aunt Muriel, in a nursing home on her way
home from the funeral. The stranger, an unnamed bush pilot and doctor
who treated the deceased, offers to drive her there. Despite her cataracts,
Aunt Muriel easily recognizes the frisson between the pair, responding
to the invisible “transmission of affect” described by Teresa Brennan.11
“I could tell,” Aunt Muriel tells the pair, “I used to be a devil myself.”12
The magnificent tension between the narration’s first description of Aunt
Muriel’s pointedly ailing body—“swollen and glimmering” under her
asbestos blanket, smoking a cigarette alone in a “dim corridor” painted
a “liverish” color; her skin covered in “dead-white spots,” her hair “rag-
ged, mussed from being rubbed into pillows, and the lobes of her ears
hung out of it like flat teats”13—and the licentious stories she tells of sex-
ual adventure, the wild parties where people would “Just meet for the
first time and start kissing like mad and run off into the forest. In the
dark,”14 reanimates the story’s initial reference to the feminized space of
the home, here transformed into the nursing home, as an unseemly space
dominated by “ailments and emotion.” The concurrence of morbidity
and “decline”15 with sexual vitality and adventure asserts the persistence
of affective embodiment, the often-troubling unpredictability of human
embodiment as a site of combined vulnerability, power, and risk. The
masculine order that seeks to disavow this precarity, to confine “ailments
and emotions” to the feminine space of the home, is a futile rejection,
a false imposition of order that cannot be sustained because Meriel’s
husband, Pierre, like all the story’s men, succumbs to illness in the end,
though he strives to maintain masculine order throughout his illness.
When Meriel reads Fathers and Sons to him during his convalescence,
the couple argue over the novel’s depiction of gender and romance.
According to Pierre, Anna cannot respond to Bazarov’s declaration of
love because of the risk of “shame and rejection. She’s intelligent. She
knows that,” argues Pierre. “Intelligence makes her cold. Intelligent
means cold, for a woman.”16 Although he clarifies that he is speaking of
nineteenth-century tropes, his reading echoes the earlier description of
male breadwinners seeking to protect their rational world (with newspa-
pers, no less) from the disarrayed emotionality and embodiment of the
feminized space of home, a rearticulation of the notion that rationality
and embodied affects cannot cohabitate. The either/or fallacy of reason
versus emotion cannot be consigned to the past, as Meriel’s story of pas-
sion and prudence makes clear.
This persistent fiction—that emotions, embodied vulnerability can,
indeed should, be controlled and contained, limited to appropriate sec-
tors and zones of life—haunts Munro’s characters, who can only expe-
rience emotions as dissonance, as the disorienting conflict of “exquisite
shame,” or “morbid, preening excitement.”17 This dissonance and
its oxymoronic stylistic vehicle are characteristic of affect as theorized
by Silvan Tomkins; shame, he observed, is not walled off from affects
thought to be positive, such as interest/excitement or enjoyment/joy;
indeed, in his words it is, “produced by the incomplete reduction of the
positive affects of interest and enjoyment.”18 Recalling the brief affair
with the doctor years, even decades, later, Meriel experiences “the raw
surprise of her own body, the racketing of desire.”19 The story’s only
mention of entirely positive affects—her body “packed full of happi-
ness, rewarded as she would surely never be again, every cell in her body,
plumped up with a sweet self-esteem”20—is delivered as the (potential)
rationale for suicide. A barely entertained idea she takes from romantic
fiction, “a certain kind of story—not the kind that anybody wrote any-
more.”21 All-consuming pleasure, the kind that affects every cell in the
body, is such a rarity that it becomes a kind of inverse trauma, a haunting

recollection that takes her body by storm again and again in the decades
that follow.
“What Is Remembered” draws our attention to the inextricable entan-
glement of gender, bodies, affects, and ethics in Munro’s work. Margaret
Atwood has described Munro as the preeminent writer of shame: “I can
think of no other writer who returns to the emotion of shame so fre-
quently and meticulously as Munro.”22 However, as our contributors
demonstrate, shame is only the beginning. Munro’s stories explore the
wide range of shifting, contradictory embodied affects, at once per-
ceived and mysterious, felt and disavowed. The discussion of affects is,
we suggest, always inevitably a discussion of ethics because the way that
bodies register and create affects, and how those affects initiate, or often
fail to initiate, action in the world creates a tangle of causes and effects.
Munro’s stories explore the connections between negative affects—
shame, disgust, guilt—and negative, cruel, even homicidal actions in
often discomforting detail. The dismissal of emotions and emotionality
as frivolous, “feminine,” without consequence, as somehow removed
from the masculine domains of politics and work is a ridiculous, yet dan-
gerously persistent conviction. As the explorations of Munro’s fiction
make clear, emotions are powerful, productive, and always political.
***
The following chapters explore how the denizens and readers of Alice
Munro’s fictional worlds “inhabit uncertainty together” as they come up
against the manifold challenges of living in the world. Claire Omhovère
reminds us that the term ‘ethos’ first meant “dwelling place.” In
Munro’s fiction, being in the world becomes a matter of considering the
degree of habitability the world affords us and how “open” to that world
we can be. As several of our contributors note, in the case of characters
who find themselves on the lower rungs of social hierarchies of gender,
class, age, or (less often) race, the degree of choice about how open they
can be to the world and its harshness or pleasures is seriously compro-
mised. Some of that harshness comes from the confrontations of ethics
with morality, and its associated values of resoluteness and certitude.
The following chapters ponder the collision of ethics as “dwelling”—as
a place one can or cannot “inhabit”—and the “uncertainty” that attaches
itself to our (differently) embodied experiences of the world.
Embodiment is, for several of these critics, a dwelling too, and a con-
duit by which the particularities of the everyday resist the grander narra-
tives of morality and Enlightenment individualism. In these chapters, the
authors explore the consequences of unruly embodiment that interfere
with gendered identity and humanist conventions of the human based
on reason and rationality. For Sara Jamieson, the embodied dailiness
of breastfeeding offers one site at which Munro’s women can depart
(or not) from a timeless, transcendent-seeming moral realm of “good
mothering.” For Marlene Goldman, that most Munrovian affect of them
all—shame—brings subjects back to their inescapable, vulnerable cor-
poreality. Writing from her own embodied experience of chronic pain,
Amelia DeFalco shows how those affects that are visibly embodied
in Munro’s characters are precisely those that are socially denigrated,
for they transgress cultural privilegings of autonomy and individual-
ism. Several contributors examine Munro’s use of animal metaphors as
a means of signaling that denigration; for example, Heidi Tiedemann
Darroch notes the way in which the possession of “reason” is often cited
as evidence in favor of animal rights, an argument that has the effect of
disenfranchising cognitively impaired people as full subjects. She points
out that philosophical discussions of cognitive impairment as test cases
for viable or worthwhile lives have the same effect. Munro’s characters
whose embodied affects place them beneath consideration have a richly
troubling philosophical context.
In a similar fashion, many of these readings of Munro’s stories probe
the psychic dynamics by which such denigrations operate. Darroch argues
that those Munro characters who recoil from disabled people may be
operating out of envy for those who may lack self-consciousness about
their refusals or failures to follow social scripts. To be “shameless” is
subject, in Munro’s fictional world, to a complicated mixture of desire
and repulsion. In analyzing the extreme case of the urge toward repul-
sion—murder—Susan Warwick sees it as the ultimate test case for the
ethical choice between “repudiation and responsibility” that is endemic
to the encounter with the “other.” Amelia DeFalco sees the origins of
that choice in our very openness to the world, for it entails risk (the risk-
ing of affect); the desire to limit that risk that many of Munro’s characters
feel is, in effect, a refusal of ethical encounter. Like the phrase “exquisite
shame,” her description of this “affective dissonance and ethical unease”
syntactically balances and intertwines the affective and the ethical.
Human encounters often form the tacitly assumed ground zero of

ethical criticism, and yet both the burgeoning field of animal studies and
the wider examination of more-than-human worlds offer salient correc-
tives to that tendency. For instance, in Claire Omhovère’s chapter, land-
scape is not the usual reflective metaphor for human ethical encounter
but it becomes, instead, the very locus of ethical and affective negotia-
tion. Landscape, in the form of those frequent references to geological
change and the recurring figure of waste in Munro’s stories, is a site for
a phenomenological being-in-the-world: a mutually constitutive rela-
tionship between a vulnerable environment and its vulnerable human
inhabitants.
Omhovère’s phenomenological language finds resonance in other
chapters in this collection that take phenomenology in a more femi-
nist, performative direction. Judith Butler opened her pioneering essay
“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” by thinking about femi-
nist reimaginings of phenomenology, specifically de Beauvoir’s revisions
of Merleau-Ponty. Butler’s understanding of the way identity is forged
in repeated mundane acts depends on a sense of embodiment that grows
out of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body as a historical idea rather
than a transhistorical essence. So too, in the readings of Munro’s embod-
ied affects and their ethical implications, several of these critics emphasize
the repeated, performative nature of ethics. In her earlier essay, Naomi
Morgenstern asked why, in Munro’s work, the central ethical insight
(i.e., the existence of the other beyond the self) needs to be repeatedly
rehearsed. In the essays that follow, critics have much to say about this
iterative, performative nature of ethical behavior. Katherine Sutherland
argues that Munro’s retrospective narratives of childhood often detail
the breakdown of affective relations between children and adults that are
in a state of constant becoming. In examining “the performative nature
of shame” Marlene Goldman also stresses iterative mimicry; shame, she
concludes, is the consequence of an inability or unwillingness “to mimic
the norm.” In a similar vein, Lorraine York explores Munro’s own per-
formance of public affects, and how her performance of reluctance has
been subsumed within a larger national mythology of Canadian humility.
Despite this normalization and apparent acquiescence, Munro’s reluc-
tance manages to maintain its roots in ambivalence and unease as a way
of “tarrying with” difficult, negative, often ugly emotions.
Affective performativity in (and by) Munro, like performativity in

general for Butler, opens up the possibility of departure from social
scripts, even though there remain social punishments for not performing
according to those scripts. Accordingly, many of the contributors to this
volume approach the question of hope amid sometimes painful, difficult
affective and ethical exchanges: is there a possibility for subversion of the
hierarchies that are tied to embodied affects, to those shamefully visi-
ble performances of affect in Alice Munro’s stories that lead to betrayal,
inhibition, self-denial, “royal beatings,” and even murder? Marlene
Goldman identifies “socially transformative performative utterances…
alternative, gestural forms of communication and mimesis”: in a word,
play. Ana Fraile-Marcos sees shame as potentially enabling the work-
ings of what Winfried Siemerling calls re/cognition: moving beyond
the capacity to see the other in the self, and the self in the other, which
arguably involves assimilating the unknown to the known, and, instead,
accomplishing the more refractory, challenging work of cognitive and
ethical change. Such a possibility is active in Silvan Tomkins’ theoriz-
ing of shame as intimately intertwined in “a relationship of mutuality”;
for the shame that Tomkins associates with the physical act of averting
one’s face and gaze from the source of humiliation or judgment bears
“the residual positive wish…not only to look at the other rather than
to look down, but to have the other look [back] with interest or enjoy-
ment rather than derision.”23 Susan Warwick, considering the ultimate
breakdown of ethical exchange or “gaze”—murder—perceives hope even
there: the response of shame at such a failure can bring with it a deeper
understanding of the responsibility we bear for each other.
Closing out our collection, Naomi Morgenstern’s new essay offers
radical and nuanced grounds for hope. Morgenstern proposes that the
posthumous existence of Munro’s female characters who live on, endure,
survive, says something profound about Alice Munro’s ethical world.
Living on in the aftermath of death, abandonment, and pain, she sug-
gests is a deeply “relational” act. Like Omhovère’s musings on “wasted”
landscape as a refusal of the economies of utilitarianism, Morgenstern’s
life-left-over challenges the teleology of the life narrative as ending in
death and presents us with a moving sense of life itself as posthumous. In
seeing Munro as the chronicler of women’s affective lives-after-life that
take shape in narratives that are always attentive to the might-have-been
alternative narratives, Morgenstern implicitly places her in a tradition of
women’s writing that has deeply examined the ethics and affects of lives
that exceed conventional narrative containers. As Jane Austen’s Anne

Eliot declared in her (fittingly) posthumous novel Persuasion, “All the
privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need
not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is
gone.”24
In our own nod to the recursive performances of ethics and affects
in the work of Alice Munro, we perceive this volume as a response to
Morgenstern’s “The Baby or The Violin”—the 2003 essay that issued
a call for the extensive study of ethics in Munro’s fiction—and we close
with her critical return to Munrovian ethics as gendered, relational, and
posthumous in Morgenstern’s “Life after Life: Survival in the (Late)
Fiction of Alice Munro.” Within this recursive frame, the scholars who
have contributed to this volume have plentifully and creatively answered
Morgenstern’s—and our—invitation to ponder the “exquisite shame” of
Alice Munro’s ethics and to inhabit uncertainty together. Munro’s fic-
tion reminds us of the consequences of everyday affects, the extraordi-
nary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage again and again.
In her exploration of the minutiae of the everyday, anthropologist
Kathleen Stewart explains how “The ordinary throws itself together out
of forms, flows, powers, pleasures, encounters, distractions, drudgery,
denials, practical solutions, shape-shifting forms of violence, daydreams,
and opportunities lost or found. Or it falters, fails. But either way we
feel it.”25 Stewart’s evocative description reads like an encapsulation of
Munro’s corpus, which delves into the affects and effects of what is often
dismissively termed the “ordinary.” Like Stewart and other theorists of
affect, Munro’s stories remind us, again and again, why and how “ail-
ments and emotions” do not intrude into our lives, but rather consti-
tute those lives, betraying the redundancy of phrases like “emotional
life,” that imply the divisibility of the two, the possibility of some kind
of non-emotional existence. Life, survival, is always, already, emotional,
embodied, vulnerable, relational, in short, an exquisite tangle of affects
and ethics.
Notes
1. Naomi Morgenstern, “The Baby or the Violin?: Ethics and Femininity in
the Fiction of Alice Munro,” Literature Interpretation Theory 14 (2003):
73.
2. Ibid., 69.
3. Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 11.

4. Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), 234.
5. Ibid., 220.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 241.
8. Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
2009), 58–59.
9. Munro, Hateship, 224.
11. The oft-cited opening to Teresa Brennan’s The Transmission of Affect
elaborates on the processes of affective communication: “Is there any-
one who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmos-
phere’?…The transmission of affect, whether it is grief, anxiety, or anger,
is social or psychological in origin. But the transmission is also responsi-
ble for bodily changes; some are brief changes, as in a whiff of the room’s
atmosphere, some longer lasting. In other words, the transmission of
affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the
subject. The ‘atmosphere’ or the environment literally gets into the indi-
vidual. Physically and biologically, something is present that was not there
before, but it did not originate sui generis: it was not generated solely or
sometimes even in part by the individual organism or its genes” (1).
13. Ibid., 227–228.
14. Ibid., 230.
15. Ibid., 227.
16. Ibid., 237.
17. Ibid., 220.
18. Silvan Tomins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press:
1995), 147.
19. Ibid., 238.
20. Ibid., 239.
21. Ibid.
22. Margaret Atwood, “Lives of Girls and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Woman,” in Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, ed. David
Staines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 99.
23. Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, 138.
24. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. D. W. Harding (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1965), 238.
25. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007), 29.
Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. “Lives of Girls and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Woman.” In The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, edited by
David Staines, 96–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Austen, Jane. Persuasion, edited by D.W. Harding. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1965.
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2014.
Heble, Ajay. The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Howells, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1998.
———. “Intimate Dislocations: Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage.” In Alice Munro, edited by Harold Bloom, 167–192.
New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009.
Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity, 2015.
Morgenstern, Naomi. “The Baby or the Violin? Ethics and Femininity in the
Fiction of Alice Munro.” Literature Interpretation Theory 14 (2003): 69–97.
Munro, Alice. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 2001.
———. Too Much Happiness. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009.
Redekop, Magdalene. Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro.
New York: Routledge, 1992.
Siemerling, Winfried. “Ethics as Re/Cognition in the Novels of Marie-Célie
Agnant: Oral Knowledge, Cognitive Change, and Social Justice.” University
of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2007): 838–860.
Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Tomins, Silvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
CHAPTER 2
Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s

Stories
Sara Jamieson
In her discussion of ethics and femininity in Alice Munro’s fiction,

Naomi Morgenstern outlines how we might read Munro’s representation
of the relationship between mother and baby as one that embodies “the
complexities of an ethical encounter.”1 Drawing upon Derek Attridge’s
definition of the ethical as a category in which the concrete responsibil
ities and obligations to others that characterize morality are infused with
a degree of “unpredictability and risk,”2 Morgenstern offers a reading
of Munro’s extraordinary story “My Mother’s Dream” (1998) as one
in which a mother, responding to the “absolute” and “annihilating”3
demands of her infant, runs “the risk that she will never recover herself.”4
In response to Morgenstern’s concluding suggestion that “much more
might be said about the specificity of ethics and the mother-child rela-
tion in Munro’s work,”5 this chapter examines infant feeding as one of
the specificities of early motherhood that receives persistent and detailed
attention in Munro’s later stories, not only in “My Mother’s Dream,”
but also in “Jakarta” (1998), “The View from Castle Rock” (2006),
“Dimensions” (2009), and “Deep-Holes” (2009). From a philosophical
S. Jamieson (*) 
Department of English, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_2
14 S. JAMIESON
perspective, breastfeeding has often been taken for granted as “such an

immanently somatic…practice [as to be] morally…insignificant,” yet
at the same time it is “arguably the most conspicuously moralized ele-
ment of mothering” in contemporary culture.6 Challenging perceptions
of breastfeeding as either morally neutral or morally obligatory, Munro’s
stories shift the focus to the ethical. Situating her fiction in relation to
didactic literature on infant feeding directed at contemporary mothers, as
well as cultural and philosophical critiques of that literature, this chapter
details her representation of breastfeeding (and bottle-feeding) women as
ethical subjects whose experiences of feeding their babies intersect, and
sometimes collide, with the kinds of information they receive regarding
their responsibilities to their children in this area of motherhood.
In Otherwise than Being, Emmanuel Levinas gestures toward the
intersection of infant feeding and the ethical when he frames responsi-
bility to the Other in terms that foreground a lactating body: “the abso-
lutely other…I already have on my arms, already bear, according to
the Biblical formula, ‘in my breast as the nurse bears the nurseling’.”7
The Biblical formula that Levinas refers to comes from Numbers 11:12,
where Moses, protesting the overwhelming burden of shepherding the
Israelites out of Egypt, likens himself to a “nursing father” charged with
the care of an insatiable “sucking child” that he has neither “conceived”
nor “begotten.”8 As Lisa Guenter comments in “Like a Maternal Body:
Emmanuel Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses,” Levinas’ use of the
idea of wet nursing to signify the concept of infinite responsibility “risks
identifying femininity too closely with saintliness, thus confirming the
patriarchal ideal of a woman who thinks nothing of herself and gives self-
lessly to Others.”9 At the same time, the fact that the nursing body fig-
ured here belongs neither to a mother, nor even to a woman, posits an
understanding of maternity as a response to an ethical imperative from
the Other, but one that is “disengaged from a strict biological interpre-
tation” and defined instead as a “locus of responsibility” that does not
have to be borne by mothers, or indeed by women, alone.10 Levinas’
image of lactation both reinforces and subverts an ideal of self-sacrificing
maternal generosity long associated with nursing; it suggests how an
ethical approach to infant feeding opens up an avenue for questioning
the straightforwardly moralistic identification of “good” mothering with
the biological process of breastfeeding that has dominated infant feeding
discourse for the past several decades.
2 ETHICS AND INFANT FEEDING IN ALICE MUNRO’S STORIES 15
The image of the nursing man provides an illuminating point of entry

into my discussion of how Munro’s fiction undertakes such question-
ing, since it is reminiscent of the “mock mother” figures that, accord-
ing to Magdelene Redekop, populate so many of her stories. Rather than
affirming motherhood as “anything inexpressible or sacred,” Munro’s
mock mothers instead “enable us to walk ‘disrespectfully’ around our
idealized images of maternity.”11 If Redekop sees milk as “an inherently
absurd image” in Munro’s work, one that jars our complacent expec-
tations of “maternal selflessness,”12 Chantel Lavoie has more recently
drawn attention to how Munro’s representation of breastfeeding (spe-
cifically the comparison of the maternal breast to a “snouted beast” in
“My Mother’s Dream”) conflates “animal and monster” in a way that
unsettles whatever we believe to be ‘natural’ about the figure of the
mother.”13 In my readings of the representation of infant feeding in
Munro’s later stories, what I want to stress is neither its absurdity, nor its
monstrosity, but rather its dailiness. Her emphasis on feeding as one of
the tasks of mothers’ day-to-day lives, something they are often shown
accomplishing simultaneously with other tasks, might be seen as an
example of how her fiction continues to “domesticate the…madonna”
(an idealized image of maternal nursing if ever there was one) in order
to “destroy the distance that makes her into an object of adoration.”14
Drawing attention to infant feeding as a quotidian practice that is his-
torically contingent and highly localized rather than a timeless, natural
function of motherhood, these stories undermine the moral authority
of nature through which contemporary infant feeding discourses con-
struct breastfeeding as a maternal obligation. Representatives of those
discourses—doctors, breastfeeding support workers, characters who
reproduce fragments of the kinds of advice routinely directed at nurs-
ing mothers—make peripheral appearances in these stories, yet Munro’s
focus on the daily lives of mothers counters the tendency of these dis-
courses to render women’s needs, desires, and feelings invisible.
Critics of contemporary breastfeeding advocacy have traced this mar-
ginalization of women to an overwhelming emphasis on breastfeeding
as valuable primarily for the nutritional advantages that it confers upon
babies. Surveying materials on infant feeding disseminated by Health
Canada in the 1990s, Glenda Wall observes that the literature draws
much of its moral authority from its emphasis on the health benefits of
breastfeeding for babies, and reinforces a child-centered approach to
infant feeding that displaces mothers as subjects.15 The health benefits
16 S. JAMIESON
of breastfeeding for babies have been represented as so profound and

incontrovertible that mothers are implicitly encouraged to “endure any
and all costs to ensure that their children’s needs for ‘optimal’ care are
met.”16 Within the last decade, an increasing number of journalists,
social scientists, and breastfeeding researchers have shown many of the
claims about the health benefits of breastfeeding to be exaggerated and
based on research that is methodologically flawed; nevertheless, the
contemporary conversation about breastfeeding remains pervaded by a
“moral urgency” that “distinguishes… good parents from bad” on the
basis of how and what they feed their infants.17
In contrast to the view of mothers’ infant feeding practices as
“straightforward sites of moral accountability,” a view that obscures the
“reasons why breastfeeding can be an acutely uncomfortable and risky
practice for some…women,” feminist philosopher Rebecca Kukla empha-
sizes the need for a “more sophisticated ethical analysis” that looks
to “the social and symbolic contexts that might make mothers’ feel-
ings explicable and reveal their needs.”18 Kukla’s emphasis on “moth-
ers’ feelings” characterizes the ethical analysis that she proposes as one
that would prioritize maternal affect as an important aspect of wom-
en’s experiences of infant feeding, one that has only recently begun to
be acknowledged in research on this topic. In her work on affect and
infant feeding, sociologist Charlotte Faircloth argues that the privileg-
ing of babies’ health as the primary argument for breastfeeding not only
inculcates damaging emotions—like shame—in women who struggle
with nursing, but also threatens to eclipse the “joyful, pleasurable” feel-
ings that many women derive from it as a form of bodily interaction with
their children, as something that they want to do even as they acknowl-
edge that the “‘science’ around breastfeeding…is more flimsy than the
advocacy case suggests.”19 An ethical analysis that is alert to the role of
affect in women’s lives as mothers thus offers a way to move beyond the
focus on biomedical evidence of benefits to babies and to make women’s
experiences more visible within the cultural conversation about infant
feeding.
Munro’s stories contribute to this process by stressing infant feed-
ing as something that fits into women’s daily lives in ways that involve
many considerations beyond that of what might be “best” for their
babies’ health. Joan Wolf argues that the current framing of breast-
feeding as a maternal obligation ignores the context in which decisions
about mothering take place, the “tangle of competing needs and desires
that is family life.”20 It is precisely through their attention to context

and complexity that fictional representations like those of Munro inter-
act with contemporary debates about infant feeding. In her work on
Canadian caregiving narratives, Amelia DeFalco contends that it is in
their attention to “human particularity, context, the details of life,” that
literary narratives convey ethical dilemmas that “complicate straightfor-
ward ‘right’ or ‘superior’ moral reasoning.”21 Fictionally recreating the
particular details of a range of infant feeding practices in various times
and places, Munro’s stories offer us multiple scenarios of mothering that
collectively challenge the moral certainties that pervade the conversation
about infant feeding in contemporary culture.
“Dimensions,” from Munro’s 2009 collection Too Much Happiness,
highlights the displacement of mothers as subjects in contemporary
breastfeeding advocacy. The story is focused on Doree, whose breast-
feeding is bound up with the “natural” image that her husband Lloyd
desires that she project.22 When her third child, Dmitri, becomes “col-
icky,” Doree suspects a problem with her milk, and Lloyd brings in “a
lady from the La Leche League [to] talk to her.”23 Munro’s phrasing
suggests Lloyd’s high-handed treatment of Doree, who is much younger
than he, as someone who needs to be “talked to” (rather than listened
to) even though the fact that she has already nursed two other children
lends credence to her sense that something is not right this time around.
The largest and most influential breastfeeding support organization in
the world, La Leche League (LLL) International, was founded as a local,
grassroots concern in 1956 by seven conservative Catholic women com-
mitted to providing “mother-to-mother” encouragement and assistance
with breastfeeding.24 This type of help was much needed at a time when
formula was very commonly used, and infant feeding fell largely under
the purview of doctors, most of them men, who had little knowledge
of the mechanics of nursing. In the story, the woman-centered approach
central to LLL philosophy is violated because it is Lloyd who seeks out
help from them rather than Doree, who has already sought to remedy
the problem by secretly supplementing with formula. Munro’s rep-
resentation of Doree’s experience draws attention to how the efforts of
the LLL to wrest control of infant feeding from the hands of doctors and
return it to mothers risks reinforcing an allegedly “natural” identification
of femininity with motherhood that is easily coopted by a patriarchal ide-
ology that rigidly circumscribes women’s control over other aspects of
their lives.
18 S. JAMIESON
The story further explores the very complicated relationship between

breastfeeding advocacy and feminism through its disturbing representa-
tion of the breastfeeding imperative as a form of violence against women.
When Doree eventually tells Lloyd that her milk has dried up, his reac-
tion is to “squeeze one breast after the other with frantic determination”
until “he succeeds in getting a couple of drops of miserable-looking
milk.”25 As this and other instances of Lloyd’s abusive and controlling
behavior indicate, Doree is a woman profoundly in need of help with
problems more serious than whether her baby is breastfed. The story is
silent on whether the LLL volunteer, as a visitor to their home, notes
anything suspicious about the dynamics of Lloyd and Doree’s marriage;
the only help she is shown to offer Doree is a warning to not, under any
circumstances, use a “supplementary bottle.”26 Munro’s representation is
consonant with the LLL’s self-styled image as a “single-issue” organiza-
tion that has been reluctant to involve itself with matters affecting wom-
en’s lives that it deems too “political,” as well as its history of endorsing
“patriarchal notions of men’s rights over their wives’ bodies.”27 By evok-
ing the history of the LLL’s complicity in the very domestic structure
that is the source of Doree’s problems, Munro’s story articulates a cri-
tique of a culture in which the importance of breastfeeding has been
exaggerated to the point where the alleged “need” of babies for their
mothers’ milk takes precedence over the needs of mothers themselves.
In Feminism, Breasts, and Breast-Feeding, Pam Carter argues that
feminists have been reluctant to grapple with the ethical shortcomings
of breastfeeding advocacy because of their own commitment to the idea
of breastfeeding as a “stolen art,” taken from women in the twentieth
century by the forces of capitalism and medicalization which alienated
women from the natural capacities of their bodies, and eclipsed moth-
ers and grandmothers as repositories of practical knowledge.28 Munro’s
historical fiction “The View from Castle Rock” is an example of how
her stories can acknowledge the appeal of a particular strain of femi-
nist “yearning for an archaic maternal past,” but its representation of
maternity also alerts us to the dangers of romanticizing the notion of
a “pre-industrial golden age” of breastfeeding.29 The story certainly
registers the upheavals associated with modernity as forces that cre-
ated particular difficulties for childbearing women as it imagines the
Atlantic crossing undertaken in 1818 by Munro’s Scottish ancestors,
one of whom, a woman named Agnes, gives birth to her second child
on the ship. Agnes’ emigration separates her from her mother, who
“would have known…which leaves to mash to make a soothing poultice”

to ease the pain of late pregnancy.30 At the same time, Agnes’ adherence
to a superstitious belief that she must add salt to her milk or her child
“will grow up half-witted” cautions against the uncritical celebration of
a female folk medicine that generates its own absurdities and perpetuates
unnecessary anxiety.31 Agnes’ insistence on the necessity of salt questions
the assumption that breastfeeding was ever “natural,” and characterizes
it instead as a cultural practice too thoroughly “shaped by different kinds
of beliefs” to constitute a body of knowledge that can be straightfor-
wardly “lost.”32
Agnes’ demand for salt scandalizes the two “Edinburgh ladies” who
assume her post-partum care “out of charity,” and who initially refuse
to give it to her, even as her baby “howl[s]” with what might be hun-
ger.33 It is the doctor who presided over the birth who ultimately inter-
venes and commands that Agnes be given the salt. While his intervention
is tinged with condescension toward her rural origins, he is nonethe-
less prepared to support her infant feeding decisions as hers, despite the
absence of any scientific basis for them. While there is similarly no scien-
tific justification for Doree’s conclusion that her baby’s colic is caused by
her milk, she receives no such support in her decision to use formula: her
“failure to breastfeed [is] recalled” whenever Dmitri “had a cold, or…
still hung onto chairs at an age when his brother and sister were walk-
ing.”34 The passive construction signifies the diffusion of Lloyd’s indi-
vidual voice into a generalized chorus on the medical and developmental
benefits of breastfeeding that authorizes him to pathologize differences
among his children and to blame his wife (and formula) for ordinary
childhood illnesses and behaviors. Lloyd’s assessment is grounded in the
common assertion that breastfed babies have a lower risk of respiratory
tract infections, but the story stops short of endorsing this view; we are
not told that Dmitri gets more colds than his siblings do, only that when
he does, it is construed as being Doree’s fault.35 With its reference to
colic, a condition for which the cause remains unknown, the story high-
lights the fallibility of medical science in the area of infant health and
questions the certainty with which breastfeeding science is sometimes
deployed in the service of an oppressive domestic ideology, underscoring
the need to reframe the discussion about infant feeding in a way that pri-
oritizes maternal choice over medical authority.
“My Mother’s Dream” examines in more detail the kinds of assump-
tions about formula generated by the complicated history of the
20 S. JAMIESON
relationship between medical authority and early motherhood. The

mother in question here is Jill, who marries airman George Kirkham
while she is unknowingly pregnant with their first child, and is widowed
before the child is born when George is killed in World War II. Jill is liv-
ing with George’s two sisters, Ailsa and Iona, along with their mother,
and goes into precipitous labor at the reception following her husband’s
funeral, giving birth to a girl in her bedroom. The story is set in 1945,
a time when, Jill’s (unintended) homebirth notwithstanding, the med-
icalization of birth and infant feeding were well underway. Kukla notes
a tendency in much of the contemporary breastfeeding literature to
oversimplify this phenomenon as one whereby women were “push[ed]”
into bottle-feeding by “a supposedly impersonal, callous, and oppressive
medical establishment.”36 By contrast, Munro’s story suggests the com-
plexity of this history through the figure of Dr. Shantz, who is not only
the Kirkhams’ doctor but also their neighbor, and whose “thoughtfully
warmed hands” undermine the notion of doctors as cold, uncaring, and
distant authority figures.37 Focalized through the perspective of Jill’s
daughter, who in adulthood somehow remembers her own infancy, the
story offers a detailed account of postpartum and infant care during the
period that challenges a related assumption about bottle-feeding itself as
a signifier of “uncaring, disembodied motherhood.”38
Although Jill’s milk “[comes] in plentifully,” she struggles to initiate
breastfeeding because of her baby’s refusal to nurse.39 By locating the
source of the problem in the baby’s apparent aversion to her mother (“I
screamed blue murder. The big, stiff breast might just as well have been
snouted beast rummaging in my face”), Munro stresses the affective
dimension of infant feeding in a way that addresses a persistent associa-
tion of breastfeeding with mother-infant bonding.40 The LLL’s influen-
tial book The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding offers a particularly eloquent
example of the desire that breastfeeding should function as the ultimate
expression of love between mother and child: “With his small head pil-
lowed against your breast and your milk warming his insides, your baby
knows a special closeness to you. He is gaining a firm foundation in an
important area of life—he is learning about love.”41 The idea that the
unmediated bodily contact of direct breastfeeding facilitates an inti-
macy that grounds the future psychic, cognitive, and moral health of
the baby “draws on and perpetuates deep-seated cultural beliefs about…
natural mother love and exclusive motherhood” that are deeply prob-
lematic; nevertheless, the insistence regarding the benefits to be derived
from breastfeeding as a unique form of physical and emotional interaction

persists, even in texts that are otherwise critical of the claims of contem-
porary breastfeeding advocacy.42 In her recent book Lactivism, for exam-
ple, Courtney Jung recounts her conversations with Dr. Michael Kramer,
the “most prominent breastfeeding researcher in the world today” and
the author of the “largest and most authoritative study of the effects of
breastfeeding to date.”43 The Promotion of Breastfeeding Intervention
Trial (2001), often referred to as the PROBIT study, found no connec-
tion between breastfeeding and many of the health benefits commonly
attributed to it, one exception being a small benefit in the area of cognitive
development. Researchers speculate that this advantage may have less to
do with the properties of human milk than with the “intense interaction
between mothers and babies who breastfeed”: “in general, these moth-
ers talk to [their children] while they are breastfeeding and look down at
them, making eye contact and smiling.”44 This is the theory that Kramer
himself prefers, “because it would suggest something the formula compa-
nies can’t reproduce.”45 But surely it is something that mothers and other
caregivers can reproduce because the kinds of tactile and affective interac-
tion that Kramer describes can all be carried out while bottle-feeding.
The most conspicuously loving, interactive, and intimate depiction of
infant feeding anywhere in Munro’s work is of Iona feeding the baby for-
mula from a bottle:
Iona rocked and soothed me and touched my cheek with the rubber
nipple and that turned out to be what I preferred. I drank the formula
greedily and kept it down. Iona’s arms and the nipple that she was in
charge of became my chosen home…“What a monkey, what a
monkey,” crooned Iona. “You are a monkey, you don’t want your
mommy’s good milk.”46
If a slogan of LLL International, “we speak for the baby,” rests on the
assumption that if babies could speak, they would ask to be breastfed,
a story in which a baby not only plainly states her preference for for-
mula, but elsewhere opines on the relative difficulties of violin concertos
by Mendelssohn and Beethoven, underscores the essentially specu-
lative nature of claiming to know what babies think and want so as to
manipulate women into making particular feeding choices.47 According
to Kukla, breastfeeding advocacy literature often represents bottles and
22 S. JAMIESON
formula as “instruments of interruption” that intervene between the

bodies of mothers and their babies with allegedly disastrous effects.48
In contrast to this emphasis on the intrusiveness of the bottle as a non-
human object, Munro’s vocabulary avoids the word “bottle” altogether
in favor of “nipple,” stressing the baby’s interaction with that part of
the bottle that most closely resembles, and whose name is interchange-
able with, a human body part. In response to Linda Blum’s argument
that devices such as bottles and breast pumps “disembody” the work of
mothering, Kukla cautions against reducing the “embodied dimensions
of motherhood…to the act of direct breastfeeding,” and reminds us that
“learning to feed a baby…is a challenging, reciprocal, and highly embod-
ied process, regardless of what [that baby] is eating and via what delivery
mechanism.”49 Through a syntactical order that prioritizes “Iona’s arms”
as the baby’s primary point of contact and object of desire, Munro’s
story insists on the embodied aspect of bottle-feeding, an aspect that is
often elided in infant feeding discourses that represent bottles as objects
that somehow eclipse or diminish the human presence of the caregiver.
Iona is not a breastfeeding mother, yet she interacts with the baby in
much the same way that Kramer would seem to associate exclusively
with breastfeeding mothers. By representing bottle-feeding as a loving
act, Munro challenges the cultural positioning of bottle-feeding par-
ents as less loving, but in a way that resists aligning bottle-feeding, any
more than she aligns breastfeeding, with uncomplicated devotion. The
baby’s unexpected partiality for shy, neurotic Iona transforms her from
“the most negligible” to “the most important person in the house”; her
love for the baby is inseparable from the satisfaction she takes in her own
newfound power.50 Munro’s emphasis on the complexity of Iona’s moti-
vations is central to how her fiction delineates an ethics of infant feeding
that resists subordinating the feelings and desires of women to those of
the infants in their care.
Indeed, it is through an act of infant feeding that the story plumbs the
depths of maternal ambivalence. When Iona reluctantly accompanies her
mother and sister on an overnight visit to relatives, Jill has no choice but
to wield the bottle herself. In response to the baby’s relentless crying,
the exhausted Jill sprinkles the milk in the bottle with a few grains shaved
from the prescription pain pills she has just taken for a headache, sending
both herself and the baby into a profound sleep. As Morgenstern com-
ments, the story figures the “normal (good enough?) mother and the
murderer” as “ominously close to being interchangeable,” (85) and Jill is
awakened the next morning by a frantic Iona who is convinced that the
baby is dead. In the light of day, the confusion is sorted out in a way that
sees Jill displace Iona as primary caregiver by assuming her role as the
baby’s mother.51 In the story’s final pages, it is Jill whom we see “read-
ing the instructions for making baby formula,” and putting a bottle to
warm, “holding [her baby] in the crook of her arm all the time.”52 The
story thus returns to the issue of infant feeding to signal Jill’s transition
to maternal competence, not by presenting us with any transcendently
sensual or empathetic scene of “bonding,” but by situating the contact
between mother and baby within the midst of the various mundane tasks
that surround the feeding itself.
A similar kind of multitasking also characterizes Munro’s depictions
of breastfeeding. In “Deep-Holes,” the character Sally, on a family pic-
nic, is described as “getting [her daughter] latched onto one side and
with her free hand unfasten[ing] the picnic basket.”53 Kath, in the
story “Jakarta,” reads a book or smokes a cigarette while nursing, to
avoid feeling sunk in “a sludge of animal function.”54 Such images con-
trast markedly with Kramer’s description of breastfeeding mothers, in
which the mother is figured as exclusively focused on her infant. This
type of idyllic image of mother and infant as a closed, dyadic unit con-
stitutes the “hegemonic norm” in representations of breastfeeding in
parenting books, public health materials, and advertising campaigns.55
Rhonda Shaw warns that the ubiquity of such “romanticized images”
of breastfeeding and “mother-infant affinity” may pose an “emotional
and affective burden” that is potentially “too heavy for women to bear,”
particularly women who perceive breastfeeding as neither a “pleasurable
sensory experience” nor one of “positive bonding.”56 Munro’s stories
broaden the range of available representations of breastfeeding by situ-
ating nursing amidst a variety of other activities, and suggesting the myr-
iad reasons women may have for doing it that have nothing to do with
developing a bond with their babies or lowering their risk of illness.
In “Jakarta,” Kath resists the selfless ideal of the “good mother” that
breastfeeding has come to signify, “nursing so that she can shrink her
uterus and flatten her stomach, not just…provide the baby…with pre-
cious maternal antibodies.”57 While Lavoie downplays the story’s “sar-
donic tone” to insist that “such antibodies are precious,” I would stress
that the tone is key to how Munro’s fiction contests the hyperbolic ide-
alization of breast milk as “liquid gold,” elevated to a status beyond
mere food for babies.58 Kath’s interactions with others expose the way in
24 S. JAMIESON
which the promotion of breast milk as a guarantor of infant health turns

mothers’ behaviors into a matter for public scrutiny. When she hands a
bottle of beer to a friend at a party, another guest comments, “Good
thing you weren’t going to drink that yourself…It’s a no-no if you’re
nursing.”59 The scene draws attention to how the framing of infant feed-
ing as a public health issue produces a culture in which even a casual
acquaintance feels justified in preemptively censuring potential maternal
transgressions. Another guest at the party counters this comment with
the information that beer consumption was “recommended” when she
herself was nursing.60 In this scene, the moral certainties of breastfeed-
ing advocacy give way to a morass of conflicting information, and even a
mother who has made the “right” decision to breastfeed is still subject to
social policing in the name of reducing risk to her child.
As an alternative to the framing of breastfeeding in terms of infant
health and maternal responsibility, the story instead emphasizes the
ways in which Kath paradoxically uses breastfeeding to pursue an iden-
tity separate from her role as a mother. While she occasionally uses for-
mula, on the night of the party she leaves her “supplemental bottle” at
home because she is uncertain of what to expect and “might welcome
a chance to get away” to nurse her baby who is being cared for in a
neighboring house.61 The host of the party is a Marxist journalist named
Cottar. In a series of flashbacks, the story depicts Kath and her husband
Kent attending a previous party in Cottar’s home, a small dinner party
at which the conversation had turned to the subject of “American com-
panies… persuading African mothers to buy formula and not to nurse
their babies.”62 This reference to the formula marketing scandals of the
1960s and 1970s raises the possibility that one might choose to breast-
feed as a protest against the unethical marketing practices of the multi-
national corporations that make formula. If Kath has left her bottle at
home in part as a political gesture calculated to win Cottar’s approval, it
is not only because she is convinced by his arguments, but also because
she is attracted to him and the sexual freedom of his countercultural life-
style, which gives her a “deep, obscene thrill.”63 By presenting Kath’s
motivations for choosing breast over bottle at this particular moment as
informed by a complex tangle of geopolitical and private reasons, Munro
expands the representation of breastfeeding beyond the realm of infants
and their health, to encompass the realm of women and their desires.
The “shock of desire” that Kath experiences when “test[ing the] full-
ness” of her breasts after being kissed by a man at the party connects
breastfeeding to a wider range of affective response than maternal

devotion.64 This range of feeling is further widened in “Deep-Holes,”
which represents Sally as a nursing mother full of “seeping rage,” whose
breastfeeding functions as a gesture of aggression toward the husband
who, disgusted by the sight of “his wife’s breasts turned into udders,”
is constantly pressuring her to wean the baby to a bottle.65 Sally resists
the pressure, but she does not do so by drawing upon a medical dis-
course of health benefits. There is no mention here of maternal anti-
bodies; her only response to her husband’s claim that “you could have
her on the bottle tomorrow” is a noncommittal “I will soon. Not quite
tomorrow, but soon.”66 It is in interpreting the significance of Sally’s
laconic deferrals and unarticulated anger that Charlotte Faircloth’s use
of affect—defined as the “preconscious response to a stimulus, not nec-
essarily expressed or verbalized in the language of emotion”—to under-
stand women’s decisions about infant feeding is especially helpful.67 In
interviews with women who practice “extended breastfeeding,” Faircloth
notes the frequency with which they justify their actions with recourse
to a feeling of “right[ness]” that they find difficult to put into words.68
Sally is not an extended nurser (her baby is only six months old), but she
is nonetheless depicted as someone who has her own unstated reasons
for continuing in the face of demands that she stop. Sally’s silence as to
her feelings of anger, as well as any other feelings that may fuel her desire
to continue nursing, suggests the importance of this kind of unverbalized
maternal affect as a way to reconceptualize breastfeeding as valuable to
mothers for reasons other than the reduction of risk to infants’ health.
Of course, Sally’s feeling is not one of rightness, but of rage. While
Faircloth argues that we should pay attention to affect in women’s nar-
ratives of breastfeeding to bring to light positive feelings of happiness
and pleasure that are obscured by the biomedical discourse through
which infant feeding is primarily framed, such emotions do not figure
in Munro’s representations of nursing, perhaps because to include them
would risk reinforcing the kind of idealized image of motherhood that
her fiction generally holds up to scrutiny. The most emotionally buoy-
ant depiction of breastfeeding in her work would have to be the scene
in the maternity ward in “Mischief” where Rose and Jocelyn react to
what they perceive as the “disgusting…blue” color of their milk with
an irreverent hilarity that deflates the image of the nursing mother as a
cultural “sacred cow.”69 By contrast, “Deep-Holes” acknowledges the
darker feelings associated with motherhood that our culture is often at
26 S. JAMIESON
pains to deny. It is again important to notice the domestic context in

which Sally’s nursing is situated; she is not only responsible for feeding
the baby, but for catering to everyone else’s appetites as well, packing
fancy picnic foods that her husband likes but that she “hate[s]” to make,
and having to make a second lunch for her older children.70 These details
remind us of the ease with which the asymmetry of the ethical relation
between self and other, mother and infant, becomes “reified…into a
social asymmetry between those whose role it is to bear Others and those
who enjoy the luxury of being borne.”71 It is unlikely that switching to
the bottle would make Sally’s life easier; her husband’s primary concern
is that her breasts not be exposed to anyone but him, in the privacy of
the bedroom, rather than the possibility that he might become a “nurs-
ing father” and take over some of the feedings himself. So Sally keeps
nursing, and nurses her anger.
“Deep-Holes” is a story that, like “My Mother’s Dream” before it,
places infant feeding at the center of its exploration not just of the dif-
ficulties, but the “impossibilities”72 of ethical life as Sally struggles, and
fails, to meet the contradictory needs of those in her care: to protect her
baby from exposure to alcohol through her milk, she sets aside a glass
of champagne; her eight-year-old son finds and furtively drains the glass,
then subsequently loses his balance and falls into one of the “Deep-Holes”
of the title, breaking both of his legs. Wolf has argued that the current
framing of breastfeeding as something that mothers ought to do to
reduce risks to their children ignores the omnipresence of risk in chil-
dren’s lives, and fails to appreciate that “behavior that is risk-averse in
one domain is likely to produce new risks in others.”73 That Sally inad-
vertently increases risk for one of her children while trying to reduce risk
for another is indicative of the impossible demands made on mothers in
a culture that holds them uniquely responsible for protecting their chil-
dren from harm.
Munro’s story interrogates the cultural positioning of nursing moth-
ers as guardians not only of their children’s physical health but also of
the emotional integrity of the mother–child relationship. The contem-
porary breastfeeding imperative grew out of an approach to early moth-
erhood that idealized certain practices involving birth and infant care as
ways to “magically ensure ‘love’ against an uncertain future,” an ideali-
zation that survives in the persistent connection between breastfeeding
and the “now widely discredited ‘maternal bonding’ thesis.”74 In con-
trast to the expectation that maternal bodies function as guarantors of
“lasting family ties,” “Deep-Holes” lays bare the fragility of family rela-
tionships as Sally attempts to cope with the voluntary disappearance, in
adulthood, of one of her sons.75 This experience connects Sally to other
mothers in Munro’s stories, like Eve in “Save the Reaper” (1998) and
Juliet in “Silence” (2004), who are, often inexplicably, deserted by their
grown children, and who suffer through extreme versions of the “slightly
ridiculous desolation” that, as the character Pauline contends in “The
Children Stay” (1998), may well await all mothers in the end.76 Munro’s
rather bleak representations of the experience of being a mother to adult
children expose what Kukla identifies as a contemporary cultural fail-
ure to recognize mothering as a narrative that extends over the course
of a life, and a tendency instead to measure the whole of motherhood
by the way in which women navigate a set of “signal moments” in the
care of infants and young children.77 Juxtaposing the hectic intimacy of
early motherhood against a late-life motherhood characterized by isola-
tion and abandonment, a story like “Deep-Holes” undermines the ide-
alization of nursing mothers as bulwarks against “the impermanence of
relationships and the ambiguities of parental roles.”78 Reminding us that
feeding a baby is a very small part of being a mother, the story contests
the disproportionate significance placed on decisions regarding infant
feeding, suggesting that such decisions do not guarantee the kind of
control over a child’s future life that breastfeeding advocates sometimes
claim that they do.
With its emphasis on the unpredictability of family life over time,
Munro’s fiction questions the notion that mothers are uniquely capable
of, and therefore solely responsible for, ensuring the long-term health
and well-being of their children through breastfeeding, and gestures
toward the larger ideological context in which her own writing, as well
as contemporary discourses of infant feeding, are situated. The cur-
rent obsession with human milk as a kind of preventive medicine that
lowers children’s risk of a vast array of diseases and conditions ranging
from allergies and obesity to heart disease and cancer aligns with a dom-
inant neoliberal sensibility that views the maintenance of good health
as being within the control of those individuals who make responsible
decisions about, among other things, what they eat and what they feed
to their families. Despite the fact that no causal relationship has been
clearly established between breastfeeding and any but a few health ben-
efits that, in the context of a “developed” nation like Canada, are rela-
tively minor, women are still strongly encouraged to breastfeed in the
28 S. JAMIESON
name of producing healthier children who will not grow up to place an

undue burden on the healthcare system.79 The continued insistence on
the profound and life-long health benefits of breastfeeding may reflect
advocates’ sincere conviction that it is the best way to feed a child; how-
ever, the implication that the health of the population rests on the bodies
and behaviors of mothers can easily be made to serve a neoliberal agenda
whose adherents seek individual and private, rather than collective and
structural, solutions to complicated problems such as improving public
health. When breastfeeding is framed as part of a maternal responsibility
to produce healthy citizens, the importance of reducing putative costs
to the healthcare system takes precedence over the very real personal
costs—physical, emotional, financial—that mothers themselves may incur
to breastfeed their children.
Munro’s stories invite readers to question the conception of breast-
feeding as mothers’ moral and civic duty by evoking, yet refusing to
endorse, the biomedical narrative that connects breastfeeding with better
health outcomes and greater maternal control over children’s well-being.
Rather than celebrating breastfeeding as a joyful bonding experience, or
as the ultimate expression of selfless maternal devotion, Munro’s fiction
keeps its costs to women consistently in view by representing it instead
as work, as one among the many daily tasks of motherhood. Situating
nursing among the details of domestic life, characterizing it as an activ-
ity motivated in any given moment by desires and antagonisms that may
have little to do with conferring health benefits upon babies, Munro’s
stories approach the subject of infant feeding in a way that moves the
needs, desires, and feelings of women closer to the center of our concep-
tions of mothering. Her fiction invites us to move beyond viewing infant
feeding through the lens of moral obligation, and instead to understand
it, along with motherhood itself, as an ethical relation in which risk is
unavoidable, and as a form of caregiving inevitably fraught by the com-
peting needs of self and other.
Notes
1. Morgenstern, “The Baby or the Violin? Ethics and Femininity in the
Fiction of Alice Munro,” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 14 (2003): 88.
2. Ibid., 69.
3. Ibid., 84.
4. Ibid., 69.
5. Ibid., 88.
6. Rhonda Shaw, “Performing Breastfeeding: Embodiment, Ethics, and the
Maternal Subject,” Feminist Review 78, no. 1 (2004): 100; Charlotte
Faircloth, “‘What Feels Right’: Affect, Emotion, and the Limitations of
Infant-Feeding Policy,” Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy 34, no. 4
(2013): 347.
7. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1981), 91.
8. Num 11:12 KJV.
9. Lisa Guenter, “‘Like a Maternal Body’: Emmanuel Levinas and the
Motherhood of Moses,” Hypatia 21, no. 1 (2006): 121.
10. Ibid., 131–132.
11. Magdalene Redekop, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice
Munro (New York: Routledge, 1992), 8.
12. Ibid.
13. Chantel Lavoie, “Good Enough, Bad Enough, Animal, Monster: Mothers
in The Love of a Good Woman,” Studies in Canadian Literature 40, no. 2
(2015): 75.
14. Redekop, Mothers, 12.
15. Glenda Wall, “Moral Constructions of Motherhood in Breastfeeding
Discourse,” Gender and Society 15, no. 4 (2001): 603.
16. Erin Taylor and Lora Ebert Wallace, “For Shame: Feminism,
Breastfeeding Advocacy, and Maternal Guilt,” Hypatia 12, no. 1 (2012):
85.
17. Courtney Jung, Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Yuppies
and Hippies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big
Business and Bad Policy (New York: Basic, 2015), 16; Ibid., 8. For over-
views of the methodological problems affecting breastfeeding research,
see Wolf, Is Breast Best? chap. 2; and Jung, Lactivism, chap. 3.
18. Rebecca Kukla, “Ethics and Ideology in Breastfeeding Advocacy
Campaigns,” Hypatia 21, no. 1 (2005): 169.
19. Faircloth, “‘What Feels Right’,” 355.
20. Joan Wolf, “The Politics of Dissent,” Journal of Women, Politics, and
Policy 34, no. 4 (2013): 312.
21. Amelia DeFalco, Imagining Care: Responsbility, Dependency, and
Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 10,
24.
22. Alice Munro, “Dimensions,” in Too Much Happiness (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 2009), 2.
23. Ibid., 7.
24. Linda Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in
the Contemporary United States (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 63.
30 S. JAMIESON
25. Munro, “Dimensions,” 7.
26. Ibid.
27. Blum, At the Breast, 100.
28. Pam Carter, Feminism, Breasts, and Breast-Feeding (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1999), 33.
29. Redekop, Mothers, 6; Carter, Feminism, 36.
30. Munro, “The View From Castle Rock,” in The View From Castle Rock
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006), 33.
31. Ibid., 53.
32. Carter, Feminism, 37.
33. Munro, “The View,” 52–53.
35. On the inconsistency of research regarding breastfeeding and the risk of
respiratory tract infections, see Jung, Lactivism, 84–85.
36. Kukla, Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mother’s Bodies (Lanham:
Rowan and Littlefield, 2005), 175.
37. Munro, “My Mother’s Dream,” in The Love of a Good Woman (Toronto:
38. Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 159.
39. Munro, “My Mother’s Dream,” 264.
40. Ibid.
41. La Leche League International, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, 6th ed.
(Schaumburg, IL: La Leche League International, 1997), 6.
42. Wall, “Moral Constructions,” 602.
43. Jung, Lactivism, 72–73.
44. Ibid., 168.
45. Quoted in Rosin, “The Case Against Breastfeeding.”
47. Blum, At the Breast, 93.
48. Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 153–154.
49. Blum, At the Breast, 52; Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 157.
51. In her retrospective account, the baby-narrator identifies the aftermath of
the crisis as the moment when she and Jill each “took on [their] female
nature,” the baby by choosing to survive and choosing the “half a loaf”
of Jill’s love over the wholeness of Iona’s, Jill by taking on maternal
responsibility and loving her daughter. Morgenstern reads this moment as
a “primal scene of sexed identity” in which mother and daughter accept
subject positions defined by an “irreducible mutual lack that makes rela-
tionship possible,” thus characterizing the mother-daughter relation as an
ethical encounter.
52. Ibid., 282.
53. Munro, “Deep-Holes,” in Too Much Happiness (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 2009), 95.
54. Munro, “Jakarta,” in The Love of a Good Woman (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1998), 68.
55. Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 199.
56. Shaw, “Performing,” 104.
57. Munro, “Jakarta,” 68.
58. Lavoie, “Good Enough,” 81; Jung, Lactivism, 147.
59. Munro, “Jakarta,” 83.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 81.
62. Ibid., 78.
63. Ibid., 82.
64. Ibid., 90.
65. Munro, “Deep-Holes,” 94; Ibid., 97.
66. Ibid., 96.
67. Faircloth, “‘What Feels Right’,” 345.
68. Ibid., 351.
69. Munro, “Mischief,” Who Do You Think You Are? (Toronto: Penguin,
2006), 109; Redekop, Mothers, 6.
70. Munro, “Deep-Holes,” 93.
71. Guenter, “Like a Maternal Body,” 128.
72. Morgenstern, “The Baby,” 69.
73. Wolf, “Politics of Dissent,” 307.
74. Mira Crouch and Lenore Manderson, “The Social Life of Bonding
Theory,” Social Sciences and Medicine 41, no. 6 (1995): 839; Jules Law,
“The Politics of Breastfeeding: Assessing Risk, Dividing Labor,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25, no. 2 (2000): 423.
75. Ibid.
76. Munro, “The Children Stay,” in The Love of a Good Woman (Toronto:
77. Kukla, “Measuring Mothering,” International Journal of Feminist
Approaches to Bioethics 1, no. 1 (2008): 69.
78. Crouch and Manderson, “The Social Life of Bonding Theory,” 839.
79. In her discussion of the “neoliberal rationality” that pervades late-twenti-
eth-century understandings of breastfeeding, Glenda Wall notes the fre-
quency with which the media “frame the discussion in terms of the costs
to the health care system of breast-fed versus bottle-fed babies.” “Moral
Constructions of Motherhood in Breastfeeding Discourse,” 604.
32 S. JAMIESON
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1995.
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(2013): 345–358.
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———. “Measuring Mothering.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to
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Fiction of Alice Munro.” Literature Interpretation Theory 14 (2003): 69–97.
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———. “My Mother’s Dream.” In The Love of a Good Woman, 247–286.
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———. “Save the Reaper.” In The Love of a Good Woman, 123–152. Toronto:
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———. “Silence.” In Runaway, 126–158. New York: Vintage, 2004.
———. “The View from Castle Rock.” In The View from Castle Rock, 27–87.
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CHAPTER 3
The Shame of Affect: Sensation

and Susceptibility in Alice Munro’s Fiction
Amelia DeFalco
My body is cramped and irritated as I write this. Indeed, the act of

writing is, at least partly, an attempt to distract myself, to replace sensa-
tions of chronic pain—stiffness, aching, burning—with less discouraging
feelings: curiosity, fascination, excitement, or even fatigue. I often read for
much the same reason as I write: to distract and displace, to disappear,
to lose track of myself as I follow the plights of imaginary others. Alice
Munro’s writing is especially good at accomplishing this task of distrac-
tion, preoccupied as it is with conveying at once the complexity and the
homeliness of the everyday: human lives as mysterious, fascinating, and
banal in equal measure, as “deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”1
It’s not surprising that reading has embodied effects, since, as Elspeth
Probyn asserts, “Writing is a corporeal activity. We work ideas through
our bodies; we write through our bodies, hoping to get into the bod-
ies of our readers.”2 Munro’s work is particularly adept at this affective
transfer. It transmits affects in ways that involve my reading body, trig-
gering sympathy, and often empathy, that “vicarious spontaneous sharing
of affect,”3 which can often make reading fiction such an uncomfortable
A. DeFalco (*) 
School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_3
36 A. DeFALCO
pleasure. In Munro’s work, I discover other people’s tragedies: mur-

dered children (“Child’s Play,”4 “Dimensions”5), gruesome accidents
(“Family Furnishings,”6 “Nettles”7), sexual betrayals (“The Children
Stay”8), and debilitating illnesses (“Some Women,”9 “The Love of a
Good Woman”10). Hardship and loss, cruel twists of fate-Munro’s stories
teem with experiences of pain, frustration, suffering, bewilderment, not
to mention spontaneous levity, curious reprieves, precarious pleasures.
There is humor in her work, but, as many critics have pointed out, the
jokes and tricks that appear in her fiction tend to involve bitter ironies,
and absurd paradoxes, jests, and nonsense as salves for life’s outrageous
afflictions.11 When I read Munro’s work, I am sometimes amused, but
more often I am enthralled, conflicted, and, perhaps most importantly, as
I will explore further, implicated by narratives that convey uneasy affects,
absorbing me into the murk and mess of ethical quandaries that refuse
clean resolution.
As the essays in this collection reveal, Munro’s stories are suf-
fused with discomfiting affects, difficult sensations that permeate and
threaten narrators, characters, and, I would argue, readers. Over and
over, Munro’s fiction invokes and explores sensations of disgust, regret,
guilt, and shame, depicting the ways such negative feelings are provoked,
endured, perceived, and transferred. One frequently finds narrators and
characters squirming to evade these negative effects, which have the
tendency to pin subjects to events, objects, and places in ways that the
ambitious, striving women (typically young, poor, and alienated) at the
center of many of Munro’s stories must avoid at all costs to retain any
hope of agency and mobility. As Sara Ahmed would say, negative affects
threaten to cling to these young women, to “stick” to them,12 and in
turn stick them to the gendered, sexualized narratives of helplessness and
vulnerability that they seek to avoid. However, the compulsion to evade
those sticky, sticking affects is often simultaneously an evasion of moral
responsibility, a willful avoidance of the obligations triggered by others’
suffering.
This chapter considers how Munro’s stories evoke and complicate
the “tricky,” to use Munrovian terminology, ethics and affects of writ-
ing, reading, and listening to stories. Her stories alert readers to the risks
of affectivity, providing us with surrogates for embodied affects that tit-
illate us with their proximity, at once intimate and removed. Readers
are often aligned with ethically dubious narrators and characters who
use intimate knowledge for literary effects and readerly affects. While
3 THE SHAME OF AFFECT: SENSATION AND SUSCEPTIBILITY … 37
Robert McGill seeks to distinguish between writing and storytelling in

his analysis, which draws attention to the significance of one of Munro’s
narrator’s apparent failure to write anything more than “short jabbing
sentences”13 of accusation,14 my own inquiry concerns the correlations
between writing, storytelling, gossip, spying, and reading as potentially
exploitative transactions that take affects as material for literary trans-
actions and pleasures. Conspicuous affects are risky in Munro’s stories
because having feelings, and far worse, displaying feelings, leaves one vul-
nerable to mimicry, mockery, to becoming “material” for someone else’s
entertainment, whether as gossip, parody, or even perhaps a figure in a
short story.
The oft-noted Gothic elements of Munro’s fiction—her work is fre-
quently referred to as “Southern Ontario Gothic”15—suggest a larger
scale invocation and interrogation of the social denigration of embod-
ied affects. Although not melodramatic or Gothic per se, Munro’s fic-
tion often plays with genre, depicting sensational elements in a distinctly
understated tone. Within literary history, genres associated with sensa-
tion have typically been devalued in opposition to esteemed, “intel-
lectual” modes of representation: elegy, tragedy, history, etc. Art that
appeals to the body, as opposed to the mind, is, according to such
categorizations, cheap, base, suitable for uneducated masses includ-
ing women, people of color, and the working class. So-called high art
eschews the chills of gothic horror, the thrills of pornography and erot-
ica, and the shudders and sobs of melodrama.16 This familiar socio-his-
torical reading of genre assists my interpretation of Munro’s form and
content. Munro’s stories demonstrate a shrewd understanding of the
problem of affect in various registers—personal, political, and literary.
Being affected is always risky because powerful sensations and susceptible
bodies are signs of weakness, vulnerability, and degeneration. Cultures
that value autonomy and invulnerability scoff at tears, fears, swoons, and
sighs. Just as Munro manages to invoke sensation and Gothic elements
while managing to evade such generic categorization, her characters are
fascinated, even titillated by embodied affects, but wary of falling prey to
such risky sensations.
The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it seeks to demonstrate how
Munro elucidates the risks of affective encounters, particularly for those
whose age, gender, and class heighten their vulnerability to “sticky”
negative affects, such as shame, disgust, repulsion, and guilt. Second,
it explores the narratological consequences of such sensitivity to affective
38 A. DeFALCO
vulnerability, the metafictional self-awareness of narrators who deride

affective exploitation while capitalizing on its powers. The second part
of my investigation considers a story that features storytellers and writ-
ers castigated for their transformation of others’ suffering into literary
“material.” In “Family Furnishings,” like “Material,” a canny narra-
tor at once sneers at the titillating affects produced by storytelling and
achieves similar effects with her own reconstruction of events. I regard
the stories “Material” and “Family Furnishings” as significantly twinned,
with “Family Furnishings” functioning as a kind of thematic sequel to
“Material” in which the narrator has become a writer engaging in the
kind of manipulation and use of actual people and their suffering that the
narrator of “Material” condemns.
Risky Feelings
Over the past decade, affect theory has highlighted the philosophy and
politics of what are commonly called emotions or feelings. The field is
characterized by varying definitions of, and approaches to, the study of
embodied affects, including those that draw firm distinctions between
emotions and affects,17 and those that see significant overlap between
the two.18 For my own purposes, a definitive definition of “affect”
as a psychological state, or as a preconscious, autonomic “visceral per-
ception”19 is less important than its general association with distinctly
embodied, socio-political states of being: “Because affect emerges out
of muddy, unmediated relatedness and not in some dialectical reconcil-
iation of cleanly oppositional elements or primary units, it makes easy
compartmentalisms give way to thresholds and tensions, blends and
blurs.”20 Affect is linked to unpredictability and corporeal potential; it is
“‘a body’s capacity to affect and be affected,’ where a body can in prin-
ciple be anything,” emphasizing the inextricability of corporeality and
affective states.21 Affect studies insist on embodied subjects as inherently
relational and always socio-political.22 Theorists like Ahmed and Lauren
Berlant draw attention to the socio-political dimensions of affect, attend-
ing to the artificial distinction made between cognition and feeling, the
gendering and sexualizing of affects, along with their economization and
commodification.
Affectivity is part of human vulnerability because it connotes an
essential corporeal susceptibility. Embodied subjects are always, in some
sense, at risk of being agitated, disturbed, altered, transformed by our
interactions and collisions with the world. Consequently, affect chal-

lenges notions of independence and agency because it speaks to a vision
of the body as “radically open to the world.”23 Such unpredictable sus-
ceptibility is precisely what Munro’s women, seeking autonomy and
empowerment, seek to avoid. They yearn for clean oppositions, legi-
ble distinctions between themselves and the (vulnerable) others they
describe. “Radical openness” is an admission of the embodied self as
highly vulnerable, in the world, and in Munro. Although we may all be
fundamentally susceptible because of our corporeal ontology, that is, our
animal material capacity to affect and be affected, such capacity is pro-
foundly regulated by privilege. This is why, as Ahmed makes clear, affect
is always political as much as it is phenomenological. Some populations,
and some characters, can “afford” affects more than others.
In Munro’s stories, female narrators often express their wariness
toward affect, treating emotional reactiveness as an invasion and an
affront. One finds many narrators and characters who interpret their own
affects as disagreeable, even shameful signs of vulnerability, and, conse-
quently, struggle to evade their own sensitivity and susceptibility. Such
narrators seek to affect without being affected: they want to have an
impact on others but remain untouched by the world. Attempts at such
invulnerability disavow the twoness of affect as both the capacity to affect
and be affected. Women, especially the young, poor, white women liv-
ing in repressive families and oppressive rural communities that populate
Munro’s fiction, can’t afford affect because it threatens to aggravate and
amplify their subordinate status, their structural vulnerabilities.
For example, in an early story that Munro considers a milestone in her
career,24 “The Peace of Utrecht” (1968), the narrator, Helen, recalls her
efforts to evade the shame of her mother’s “gothic” illness by keeping
her hidden from public view. As an adult, Helen is plagued by feelings
of guilt and shame as she recalls her cruelty toward her mother. Helen
recollects being confronted by her mother’s oppressive need: “the cry
for help—undisguised, oh shamefully undisguised and raw and suppli-
cating—that sounded in her voice.”25 That call for help triggers embod-
ied affects: Helen “feel[s] [her]self go heavy all over as [she] prepared
to answer it.”26 She protects herself from the contagion of her moth-
er’s suffering by refusing to convey authentic emotions. Instead, she and
her sister Maddy “grew cunning,” performing carefully calculated “par-
odies of love” that concealed their “cold solicitude.”27 Recalling this
arm’s length interaction, she regards her withholding of emotion as a
40 A. DeFALCO
refusal of sustenance: “we took away from her our anger and impatience
and disgust, took all emotion away from our dealings with her, as you
might take away meat from a prisoner to weaken him, till he died.”28
For both sisters, their mother’s impossible, yet necessary, demands for
affective attention haunt the failed caregivers long after their mother’s
death.29 But Helen is far less “stuck” by these affects than Maddy, who,
unlike the narrator, stayed home to care for their ailing mother, even-
tually succumbing to the strain of caregiving and moving their mother
into the hospital against her will. Helen flees family as soon as she can,
distancing herself from Maddy’s struggles and their mother’s suffering,
learning to read her sister’s letters without much sympathy, managing a
“secret, guilty estrangement,”30 trading the burden of care for the bur-
den of guilt. Maddy is similarly burdened by guilt; her last-ditch effort
at independence—depositing her mother at the hospital, despite her
appeals to remain home—has left her emotionally fractured. “I couldn’t
go on,” Maddy explains to Helen, “I wanted my life.”31 At the story’s
end, Maddy drops a cut-glass bowl, which shatters, a metaphor for her
splintered life. Despite Maddy’s attempts at freedom, she remains unable
to take control,32 that is, to be responsible only for herself, and the story
closes with her desperate, questioning appeal “But why can’t I, Helen?
Why can’t I?,”33 a floating entreaty for an unnamed something that speaks
to the impossible desire for independent individualism simultaneous with
embedded responsibility. Both sisters remain stuck by and to the affects
and ethics they have sought to evade.
Other People’s Feelings

In the collections of linked stories that followed “The Peace of Utrecht,”
Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are?, as well as
later stories such as “Family Furnishings” and “Fathers,”34 one finds
female characters who, like Maddy, are wary of affects and the (gen-
dered) responsibilities they imply. Protagonists Del (Lives of Girls and
Women) and Rose (Who Do You Think You Are?) apprehend and ana-
lyze embodied affects in ways that ensure a protective gap between
themselves and others. These narrators and protagonists are mimetic
artists within the story’s diegesis, writers or actors who seek to mimic
emotional registers without actually experiencing them. These canny
mimics recognize the risks of affect, particularly for vulnerable pop-
ulations. Munro’s narrators often reflect, with wonder, on those
vulnerable bodies—Dotty in “Material,” Mary Agnes in “Heirs of the

Living Body,”35 Franny in “Privilege,”36 and Verna in “Child’s Play”—
that fail to adopt a protective skepticism, subjects who remain sensitive,
open, and eager to engage. In “Privilege,” for example, Rose marvels at
her classmate Franny’s optimistic efforts at affective engagement. Despite
being the victim of repeated public sexual violence, there remains “some-
thing hopeful about [Franny]. She would follow after anybody who did
not immediately attack and insult her.”37
In more recent stories, Munro has continued to explore the refusal
of demands for affective affinity. In “Soon,”38 Juliet withholds the care
and affection her mother longs for, maintaining, like Helen in “The
Peace of Utrecht,” a self-protective distance from the vulnerability and
need of an ill mother. When her mother, Sara, confides how, during her
worst moments she comforts herself with thoughts of Juliet, how she will
visit “soon,” Juliet remains silent, refusing to acknowledge her mother’s
thinly veiled entreaty for affective response. Like Helen, Juliet reflects on
her refusal after Sara has died, “When Sara had said, soon I’ll see Juliet,
Juliet had found no reply. Could it not have been managed? Why should
it have been so difficult?”39 Like Helen and Maddy, Juliet recoils from
her mother’s blatant affective demands, an effort to disassociate herself
from vulnerability and need. Although Juliet expresses bewilderment at
her own withholding, the logic of her rejection is apparent to the reader:
Juliet’s efforts at independence and autonomy involve the adoption of a
façade of invulnerability that opposes her mother’s overt dependency.
“Child’s Play,” from the 2010 collection Too Much Happiness, depicts
the grotesque extremity of such refusal: its narrator, Marlene, recalls her
participation in the murder of a disabled girl, Verna, whose affinity for
the narrator and attempts to engage her affection posed a seemingly
mortal threat. Dilia Narduzzi reads the story as a treatment of the vio-
lent consequences of the “aesthetic anxiety” produced by disabled bod-
ies.40 While Narduzzi persuasively demonstrates how and why abnormal
bodies produce negative affects, my own reading focuses on the degree
to which the story treats undisguised displays of affect and appeals for
affective solidarity as dangerous threats that need to be avoided, evaded,
or, in this case, neutralized through violence.41 The story’s narrator
imagines a causal relationship between Verna’s affective supplications
and her own dangerously negative affects. Verna’s undisguised affec-
tion for the narrator inspires such distaste and dread that the narrator
42 A. DeFALCO
and her friend, Charlene, collaborate in her murder, a seemingly unpre-

meditated, yet tacitly agreed upon act of annihilation. Verna repre-
sents threateningly sticky, clinging affects for Marlene: “As if we had an
understanding between us that could not be described and was not to
be disposed of. Something that clings, in the way of love, though on
my side it felt absolutely like hate.”42 These oppressively powerful affects
cannot be borne.
While stories like these depict women and girls struggling to evade
the affective and ethical demands made by particularly vulnerable oth-
ers, others depict women with a distasteful tendency to lean toward
other people’s suffering for the voyeuristic pleasures and literary mate-
rial it affords. Stories like “Material,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage,”43 and “Family Furnishings,” convey the cruel
pleasures of gossip and scandal, often in ways that evoke the vicarious
affects and effects of literary storytelling. Perhaps the most famous exam-
ple of Munro’s self-conscious inquiry into the ethics of telling other
people’s stories of woe is her 1974 story “Material,” in which the narra-
tor recounts her tortured marriage to Hugo, a novelist whom the nar-
rator chastises for using their benighted neighbor Dotty as “material”
for his fiction. One of the story’s central ironies is that the story’s
reproachful narrator who recalls and recounts Hugo’s ethical failures,
comparing his heartless apathy toward Dotty, the actual person, with his
carefully attentive rendering of her fictional surrogate, is performing the
very same “trick” as her self-centered ex-husband. Critics have suggested
that the narrator “uses” Hugo and Dotty to conjure her own literary
magic,44 generating a moving story of hardship and suffering that criti-
cizes fictional representation at the same time as it produces it.45 McGill
understands the story as “a metafiction about the ethics of writing
fiction,” one that “considers the relationship between ethical writing and
ethical living and what the criteria for each might be.”46
“Material” is a suggestive touchstone for thinking through the
affects and ethics of Munro’s stories in its dramatization of the duplic-
ity of Munro’s literary “tricks,” which engage readers through affective
dissonance and ethical unease. These tricks have a tendency to show
(and often produce) discomfort at the same time as pleasure, the dis-
orienting “exquisite shame” discussed in the collection’s introduction.
We often “look” at other people’s distress (grief, shame, disgust, guilt),
and “see ourselves in the act of looking”47; in other words, Munro’s
stories activate identification and voyeurism in equal measure. Indeed,

in seeking respite from my own discomfortsI find myself aligned with
these unhelpful onlookers, reading of hardship, suffering, and loss,
with no small degree of excitement, replacing my own uneasy embod-
iment with that of others. This is not to say that other readers are
necessarily looking to Munro’s stories for distraction and escape. The
stories present a compelling correlation between characters’ affective
voyeurism and the voyeuristic consumption of stories by their readers
that provokes questions about the ethics of telling and reading other
people’s stories. Munro’s writing engages the problem of affect, that
as affective creatures we are constantly at risk, susceptible to the world.
But the urge to minimize that risk, to minimize susceptibility, involves
retreat, avoidance, and ultimately, as Munro’s stories suggest, ethical
failure since the refusal to risk being affected is the refusal to engage
and be responsible.
Munro reminds her readers that despite all attempts at invulnera-
bility, the body’s susceptibility remains inescapable. When embodied
affects are triggered, regardless of characters’ efforts at avoidance and
caution—whether via epidermal sensation: the outrageous blows of a
father’s belt; or visceral reaction: witnessing the gut churning perfor-
mance of parental desire48—such sensation is registered as dangerous,
an affront, a source of shame.49 In “Fathers,” the narrator experiences
both physical violence and showy expressions of affection as shame-pro-
ducing violations: “Shame. The shame of being beaten, and the shame
of cringing from the beating. Perpetual shame. Exposure. And some-
thing connects this, as I feel it now, with the shame, the queasiness, that
crept up on me when I heard the padding of Mr. Wainwright’s slippered
feet, and his breathing. There were demands that seemed indecent,
there were horrid invasions, both sneaky and straightforward. Some that
I could tighten my skin against, others that left it raw.”50 The narra-
tor’s own enforced sensation, the pain and tears caused by her father’s
beatings trigger the shame of affect that haunts so many of Munro’s
characters—vivid, visceral shame at the body’s unabashed openness to
the world. In the same story, the narrator delights in being the insti-
gator rather than receiver, or more precisely, the victim of affects. She
is a mimic and a storyteller who gains power through her ability to use
other people as entertaining material:
44 A. DeFALCO
In my early teens I had become the entertainer around home. I don’t

mean that I was always trying to make the family laugh—though I did that
too—but that I relayed news and gossip. I told about things that had hap-
pened at school but also about things that happened in town. Or I just
described the looks or speech of somebody I had seen on the street. I had
learned how to do this in a way that would not get me rebuked for being
sarcastic or vulgar or told that I was too smart for my own good. I had
mastered a deadpan, even demure style that could make people laugh even
when they thought they shouldn’t and that made it hard to tell whether
I was innocent or malicious.51
The ambivalence of the storyteller, whose innocence or malice in using

others for her entertaining tricks remains unclear and draws attention to
a questionable ethics of representation. The degree to which this kind
of scrutinizing imitation that revels in the particularities and peculiarities
of a person’s appearance and speech is an unethical form of portraiture
becomes apparent in the story that follows “Fathers.” In “Lying Under
the Apple Tree,” the same unnamed narrator52 expresses her anxiety at the
prospect of being perceived or interpreted in any way: “People’s thoughts
about me…seemed to me a mysterious threat, a gross impertinence. I
hated even to hear a person say something relatively harmless. ‘I seen you
walking down the street the other day. Looked like you were off in the
clouds.’ Judgments and speculations all like a swarm of bugs trying to get
into my mouth and eyes. I could have swatted them. I could have spat.”53
Not only is the narrator displeased to know others perceive her, but that
displeasure is registered not as an emotion, but as a physical violation, as
insects swarming around delicate, vulnerable mucous membranes (eyes
and mouth), which the narrator seeks to repel and destroy through vio-
lent gestures (striking and spitting). The fact that she registers and conveys
emotions as bodily invasions and expulsions reinforces the problem that
affects pose for the narrator. Her own feelings must be experienced and
represented obliquely, transformed into concrete images of material tres-
passes. Not only does the passage convey the hypocrisy of her own delight
in mimicking the people she sees, but it enacts the refusal of affect, which
must be rerouted through metaphorical representation. Although certainly
unfair, Munro’s representation of hypocrisy in these stories does not, at
least initially, appear to do harm. However, Munro’s more fictional stories
push this hypocritical evasion further, exposing the ethical consequences
of effecting invulnerability, demonstrating that the evasion of affects easily
becomes an evasion of responsibility.
Sticky Affects and Greasy Excitement

“Family Furnishings” is a story about family stories. The narrator intro-
duces readers to her father’s cousin Alfrida, the black sheep of the family,
whose worldliness appears a direct refusal of her family’s taciturn auster-
ity and wariness toward any person or behavior deemed showy, indul-
gent, or celebratory. Alfrida is the author of “Talk of the Town” and
advice columns for the local paper, gently disciplining articles that alert
readers to community gossip and remind them of the style and etiquette
appropriate for public events, particularly weddings. Alfrida is initially an
awe-inspiring figure for the narrator: she smokes (even lighting a ciga-
rette for the young narrator), she speaks her mind, and follows politics.
However, as the narrator matures, Alfrida begins to lose her transgressive
sheen. Instead she seems tawdry and small-minded, merely another itera-
tion of her family’s social conservativism. We learn that Alfrida’s outsider
status within her family is largely due to a childhood trauma: after her
mother died from a freak accident—an oil lamp exploded in her hand—
her father remarried creating a new family that excludes her. As a result,
rather than an intrepid outlier who rejects her family’s grim, judgmental
asceticism, Alfrida appears the victim of bad luck. Visiting Alfrida and her
(married) paramour as a young adult, the narrator recognizes Alfrida as
merely another version of the repressive family that has produced her.
This visit to Alfrida’s apartment is pivotal for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, it conveys the degree to which Alfrida has capitulated
to a self-denying family culture, a capitulation that ignites the narrator’s
burgeoning writerly aspirations. Like Alfrida, the narrator’s mother is
often at odds with her husband’s family, but there is a shared apprecia-
tion for the gruesome details of the death of Alfrida’s mother:
The aunts and my mother seldom felt the same way about anything, but
they shared a feeling about this story. The feeling in their voices whenever
they said Alfrida’s mother’s name. The story seemed to be a horrible treas-
ure to them, something our family could claim that nobody else could, a
distinction that would never be let go. To listen to them had always made
me feel as if there was some obscene connivance going on, a fond fingering
of whatever was grizzly or disastrous. Their voices were like worms slither-
ing around in my insides.54
The effects and resonances of this passage are manifold and profound.
The passage unites the story’s women around a shared, unnamed
46 A. DeFALCO
“feeling” that is registered through bodily affects in the sounds of their

voices, and literary effects in the tension of an oxymoron (“horrible treas-
ure”) and shivery alliterations and sibilants (“fond fingering”; “grizzly
or disastrous”; “worms slithering…insides”), but remains unidentified,
performed rather than articulated, much like the reaction of the narra-
tor in “Lying” to others’ views. In both cases, the language and imagery
speak to abject invasions; instead of insects, here we find worms penetrat-
ing and inhabiting the body, disembodied fingers picking through affec-
tive viscera. Affect is registered, but never specified, conveyed through
approximation, rather than direct description. As a result, the narration
reproduces affects in the body of the reader, an ironic participation in
the “obscene” voyeuristic pleasure that the narrator rebukes. As in
“Material,” this unnamed narrator manages to have it both ways, identi-
fying and admonishing the ethical failures of those who treat other peo-
ple’s disasters as affective “material,” while at the same time performing
the same mimetic process, conveying “horrible treasures” to the reader
in the form of literary language and narrative. Unlike “Material,” which
(ostensibly) maintains a distinction between the story’s morally outraged
narrator and its manipulative entertainer (Hugo), although there is some
dispute among scholars on this point,55 “Family Furnishings” draws
attention to the narrator’s complicity in affective economies that trade
suffering and hardship for literary pleasures and resolution.
Unlike her relations, who savor the grisly details of family tragedy,
Alfrida communicates the story of her mother’s death straightfor-
wardly; the narrator notes that she delivers the account “in her nor-
mal voice, not preparing the way with any special piety, or greasy
excitement.”56 In her plainspoken manner, Alfrida reports that when
she returned home from school and learned about the accident, she
demanded to see her injured mother, demands that were denied for
fear that the sight of her mother’s burned body would be traumatiz-
ing. As Alfrida recalls, she was indignant, insisting to her aunts that her
mother “would want to see me.”57 Looking back, Alfrida expresses awe
at the arrogance of her childhood assertion: “I must’ve thought I was
a pretty big cheese, mustn’t I?”58 This new anecdote, which conveys
the emotion of Alfrida’s childhood loss, her intuitive understanding of
maternal devotion, and the stifling family culture that interprets familial
love as excessive and prideful, excites the narrator’s imagination. She
springs on the new information as a utilitarian object, rather than an
affecting confidence: “This was a part of the story I had never heard.
And the minute that I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap
had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly
understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they
jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air,
available only to myself.”59 Alfrida is conspicuously absent in the narra-
tor’s interpretation of the story’s significance. Her mournful anecdote
is, first and foremost, literary material. As the narrator concedes, “The
story I wrote, with this in it, would not be written until years later, not
until it had become quite unimportant to think about who had put the
idea into my head in the first place.”60 That Alfrida is injured by the
use of her intimate anecdote as a literary building block is unimpor-
tant to the narrator; Alfrida’s letter of protest strikes her as peculiar and
peripheral: “I was surprised, even impatient and a little angry, to think
of Alfrida’s objecting to something that seemed now to have so little to
do with her.”61
In “Family Furnishings,” the operations of affect are central to the
ethics and politics of the relationship between the narrator and Alfrida’s
“material.” To a certain degree, Alfrida’s flight from childhood trauma,
her dismissal of her own affects (frustration, anger, longing, sadness)
triggered by her mother’s accident and subsequent death appears to be
a capitulation to social and familial norms. Alfrida works to avoid being
what Ahmed terms a “killjoy,” or “affect alien,” whose attention to
negative affects would cause awkwardness within the family. As Ahmed
explains,
Maintaining public comfort requires that certain bodies ‘go along with it,’
to agree to where you are placed. To refuse to be placed would mean to be
seen as trouble, as causing discomfort for others. There is a political strug-
gle about how we attribute good and bad feelings, which hesitates around
the apparently simple question of who introduces what feelings to whom.
Feelings can get stuck to certain bodies in the very way we describe spaces,
situations, dramas. And bodies can get stuck depending on what feelings
they get associated with.62
As a single woman with a career who lives with a man who is married to
another woman, Alfrida occupies a precarious position within her family
and society at large, and despite her best efforts, she cannot “un-stick”
herself from marginalizing negative affects. She is a reluctant affect alien.
She struggles to avoid the ostracizing role of the killjoy, attempting to
48 A. DeFALCO
“go along with it,” seeming to “agree to where [she] is placed”—on the
periphery. Munro’s narrator attempts to evade these positioning struc-
tures altogether, these sticky affects, attempting to be an invisible, dis-
embodied presence, one who, like the narrator of “Lying,” sees, but is
never seen, touches, but is never touched. She squirms to evade affective
bodies, such as Alfrida, who reach out to touch her.
The narrator regards Alfrida as an affective object that supplies the
meaning and gravitas necessary for her own literary art. Near the story’s
conclusion, we learn that Alfrida has described the narrator as “a cold
fish,”63 an apt characterization that conjures the kind of separation and
invulnerability the narrator has sought; she regards herself has a species
apart, one immune to emotion. In this way, the narrator is ultimately
aligned with her dour family members, the aunts and uncles who treat
affect as weakness. As in many of the stories I’ve discussed, affect itself is
shameful in “Family Furnishings” because being affected implies a kind
of vulnerability that is condemned by a community that strives for invio-
lable fortitude.64
Munro’s depiction of a closed-minded rural society that disparages
emotionality, individualism, pleasure, literature, and art, set against a
burgeoning artist’s struggle to feel, express, and explore is not a particu-
larly innovative narrative development. Readers of Bildungsromans have
frequently encountered such struggles. However, what is notable about
Munro’s treatment of art, life, and oppressive social forces is the degree
to which her stories refuse to equate writing with personal liberation and
progressiveness, but rather express apprehension toward the exploitative
passivity of literature that takes “life” as its material. Writing (and read-
ing) do very little. They are primarily affective activities. As Probyn makes
clear, writing and reading are embodied transferals of ideas (“we write
through our bodies, hoping to get into the bodies of our readers”). The
anti-social uselessness of literature irks the narrator’s amusing, philistine
stepmother Irlma in Munro’s autobiographical story “Home”: “Irlma
doesn’t care for the sight of people reading because it is not sociable and
at the end of it all what has been accomplished? She thinks people are
better off playing cards, or making things. Men can do woodworking,
women can quilt and hook rugs or crochet or do embroidery. There is
always plenty to do.”65 The ironic humor of the passage is undeniable;
nonetheless, I would argue that the alienating passivity of writing and
reading as solitary activities that allow, in fact encourage, the writer/
reader to escape or evade the demands of his or her actual surroundings

in favor of the distractions of other people’s lives, remains a nagging con-
cern that haunts Munro’s stories, provoking difficult questions about
the ethics of fiction, especially fiction like Munro’s that tends to draw on
actual people and events for its “material.”
Alfrida succumbs to pressures to ‘just get along,’ yet bears traces of
unhappy histories, traces that the narrator (inadvertently) ferrets out and
uses for her own purposes, to produce her own form of solitary pleas-
ures. The commitment to writing is explicitly a commitment to a sol-
itude that eschews solidarity and responsibility. The story concludes,
not with the recollection of Alfrida’s disapproval of her transformation
into literary material, but with a return to the narrator’s departure from
Alfrida’s apartment and her revelatory exposure. The narrator stops at
a drugstore and orders a coffee, relishing her solitude and separation:
“Such happiness, to be alone…I did not think of the story I would make
about Alfrida—not of that in particular—but of the work I wanted to
do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than con-
structing stories. The cries of the crowd [on a radio] came to me like
big hearbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their
distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation…this was how I wanted
my life to be.”66 The narrator is replete; the world is a distant, pliable
resource.
In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed explores the “stick-
iness” of certain affects, objects, bodies, and signs: “Stickiness then is
about what objects to do other objects—it involves a transference of
affect—but it is a relation of ‘doing’ in which there is not a distinction
between passive or active, even though the stickiness of one object might
come before the stickiness of the other, such that the other seems to
cling to it.”67 Ahmed explains that objects and affects become aligned,
become “stuck” to one another through repetition: “Stickiness is an
effect of the histories of contact between bodies, objects and signs.”68
Disgust, anxiety, shame, and fear are particularly “sticky” affects. In
Munro’s stories these negative affects “stick” to particular vulnerable
bodies—gendered bodies, ill bodies, disabled bodies—and canny pro-
tagonists seek to dodge these sticky subjects, refusing their clingy, risky
supplications. In their efforts to remain unsullied by the suffering they
witness, such protagonists often function as surrogate writers or readers,
collecting other’s stories without getting “stuck” to them. And how does
50 A. DeFALCO
one avoid getting “stuck”? One must remain slippery, evasive; one must
remain an onlooker and avoid being a participant. One must coat oneself
in the “greasy excitement” of the disinterested spectator, who, like me,
the reader seeking distraction, can always extract herself from the titillat-
ing trouble she reads about, can always slip away from the story, coated
as she is in the oily sheen of the voyeur. I propose that reading such
stories can provoke an affective dissonance in their readers that echoes
the stories’ content: we become affective voyeurs like the aunts and the
various narrators and protagonists, “fond[ly] fingering…whatever was
grizzly or disastrous,” fascinated by, but not responsible for, the grim
narratives of affected others.
From this perspective, writing fiction appears as an effort to coat one-
self in a protective veneer that will keep sticky affects at bay. At the end
of “The Ottawa Valley,” yet another story preoccupied with a narrator’s
failure to adequately respond, the narrator reflects on the story itself,
describing it as an unsuccessful effort to un-stick herself from her mother
and the guilt and sadness associated with her illness and death. The story
is an attempt, she explains,
to mark her [mother] off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid

of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did.
She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indis-
tinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close
as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what
skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same.69
Writing fiction in this instance is, or rather is meant to be, a sundering

trick that installs a protective buffer between the storyteller and her
material. However, in this case, the trick fails and the narrator’s mother
remains stuck to her, bonded by affects (shame and regret). Unlike the
“greasy” anticipation that provides an affective film protecting the nar-
rator’s mother and aunts from being disturbed by Alfrida’s suffering in
“Family Furnishing,” the narrator’s tricks in “The Ottawa Valley” are
ineffectual armor and she remains unable to seal herself off from her sub-
ject matter.
Munro’s stories propose an antithesis to sticky affects in their explo-
ration of greasy ones, those sensations and feelings that leave few traces
on the affected. These are affects that prohibit, rather than incite engage-
ment and empathy. The exploitative pleasures of gossip and mimicry that
allow one to be entertained, even affected, without being implicated or

involved, evoke an uneasy portrait not only of storytelling and writing,
but of listening and reading. As my discussion concludes and this liter-
ary distraction starts to wane, the discomforts of my own embodiment
start to disturb my attention. To what extent have I “used” Munro’s
stories and the inquiry they inspire as “material” to suit my own affec-
tive, academic needs? Who benefits from this usage? My hope is that it’s
not merely an exercise in distraction, but that it might have affective and
ethical resonances, drawing attention to the implications of writing and
reading, storytelling and story listening. As much as Munro’s stories
demonstrate the exploitation and manipulation of fictional tricks in their
self-conscious attention to such trickery, even as they exploit those same
tricks, they present a subtle challenge to the reader, prodding us to con-
sider what we are reading, where it comes from, and what it does (and
doesn’t) do to us.
Notes
1. This evocative image has become a sort of touchstone for Munro’s ability
to convey the extraordinariness of the ordinary. The description appears
in the final story of The Lives of Girls and Women: “People’s lives, in
Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable—
deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum” (277). Its relevance for critical
interpretations of Munro’s work is evident in the prevalence of its quo-
tation. In fact, there is an entire article devoted to its importance: “Alice
Munro and the Poetics of the Linoleum” by Sabrina Francesconi.
2. Elspeth Probyn, “Writing Shame,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed.
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010), 76.
3. Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 4.
2009), 188–255.
5. Ibid., 1–31.
6. Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2002), 1–52.
7. Ibid., 154–185.
8. Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1998), 181–214.
9. Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness, 164–187.
52 A. DeFALCO
10. Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman, 3–78.

11. See, for example, Heble, Howells, McGill, Redekop.
12. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge,
2012), 90–91.
13. Alice Munro, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, 1974 (Toronto:
Penguin, 1990), 44.
14. McGill, Robert. “‘Daringly Out in the Public Eye’: Alice Munro and
the Ethics of Writing Back,” University of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3
(2007): 874–889.
15. See, for example, Chapter 5, “Playing fort-da with History: Settler
Postcolonial Gothic,” in Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the
Spectre of Self-Invention, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 2014); and Judith McCombs, “‘From Listening to the Stories of
Others, We Learn to Tell our Own’: Southern Ontario Gothic in Alice
Munro’s ‘Wilderness Station’ and [Margaret Atwood’s] Alias Grace,”
Margaret Atwood Society Newsletter 22–23 (1999): 32–33.
16. Film scholar Linda Williams explains that genres that provoke “[d]irect
bodily reactions such as crying in melodrama, the sweat of anxiety in the
face of disfiguration, or the bleeding bodies in the slasher–horror mov-
ies, and (male) spectator’s response to the sexual act in pornography
underscore an excess compared to the classical regime of regulated narra-
tion” and therefore occupy a lower position in a cultural value hierarchy
(Elsaesser and Hagener, 121).
17. See, for example, Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement,
Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
18. See, for example, Kathleen Woodward, Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics
and Poetics of the Emotions (London: Duke University Press, 2009).
19. Massumi, 60.
20. Melissa Gregg, and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,”
in The Affect Studies Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 4.
21. Ben Anderson, Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 9.
22. Gregg and Seigworth, 3.
23. Jo Labanyi, “Doing Things: Emotion, Affect, and Materiality,” Journal of
Spanish Cultural Studies 11, no. 3–4 (2010): 225.
24. Alice Munro has referred to “The Peace of Utrecht” as “the first story I
absolutely had to write and wasn’t writing to see if I could write that kind
of story” (qtd. in Howells 14).
25. Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968
(Toronto: Penguin, 1997), 200.
26. Ibid., 200.
27. Ibid., 201.
28. Ibid.
29. Munro’s language recalls Lauren Berlant’s suggestion of “compassion
and coldness as perhaps not opposite at all but…two sides of a bargain
that the subjects of modernity have struck with structural inequality”
(“Introduction,” 10). Berlant’s provocative critique of compassion has
further parallels with Munro’s treatment of care, as I have discussed in
chapter 4 of Imagining Care.
30. Ibid., 203.
31. Ibid., 212.
32. Ibid., 213.
33. Emphasis in original, ibid., 213.
34. Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock: Stories (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart 2006), 173–196.
35. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971 (Toronto: Penguin, 1997),
31–69.
36. Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are? 1978 (Toronto: Penguin,
1996), 28–45.
37. Munro, Who Do You Think You Are? 32.
38. Alice Munro, Runaway (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2004),
87–125.
39. Munro, Runaway, 125.
40. Dilia Narduzzi, “Regulating Affect and Reproducing Norms: Alice
Munro’s ‘Child’s Play,’” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability
Studies 7, no. 1 (2013): 87.
41. Narduzzi explains that “‘Child’s Play’ is particularly concerned with inti-
macies: encounters with ‘others’ that have the potential to transform or
disrupt everyday life” (87). Her inquiry makes a compelling case for the
mortal dangers of negative affects toward “monstrous” bodies that chal-
lenge able-bodied, heteronormative privilege. Narduzzi explains that the
story’s murder “provides an example of the way to imagine affect’s effects,
so to speak” (72). This connection between affects and effects is an entry
point for my own discussion since the discussion of “effects” is the bridge
between affects and ethics, between embodied feelings and ethical actions
(or lack thereof).
42. Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness, 200.
43. Alice Munro, Hateship, 1–52.
44. See, for example, Heble, McGill, Redekop, and McIntyre.
45. I recognize that there is some dispute as to whether the narrator is a
writer herself because, as Robert McGill points out, there is no evidence
that she is the author of her own narration (880). However, Timothy
McIntyre argues that “[the narrator’s] ability to understand, articulate,
54 A. DeFALCO
and use her past, the way a writer like Hugo or Munro might, is the
means by which ‘Material’ realizes both its ethical vision and its gestures
at the possibility that literature, despite ethical risk and despite any real-
world moral failures, can create an experience very much like love” (162).
Consequently, McIntyre explains that “‘Material’ at times reads as a jere-
miad against the literary community and even literature itself” (161).
46. McGill, “Daringly,” 875.
47. Magdalene Redekop, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice
Munro (New York: Routledge, 1992), 218.
48. Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock, 193.
49. Ibid., 195.
50. Ibid., 195–196.
51. Ibid., 193–194. In a similar vein, Rose entertains her stepmother, Flo,
with stories from town in Who Do You Think You Are?
52. The second set of stories in The View from Castle Rock is, as the author’s
foreword explains, “closer to my own life than the other stories I had
written” (x). These first-person stories provide fictionalized accounts of
the author’s life as a child in rural southern Ontario, providing opportu-
nities for Munro to “explor[e] a life, my own life, but not in an austere
or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that
self, as searchingly as I could” (x).
53. Ibid., 202–203.
54. Munro, Hateship, 107–108.
55. See note 45 for details.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 109.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 110.
62. Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Studies Reader, ed. Melissa
Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 39.
64. It is no surprise that reading literature is also denigrated within the rural
culture that Munro describes since such an endeavor involves opening
oneself to a kind of passive affectedness.
65. Munro, The View, 291.
67. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 91.
68. Ibid., 90.
69. Munro, Something, 246.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2004.
———. “Happy Objects.” In The Affect Studies Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg
and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29–51. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Berlant, Lauren. “Introduction: Compassion (and Witholding).” In Compassion:
The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, edited by Lauren Berlant, 1–13. New
Francesconi, Sabrina. “Alice Munro and the Poetics of the Linoleum.” In
The Inside of A Shell: Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades”, edited
by Vanessa Guignéry, 86–97. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2015.
1998.
Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press,
2007.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2002.
McGill, Robert. “‘Daringly Out in the Public Eye’: Alice Munro and the Ethics
of Writing Back.” University of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2007): 874–889.
McIntyre, Timothy. “‘This Is Not Enough’: Gesturing Beyond the Aesthetics of
Failure in Alice Munro’s ‘Material.’” American Review of Canadian Studies
45, no. 2 (2015): 161–173.
Munro, Alice. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories.
Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974.
———. Who Do You Think You Are? 1978. Toronto: Penguin, 1996.
———. Lives of Girls and Women. 1971. Toronto: Penguin, 1997.
———. The Love of a Good Woman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998.
———. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Toronto:
———. The View from Castle Rock: Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
2006.
Narduzzi, Dilia. “Regulating Affect and Reproducing Norms: Alice Munro’s
‘Child’s Play.’” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 7, no. 1
(2013): 71–78.
Probyn, Elspeth. “Writing Shame.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 72–90. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010.
56 A. DeFALCO
Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The
Affect Theory Reader, edited by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg,
1–28. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Woodward, Kathleen. Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the
Emotions. London: Duke University Press, 2009.
CHAPTER 4
Embodied Shame and the Resilient Ethics

of Representation in Alice Munro’s
“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”
Ana María Fraile-Marcos
Even though structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to literature

have largely shunned moral issues as a concern, the current turn to eth-
ics proves “the resilience of ethical questions in literary criticism and the-
ory.”1 The urge to justify the existence of the Humanities as a field of
study in the neoliberal terms of economic and social profit2 may well have
contributed to this resiliency, as the function of the arts and of literature
in particular, can be explained in terms of the ethical values they may stir.
Marlene Goldman views the shift to ethics as one away from deconstruc-
tion’s concern with the provisional to a revived interest in the values of
Research for this chapter has taken place within the framework of the research
project Narratives of Resilience: Intersectional Perspectives about Literature
and Other Contemporary Cultural Representations (FFI2015-63895-C2-2-R,
MINECO/FEDER), graciously funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy
and Competitiveness.
A. M. Fraile-Marcos (*) 
University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_4
58 A. M. FRAILE-MARCOS
certainty and truth that link ethics to the study of cultural materialism and
communal responsibility. In fact, Herb Wyile posits that, “[t]hough post-
structuralist theorists have thoroughly complicated how literature might
be seen as ‘pondering’ moral questions, their challenging of the meta-
physical foundations of Western philosophy arguably has reconfigured
ethical considerations in literary criticism and theory, rather than banished
them,”3 deeply influencing, for instance, postcolonial, feminist, or cul-
tural studies. However, should we be wary of the contemporary prizing
of the ethical function of literature? Goldman argues that ethicists such as
Margaret Somerville, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty tend to view
literature as “the ethical tool par excellence because of its capacity to forge
bonds between self and other.”4 Literature is hence approached “solely as
a means to an end, as a tool for arousing sublime feelings of ‘awe and
wonder’,” and the creative writer turns into a figure akin to Shelley’s poet,
perceived as leader and legislator of the masses.5 Thus, any consideration
of the ethics of literature becomes linked to the arousal of affects.
In contrast to the understanding of literature as a tool to build a unified
moral community, Goldman sides with Wyile, who highlights “literature’s
love of ‘messiness’,” “leading the reader to grapple with the messiness of
conflicting choices that repeatedly call for judgement,”6 rather than assert-
ing a single ethical stance. Northrop Frye illustrates that position in his
Massey Lecture The Educated Imagination, delivered in 1963, in which
he acknowledges the ethical valance of literature through the generation of
“conflict” and the stirring of affects: “For Frye, literature possesses an ethical
weight not only because it promotes tolerance and generates creative con-
flict, but also because it invites us to feel. Frye particularly prizes literature’s
ability to arouse horror. Drawing in part on Aristotle’s notion of catharsis,
he maintains that this [affective] capacity has an ethical function.”7
Keith Oatley has also engaged in the discussion of the ethical value
of literature from the perspective of psychology. He argues that literary
fiction enhances empathy through its engagement with ‘mimesis,’ not
in the sense of mere imitation, but of world-making or world-creating.
According to Oatley, recent findings show that readers engaging in the
simulations provided by fiction understand other people better than
those who do not. Acting as a metaphor, “a semantic idea in which, from
mapping from one domain to another, we extend our understanding,”
fiction “can be thought of as a form of consciousness of selves and others
that can be passed from an author to a reader or spectator, and can be
internalized to augment everyday cognition.”8
4 EMBODIED SHAME AND THE RESILIENT ETHICS OF REPRESENTATION … 59
Other critics specifically stress literature’s capacity to deal with ethi-

cal questions by creating a context for the reader to confront alterity. For
instance, Michael Eskin argues that “it is the singular encounter between
reader and text-as-other, soliciting a singularly just response on the read-
er’s part that is at stake in ‘ethics and literature’.”9 Julia Kristeva points to
literature’s important role in bridging the distance between conscious and
unconscious, between the self and the Other, and between the self and the
uncanny Other within the self, all of which is achieved via linguistic experi-
mentation. In line with Frye’s underlining of the cathartic poetic element,
Kristeva holds that the revelation of the stranger within the self takes place
when the buried affects within a character surface through an act of linguis-
tic disruption that occurs when the semiotic intrudes into the symbolic, “a
moment of distortion, a moment of rhetorical figures, rhythms, and alliter-
ations, what is in fact poetic language in all its particularities.”10 In Noelle
McAffee’s words, “The semiotic could be seen as the modes of expression
that originate in the unconscious whereas the symbolic could be seen as the
conscious way a person tries to express using a stable sign system (whether
written, spoken, or gestured with sign language).”11 According to Kristeva,
it is at the crossroads of the semiotic and the symbolic that the individual is
exposed to his or her passions. In as much as the expression of affect may
lead to “healing and regeneration as a result of the release of the repressed
libidinal energies that are sublimated and harmonized in the creation of
art,”12 literature fulfills an ethical function.
I suggest that the revelation of the stranger inside and outside the
self, which is Kristeva’s concern, can be further developed in view of
Winfried Siemerling’s notion of re/cognition which he uses in his study
of racialized difference, “Ethics as Re/Cognition in the Novels of Marie-
Célie Agnant,” but which can be applied more generally to any analy-
sis of difference, including that of the inner stranger. Siemerling’s term
refers to “the ambivalent and often contradictory duality”13 entailed in
cognitive—and ethical—change. Thus, re/cognition encompasses both
a process of mere recognition when the self observes the same in the
other, thereby assimilating difference to that which is already known, and
re-cognition, which, as Goldman puts it, has “the self moving beyond
this type of narcissistic apprehension and assimilation of what is already
known or accepted to engage with difference.”14 Despite acknowledging
literature’s stirring of affects and its potential for catharsis, Goldman is
wary about understanding the role of literature in ethical terms.15
Alice Munro’s works are a fecund ground to ponder the ethical role of
literature. This chapter grapples with Munro’s nuanced rendering of the
ethics of representation in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”16 and,
consequently, with the concern with truth, as well as with certainty and
communal/individual responsibility. I posit that shame is a key affect in the
story, playing an instrumental role in the stimulation of empathy, the emo-
tion that allows for the forging of bonds and knowledge between self and
Other, not only at the level of the characters’ interaction, but also between
the reader and the text-as-other. However, contrary to many stories where
Munro deals explicitly with shame and has her characters naming and pre-
cisely describing it,17 I suggest that “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”
holds shame as an unacknowledged affect at the core of character construc-
tion, and consequently, of personality and identity.18 Some of the central
questions energizing this analysis revolve around the ethical possibilities of
shame: Can the surfacing of shame to consciousness turn it from a negative
affect into a potential agent for the positive transformation of an ethical self?
Does Munro’s exploration of shame shed light on the limits of comprehend-
ing alterity and the Other within the self, as well as on the ethics of fiction?
The story’s plot unfolds through various crises and transitions conveyed
fragmentarily and obliquely by an omniscient narrator who adopts the main
character’s point of view. Thus, the story is tinged by the perception, eli-
sions, associative memories, affects, and emotions of Grant, a retired pro-
fessor of Icelandic literature who has apparently been happily married to
Fiona for fifty years. After being diagnosed with a cognitive impairment that
resembles Alzheimer’s disease, Fiona’s memory declines, and she decides to
move to a nearby nursing home called Meadowlake. The couple separates
for the first time in their married life, and Grant witnesses, to his puzzlement
and pain, how his wife transforms into a new being, creating new affective
attachments in the nursing home. Fiona’s devotion to Aubrey, a temporary
resident, turns into a serious depression when his wife Marian takes him
back home. Facing Fiona’s ensuing quick mental and physical deteriora-
tion, Grant is afraid that she will be interned in the dreaded second floor
at Meadowlake, from where residents rarely return. As a result, he tries to
restore Fiona’s health and joie de vivre, even if that means reinstating Aubrey
into her life, thereby “facilitating her ‘infidelity’ to him.”19 At the core of the
story is Grant’s inner ethical dilemma, which pits his own abjection and fear
of loss against his love and ethical responsibility for his wife.20
Fiona’s dementia and her placement in a facility of institutional-
ized care may be seen as an unexpected twist in her life that results in
a greater freedom21 for her to remodel her relations and identity away
“from the prescripted plot of her married life,” as Coral Ann Howells
speculates.22 Moreover, a number of ambiguous revelations, such as the
fact that she and Aubrey had been sweethearts briefly in their youth,
stresses Grant’s estrangement from Fiona’s life and his gradual awareness
of her condition as an intimate Other. As Grant becomes entangled in a
web of affects, his empathy for Fiona leads him to revise his own life and
actions from what he imagines to be her perspective. Grant sees Fiona’s
current behavior as mirroring his past philandering, and envisions him-
self causing her similar feelings of hurt and disorientation to the ones he
is currently experiencing. I contend that, as a result, his own uncanny
inner stranger emerges to his conscious mind questioning his own sense
of self-identity. The story’s title, a variant of the North American folk
song “The Bear Went over the Mountain,” signifies the figurative jour-
ney that has Grant coming to himself even when going toward the Other
through empathy. I claim that the journey opens a space for re-cognition
(in Siemerling’s terms) which holds the potential to go beyond mere rec-
ognition of the self in the Other to engage with difference. In the fol-
lowing sections I will trace this process of re-cognition of the self and the
Other in which affects, feelings and emotions play a paramount role.
From Shame to Knowledge to Ethics

While attempting to establish a working distinction between affect, feel-
ing, and emotion, Robert Masters draws attention to their cognitive
functions. According to his classification, “affect is an innately struc-
tured, noncognitive evaluative sensation that may or may not register
in consciousness; feeling is affect made conscious, possessing an eval-
uative capacity that is not only physiologically based, but that is often
also psychologically (and sometimes relationally) oriented; and emotion
is psychosocially constructed, dramatized feeling.”23 In my close read-
ing of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” I aim to trace the process
through which Munro’s aesthetics works toward revealing the Other by
means of procuring the main character’s transit from unconscious affect
to conscious feeling and to psychosocial emotion. The textual surfacing
of unacknowledged or buried shame and its transit from affect to feeling
and emotion unveils the ethical complexities that the characters—and the
reader—struggle with, and holds the possibility of ethical action.
As an affect, Silvan Tomkins argues, shame is one of the nine unmod-
ulated physiological or bodily reactions that are present at birth. As
the result of an intensely painful experience following “a moment
of exposure” that “reveals aspects of the self of a peculiarly sensitive,

intimate, and vulnerable nature,”24 shame is “the affect of indignity, of
defeat, of transgression and of alienation” emerging from inside rather
than inflicted from the outside, and therefore, “felt as an inner torment,
a sickness of the soul.”25 Moreover, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, shame is a
very ‘sticky emotion’ to which other emotions, such as humiliation,
anger, rage, mortification, envy, hate, contempt, apathy, self-absorption,
or disgust are easily attached. However, shame needs to be contextu-
alized within what Paul Gilbert and Jeremy Miles call ‘biopsychosocial
models.’ That is what Brooks Bouson demonstrates in Embodied Shame,
a study that focuses on contemporary literary representations of shame
arising from various forms of social, sexual, and racial denigration
of women in our culture. Thus, shame is considered to be a complex
“multidimensional, multi-layered experience,”26 often seeping beyond
consciousness and rationality, which can be directed toward many aspects
of the self and depends to a large extent on the socially shaped body.
In “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” shame suffuses the char-
acters’ lives and identities, even when that shame is unacknowledged
by them or hardly registers in their consciousness. However, during the
course of the narration, the reader becomes aware of the transformation
of the usually negative affect into a conscious feeling, as well as of the
psychosocial component in its construction. In the transition of shame
from unconscious affect to feeling and to biopsychosocial emotion, it
becomes performative, pushing the protagonists, and Grant in particular,
to re/cognition and ethical engagement. Thus, shame transits from con-
stituting a negative affect to becoming an agent for the potential positive
transformation of an ethical self.
At the beginning of the story, as Grant reminisces about when he met
Fiona while she was still a college student, she appears as a superior and
admired being, estranged from him and his own family background by
social class, education, and economic status as well as by her youth and
beauty. While she enjoys the company of her parents’ rich cosmopolitan
and unorthodox leftist friends, she makes fun of Grant’s small-town
phrases,27 thus making him self-conscious of his underprivileged origins,
shaming him into linguistic ‘correctness,’ and inflicting upon him a sort
of class shame. In turn, Grant’s love for Fiona blends with an infatuation
with the social status that she stands for and he craves, which makes him
oblivious of her complex self. As a result, he creates an essentializing nar-
rative that holds her simply as a mysterious, unfathomable Other, “direct
and vague…sweet and ironic.”28 Even after their fifty years together, that
image of her prevails in the present: “Trying to figure out Fiona had
always been frustrating. It could be like following a mirage. No—like liv-
ing in a mirage.”29 Her impenetrability appears to him as “the spark of
life” that he hurries to possess when she proposes to him, even when
he first thought that she might be joking. His shame at not being her
equal is layered because Grant also feels guilty for taking advantage of
her father’s money30 and for profiting from her mother’s cultural capital,
as Grant benefits from his contact with Fiona’s Icelandic mother, who
coaches him about how to recite in Icelandic. In contrast, Grant envi-
sions Fiona as his opposite, a self-assured person supported by her social
background: “Fiona wouldn’t feel any of that misgiving. Nobody had
beat her down, narrowed her when she was young.”31 Yet, as the reader
puts together the fragmentary narration that makes up the story, one
suspects that Grant’s philandering over the years, which he believed he
had kept hidden from Fiona, may have had the effect of ‘narrowing her.’
Interestingly, when Grant crosses the lines of class on account of edu-
cation and marriage, his shame acquires a new dimension because he is
subject to a middle-class guilt complex for this class desertion. When he
meets Marian, Aubrey’s wife, he reminds himself that ethical generos-
ity becomes a luxury for those who, like her and his own family, strug-
gle to survive. In fact, Grant is aware that he is “[f]ree to dream up the
fine, generous schemes that he believed would make another person
happy”32 thanks to his comfortable middle-class position. Feeling like a
sham, Grant establishes some distance from himself and feels vulnerable
to other people’s likely perception of him as a jerk, “A silly person, full
of boring knowledge and protected by some fluke from the truth about
life.”33 In contrast, those who lack his status and freedom “made him
feel hopeless, exasperated, finally almost desolate,” although he wonders
whether that is because “he was afraid that in the end they’d be right?”34
Hence, Grant appears as a stranger to himself. That feeling of inner
estrangement is accentuated by ambiguous revelations that arouse his
shame and guilt while exposing his dubious ethics and destabilizing his
previous certainties or knowledge about Fiona or himself.
In his first visit to the nursing home, Grant finds that although Fiona
does not seem to recognize him, she remembers Aubrey from the times
when, as a young girl, she visited her grandparents, and has now devel-
oped an attachment to him. As a result, Grant feels humiliated, cast
off and out of place, as the residents shun him “as if to ward off any
intrusion.”35 That experience of abjection elicits Grant’s empathy for
Fiona because he imagines her feeling the same way he feels now—
speculating that she may have known about and silently endured his phi-
landering for years. Thus, by identifying with Fiona, Grant undergoes
the kind of recognition that Siemerling explains as the self seeing the
same in the Other. This process of reaching out to Fiona simultaneously
works toward the acknowledgment of the hopelessness within himself
and of Fiona as a stranger. However, before Grant undergoes the kind
of re-cognition that allows him to move beyond narcissistic apprehen-
sion and truly engage with difference, he still needs to go a step further,
which occurs later in the story, when he witnesses Fiona’s rapid mental
and physical deterioration.
Fiona’s words before saying goodbye to Grant on his first visit are
enigmatic and central to the story’s cognitive quest, which is implicit in
the lyrics of the nursery rhyme to which the story’s title alludes: “The
bear went over the mountain/to see what he could see.” The quest is no
other than an introspective journey that allows the self to see him/herself
from the perspective of the Other by means of empathizing with the
Other, and thereby experiencing some ontological revelation. Apparently
mistaking Grant for a new resident at Meadowlake, Fiona foreshadows
the epistemological/ontological process ahead for Grant: “It must all
seem strange to you, but you’ll be surprised how soon you get used to
it. You’ll get to know who everybody is. Except that some of them are
pretty well off in the clouds, you know—you can’t expect them all to get
to know who you are.”36 Fiona’s words are also ominous if one takes into
account Grant’s secrecy, and maybe Fiona’s, about his disloyalty. Is Fiona
suggesting that Grant has lived all those years in the clouds without actu-
ally knowing who she is? Is she telling him that even though he is now
shocked at her own affair with Aubrey, he will soon get used to the situ-
ation, as she did to his philandering behavior? Is she hinting that she will
now make him swallow his own medicine so that he can feel the pain that
he has inflicted on her and hence may at last get to know her; or even
further, that far from his self-image as a caring, loving husband, he will be
revealed to himself as a devious, treacherous inner stranger who has hurt
and humiliated her? Fiona’s words cause Grant inner turmoil and shame,
particularly because, due to their ambiguity and her delicate situation, he
cannot know whether he has really been exposed: “He could not decide.
She could have been playing a joke. It would not be unlike her.”37
Grant later wonders “whether she isn’t putting on some kind of a cha-
rade,”38 chastising him, or even taking revenge. After Grant considers the
possibility that Fiona may have known about his philandering from the
beginning, he confronts an intriguing paradox. Whereas he can reassess
Fiona’s behavior and character in light of this uncertain revelation that
somehow conveys the impression that Grant is closer to understanding
and to knowing her, she remains more inscrutable than ever because of
her memory impairment. She becomes more distant and unknowable
precisely at the time when Grant thinks he may have the key to reinter-
pret her, which leaves such a reinterpretation suspended.
However, the fact that knowledge of the Other is deferred presents
an opportunity for Grant to embrace alterity. Going beyond the kind of
recognition that merely assimilates difference to one’s own experience,
Grant proceeds to a re-cognition (in Winfried Siemerling’s terms) of
Fiona. That evolution in Grant’s epistemological and ethical transfor-
mation takes place in the wake of Aubrey’s sudden disappearance from
Fiona’s life. Fiona begins to decline so quickly that the staff at the nurs-
ing home begin to consider moving her to the second floor, which is
reserved for residents who have completely ‘lost it.’ Grant understands
that his efforts to become a meaningful presence in Fiona’s new life are
of no avail and accepts that he has become a stranger to her, just as she
is a stranger to him. At the point where Grant determines to take ethical
responsibility for Fiona’s well-being and happiness, his act of mere recog-
nition turns into one of re-cognition of difference.
Shame as Psychosocial Emotion of Exposure

Although I argue that shame is by and large an unacknowledged affect in
“The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” it is interesting to note that the
only instance in which shame is explicitly alluded to in the story is when
Grant reminisces about feeling socially exposed in the past when the
word got around in his university circles that he was philandering with
his students. Feeling neither regret nor repentance, he did not admit
guilt for his morally censurable behavior. Instead, he was bewildered and
ashamed at having been deceived by the very women he seduced: “The
shame he felt then was the shame of being duped, of not having noticed
the change that was going on. And not one woman had made him aware
of it.”39 Christine Lorre-Johnston explains that the narrator alludes to
the major societal shifts that transformed relations between women and
men in the second half of the twentieth century; first, during the sexual
revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when “so many women so suddenly
became available—or it seemed that way to him—and now this new
change”40 when, after the conservative backlash of the 1980s, the femi-
nist demands for gender equality in the 1990s put the stress on the une-
qual power relations that led women to submit to men against their will.
It is precisely that reasoning that gets him in trouble because women
“were saying that what had happened was not what they had in mind
at all. They had collaborated because they were helpless and bewildered,
and they had been injured by the whole thing, rather than delighted.
Even when they had taken the initiative they had done so only because
the cards were stacked against them.”41 Grant’s shame is encapsulated
inTomkins’s explanation of guilt: “one may have inadvertently hurt or
shamed a love object, and the self becomes ashamed of the self.”42 Yet
Grant manages to block any feeling of guilt by using a discourse of care,
selflessness, and pride through which he reclaims acknowledgment for all
“the acts of kindness and generosity and even sacrifice”43 that having an
affair involves. Thus, envisioning himself as a sort of Christ-like figure he
reasons that “Many times he had catered to a woman’s pride, to her fra-
gility, by offering more affection—or a rougher passion—than anything
he felt. All so that he could now find himself accused of wounding and
exploiting and destroying self-esteem.”44 In tune with the self-sacrificing
Christ-like figure that Grant creates of himself, he manages to transform
his shame for having deceived Fiona into pride for protecting her with
his secrecy and for not having abandoned her: “He had never thought
of such a thing. He had never stopped making love to Fiona despite
disturbing demands elsewhere. He had not stayed away from her for a
single night.”45 By means of his unconvincing self-justifications, Lorre-
Johnston argues that Munro exposes and makes fun of the male ego
defending itself.46
Nevertheless, Grant’s subconscious shame emerges even when
he feels he is in his prime and in full enjoyment of his sexual prowess.
Feeling overwhelmed by “a gigantic increase in well-being,”47 he seeks
human and divine sanction by unwittingly comparing himself to Christ
as a “blasphemous quotation” from Luke 2:52 runs around in his head:
“And so he increased in wisdom and stature— / And in favor with God
and man. That embarrassed him at the time and gave him a superstitious
chill.”48 In Grant’s symbolic discourse, shame is linked to social expo-
sure—“so long as nobody knew, it seemed not unnatural.”49
The Intrusion of the Semiotic into the Symbolic:

“Coming Over the Mountain,” or Reaching Out
to the Stranger Within
Grant’s main buffer against shame had consisted of hiding his affairs
from Fiona, his main object of interest and affection, thus turning shame
into pride. However, Fiona’s newly emerged narrative destabilizes the
narrative that Grant has built about her and about himself for years. The
very thought that Fiona may have known about his womanizing all along
(re)activates his guilt and shame, and pushes him to seek redemption.
In stark contrast to his self-portrayal as a distraught, loving hus-
band who is deeply concerned for his wife’s well-being, his abject inner
stranger emerges through the oneiric and figurative modes of expression
that constitute the semiotic. Thus, during the month he is kept from
visiting or speaking to Fiona once she registers in the nursing home,
Grant’s ethical narrative of care regarding both his lovers and his wife is
disrupted by a dream. In the dream, Grant receives a suicide letter from
a former lover, and he seeks out Fiona to “prepare” her for the scandal
ahead. The dream appears rather as a nightmare when Grant’s past lovers
gather around him wearing black robes and throwing bitter, judgemental
stares at him, while Fiona stands amidst them as a silent witness. Even
in his dream, however, Grant combats shame by introducing Fiona as a
detached, “untroubled”50 and even supportive spectator who dismisses
the girls’ reproaches as inconsequential: “‘Oh, phooey,’ Fiona said, ‘Girls
that age are always going around talking about how they’d kill them-
selves’.” Similarly, in reality, Grant deceives himself when, after telling
Fiona that he is being harassed by a student, he interprets Fiona’s reac-
tion at the time as reassuring: “There had been a letter, and the word
‘RAT’ had appeared in black paint on his office door, and Fiona, on
being told that a girl had suffered from a bad crush on him, had said
pretty much what she said in the dream.”51
That intrusion of the semiotic into the symbolic is further empha-
sized when Grant goes to visit Fiona at Meadowlake for the first time.
Fearing that she may have forgotten him and see him as a stranger, Grant
is aware of the process of estrangement from her, but also of the self-
estrangement that has begun. Thus, two feelings contend within him.
On the one hand, he anticipates that meeting Fiona might be like
meeting “with a new woman”52 because of Fiona’s progressive loss of
memory. Consequently, he feels an elation like that he has experienced
on numerous occasions at the prospect of conquering women who were

supposedly out of reach. On the other hand, however, Grant is stirred by
the feelings of shame and guilt for having abandoned Fiona to institu-
tionalized care—which he unconsciously experiences as the latest of his
infidelities. At this point, the semiotic intrudes into the symbolic in the
shape of a bouquet of narcissus flowers that Grant uncharacteristically
buys for Fiona. That unprecedented act disrupts Grant’s rationally con-
structed, self-exonerating discourse. Grant’s narcissus bouquet appears
as a baffling gesture metonymically underlining his self-centeredness via
the allusion to the myth of Narcissus. Moreover, that reference to the
Greek myth foreshadows Grant’s transformation into the mythical hero,
punished to suffer the pain caused by unrequited love for his repeated
spurning of the love of Others. As Grant contemplates the inner stranger
that he is reluctant to recognize as himself, he enters the nursing home
“feeling like a hopeless lover or a guilty husband in a cartoon.”53 Grant’s
hidden shame and guilt are articulated by way of the textual intrusion of
dreams and symbols, hence transforming from unacknowledged affect to
conscious feeling and, subsequently, to psychosocially constructed emo-
tion when the nurse named Kristy points out that he “must’ve spent a
fortune” on the narcissus bouquet and takes it from him, “Sighing, as if
he was a backward child on his first day at school.”54
Although Fiona’s behavior during her married life appears misrepre-
sented time and again through Grant’s subjectivity, the third person nar-
rative creates an alternative space for the reader to perceive her personality
as more troubled and complex than Grant is willing to acknowledge. Far
from the superior and detached, content woman that Grant portrays,
Fiona is revealed in the cracks of his image of her as both a vulnerable
and a resilient woman who struggles by means of ironic humor and flip-
pancy against the stigma of embodied shame and its attached feelings of
humiliation and guilt. Through Grant’s account of their life together we
can comprehend several major crises in Fiona’s existence. The main one at
this juncture of the narrative has to do with her progressive loss of mem-
ory, which, paradoxically, brings latent past crises to the forefront, and
with them, the revaluation of ontological knowledge and its limits, as well
as the reactivation of Grant’s ethics of care.
When Grant casually mentions in passing that Fiona could not have
children, the reader may suspect that this is not a minor detail in the
couple’s lives. Yet Grant does not seem to place much importance on
that fact, and has even forgotten the cause of her sterility—“Something
about her tubes being blocked, or twisted—Grant couldn’t remember
now.”55 However, at the time, Fiona responded by adopting a couple
of wolfhounds and devoting herself to them and to Grant, whom she
“groomed and tended and favored.”56 Rather than shamed by a ‘corpo-
real reality’ that denies her maternity, Fiona lavishes love on Grant and
the dogs and finds an alternative way of fulfilling the role of caregiver
traditionally assigned to women through becoming a hospital coordina-
tor of volunteer services. Thus, Fiona diverts her attention from Grant
and his self-inflicted problems because her job keeps her in touch with
“that everyday world, as she said, where people actually had troubles
that were not related to drugs or sex or intellectual squabbles.”57 Fiona’s
irony, detachment, and elegance resist the type of embodied shame that
results from failing the social expectations about women as reproductive
subjects. Those resources serve as buffers or fences she puts up to protect
her dignity—“she’d always counted on fences always taking you some-
where,”58 she explained to Grant once when, after getting lost, she had
managed to come back home following their property fence line.
Second, if Fiona was aware of Grant’s infidelities at the time that they
were taking place, she shunned humiliation and shame by remaining
detached from the general scene, at “some high-and-dry spot . . . Holding
out there against the tide . . . as if the dramas that were being played out
in other corners, in bedrooms and on the dark verandah, were nothing
but childish comedy. As if chastity was chic, and reticence a blessing.”59
Yet, rather than risk Grant’s contempt, Fiona has him look at her with
interest and enjoyment, holding his attention by means of what Grant
perceives as playful, eccentric behavior, to the extent that it is difficult for
him at the beginning of her disease to understand whether she is joking or
has a serious problem:
“She’s always been a bit like this,” Grant said to the doctor . . . He tried
without success to explain something more—to explain how Fiona’s sur-
prise and apologies about all this seemed somehow like routine courtesy,
not quite concealing a private amusement. As if she’d stumbled on some
adventure that she had not been expecting. Or was playing a game that she
hoped he would catch on to. They had always had their games—nonsense
dialects, characters they invented. Some of Fiona’s made-up voices, chirp-
ing or wheedling (he couldn’t tell the doctor this), had mimicked uncan-
nily the voices of women of his that she had never met or known about.60
Although the text allows for the reader to suspect that Fiona has known
about Grant’s infidelities all along, she is adept at preventing her humil-
iation and shame from showing.61 A clear instance appears when Grant
recalls the time when she disappeared from the supermarket where they
had gone to do their shopping together before she became a resident at
Meadowlake. A policeman finds her disoriented blocks away, and although
she can remember her name, she cleverly avoids answering his question
about who the current Canadian prime minister is by playfully reprimand-
ing him: “If you don’t know that, young man, you really shouldn’t be
in such a responsible job.”62 Similarly, using humor to keep her own
uncanny inner stranger at bay, she flippantly dismisses her condition as
something irrelevant. Shunning the vulnerability resulting from the reali-
zation that she is losing her memory, she tells Grant, “‘I don’t think it’s
anything to worry about,’ she said. ‘I expect I’m just losing my mind’.”63
Nevertheless, Fiona develops a strong sense of precariousness and
dependency on Grant’s love that makes her persistently afraid that
Grant may abandon her at any moment. Thus, far from the self-confi-
dent, untroubled woman that Grant imagines, Fiona is also revealed as
vulnerable and deeply affected by the shame of suspecting that she does
not meet his expectations, which is emphasized at the end of the story
when she momentarily recovers her memory. In that last scene, she rec-
ognizes Grant after an extended period, and her embodied shame is the
first thing to come to the surface. First, she refers to the clothes she is
wearing as inadequate and improper according to her own standards
of elegance, in contradiction to the sober, sophisticated self-image/
identity that she had cultivated all her life—“I never wear yellow,”64 she
says when she becomes aware of the clothes she is wearing. She then
reacts bitterly when she feels exposed for not being able to remember
Aubrey, a fact that brings forth her embodied shame linked to her mem-
ory disability:
“Fiona, I’ve brought a surprise for you. Do you remember Aubrey?”
She stared at him for a moment, as if waves of wind had come beating
into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything to rags.
“Names elude me,” she said harshly.
Then the look passed away as she retrieved, with an effort, some
bantering grace.65
Finally, after acknowledging Grant’s presence, Fiona struggles to artic-

ulate her feelings, signaling the passage from unconscious affect to
conscious entangled emotions. Thus, her fear of being abandoned,
her suppressed embodied shame, her gratitude and love for Grant, all
emerge in the last lines of the story: “‘You could have just driven away,’
she said. ‘Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook
me. Forsooken me. Forsaken’.”66 Fiona’s struggle to find the correct
words to express the feelings that prevail despite her memory impair-
ment reveals the depth of her psychological wounds and suppressed
shame. Her words also unveil her confrontation with and articulation
of her inner, vulnerable Other. Although Grant’s self-sacrificing ges-
ture to restore Aubrey to Fiona so that she can recover her health can
be seen as his redeeming move to engage with her total difference or
unfathomable Otherness, his heroic renunciation to her is marred by his
incipient affair with Marian. As much as he justifies it as the price to pay
to convince Marian to let Aubrey visit Fiona, it means a return to his
philandering and, therefore, to deceiving Fiona. Yet his reply to Fiona’s
remarks—“Not a chance”67—reiterates his unfailing love for her at the
end of the story.
Thus, the nursery rhyme after which the story is titled reverber-
ates at this closing point with unstated meaning. Paraphrasing the folk
song, the bear came over the mountain in an epistemological quest, to
see what he could see, and all he saw was “the other side of the moun-
tain.” In Grant’s case, his cognitive journey into the roots of unheeded
shame has meant an ontological revelation about his inner stranger and a
re-cognition of Fiona as an intimate Other, which reactivates his empa-
thy and ethical responsibility toward her. Therefore, “the other side of
the mountain” stands as a metaphor of the inner Other and of re-cog-
nition of the Other. Nevertheless, Grant’s deeply grounded mechanisms
of self-defense against shame lead him to proudly turn himself into a
Christ-like figure, only to fall back into infidelity while justifying it as
self-sacrificial love. After his narrative authority has been challenged, the
reader is led to question Grant’s apparent ethical engagement. Hence,
although at the end of the story he is transformed through new knowl-
edge, his behavioral patterns do not change. As is usually the case in
Munro’s works, there is no definitive or untroubled resolution. Through
fragmented memories and the disruption of the semiotic in the sym-
bolic, the text works by indirection and speculation to let shame emerge
to the level of consciousness, but falls short of effecting catharsis for the
characters or the reader, who is left to face the messiness “of conflicting
choices that repeatedly call for judgement.”68 Meanwhile, we are given
the context to confront alterity and bridge the space between the self and
the Other, and between the self and the uncanny stranger within the self.
Notes
1. Herb Wyile, “Making a Mess of Things: Postcolonialism, Canadian
Literature, and the Ethical Turn,” University of Toronto Quarterly 76, no.
3 (2007): 821.
2. In Canada, recent examples of this concern are the following critical collec-
tions: Marlene Goldman and Kristina Kyser’s special issue of the University
of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2007), The Ethical Turn in Canadian
Literature and Criticism; Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli’s,
Retooling the Humanities: The Culture of Research in Canadian Universities
(Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2012); and Diana Brydon and
Martha Dvořák’s, Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue
(Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012).
3. Ibid.
4. Marlene Goldman, “Introduction: Literature, Imagination, Ethics,”
University of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2007): 813.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 814.
7. Ibid., 811.
8. Keith Oatley, “Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds,” Trends in Cognitive
Sciences 20, no. 8 (2016): 618.
9. Michael Eskin, “The Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and Literature?” Poetics
Today 25, no. 4 (2004): 560.
10. Julia Kristeva, “Julia Kristeva Interviewed by Vassiliki Kolocotroni,”
Textual Practice 5, no. 2 (1991): 158.
11. Noelle McAffee, Julia Kristeva (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16.
12. Goldman, “Introduction,” 819.
13. Winfried Siemerling, “Ethics as Re/Cognition in the Novels of Marie-
Célie Agnant: Oral Knowledge, Cognitive Change, and Social Justice,”
University of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2007): 839.
15. Ibid., 813.
16. This short story was first published in The New Yorker (December 27,
1999 and January 3, 2000) before being anthologized in Munro’s col-
lection of stories Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), 274–322. In 2006 Sarah
Polley adapted it for the screen in her acclaimed film Away from Her.
17. Shame is rendered as an embodied affect in stories such as “Royal

Beatings,” in Who Do You Think You Are? (Toronto: Penguin, 1978),
1–27, where Mary Joe feels a physical shame that seems to spread from
her stomach; “Fathers,” where shame also appears in connection to
“being beaten, and the shame of cringing from the beating. Perpetual
shame. Exposure,” in The View from Castle Rock (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 2006), 195; in “Heirs to the Living Body” Del Jordan
discovers a “physical” shame that goes “far beyond sexual shame” and
nakedness in Lives of Girls and Women (Toronto: Penguin, 1971),
57, concluding that “to be made of flesh was humiliation” (ibid., 58);
in “The Progress of Love” Euphemia, the narrator, feels a “sickening,”
self-destructive shame when faced with her mother’s grief The Progress
of Love: Stories (Markham, ON: Penguin Books, 1987), 17; and in
“To Reach Japan” Greta’s shame is “scorching” Dear Life (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 2012), 14. Other stories where shame is explic-
itly mentioned are “Nettles,” where the narrator breaks out of marriage
“in the hope of making a life that could be lived without hypocrisy or
deprivation or shame” Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), 168; in “The Peace of
Utrecht” Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories (Harmondsworth
and Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1968), 190–210, it is the whole town
that loses its grip on the narrator, Helen, because after her mother’s
death, their words no longer induce her to feel shame.
18. To my knowledge, the story has not yet been approached from this angle.
In addition to the focus on the film adaptation of the story, “The Bear
Came Over the Mountain” has drawn critical attention mostly from
the perspective of age, care, and disability studies—Amelia DeFalco,
“Uncanny Witnessing: Dementia, Narrative and Identity in Fiction
by Munro and Franzen;” Patricia Life, “Shaking off the Shackles: LTC
Havens in ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ and The Other Side.” In
Alive and Kicking at All Ages: Cultural Constructions of Health and Life
Course Identity, ed. Ulla Kriebernegg, Roberta Maierhofer and Barbara
Ratzenböck (Wetzlar: Transcript Verlag, 2014), 221–242, 243–258,
respectively; Sara Jamieson, “The Fiction of Agelessness: Work, Leisure,
and Aging in Alice Munro’s ‘Pictures of the Ice’,” Studies in Canadian
Literature/Etudes en litèrature canadienne 29, no. 1 (2004), www.
journals.hil.unb.ca. December 16, 2014; Sara Jamieson, “Reading the
Spaces of Age in Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain’,”
Mosaic 47, no. 3 (2014): 1–17; Begoña Simal, “Memory Matters: Alice
Munro’s Narrative Handling of Alzheimer’s in ‘The Bear Came Over the
Mountain’ and ‘In Sight of the Lake’,” Miscelanea: A Journal of English
and American Studies 50 (2014): 61–78; Linda Simon, “Battling the
‘Invincible Predator’: Alzheimer’s Disease as Metaphor,” The Journal

of American Culture 37, no. 1 (2014): 5–15; Núria Casado-Gual,
“Unexpected Turns in Lifelong Sentimental Journeys: Redefining
Love, Memory and Old Age through Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came
Over the Mountain’ and Its Film Adaptation, Away from Her,” Ageing
& Society 35, no. 2 (2013): 389–404; Héliane Ventura “The Skald
and the Goddess: Reading ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ by
Alice Munro,” Journal of the Short Story in English 55 (Autumn 2010),
http://jsse.revues.org/1121, looks at the use of poetic language in the
story as a deterrent to senile dementia.
19. Robert McGill, “No Nation but Adaptation: ‘The Bear Came Over
the Mountain,’ Away from Her, and What It Means to Be Faithful,”
Predators and Gardens Special Issue of Canadian Literature 197 (Summer
2008): 100.
20. Amelia DeFalco, Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and
Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 3.
21. Patricia Life defends this thesis in her PhD Dissertation “Long-Term
Caring: Canadian Literary Narratives of Personal Agency and Identity in
Late Life,” (University of Ottawa, 2014), 131.
22. Coral Ann Howells, “Intimate Dislocations: Alice Munro, Hateship,
Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” in Alice Munro, ed. Harold
Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 188.
23. Robert Masters, “Compassionate Wrath: Transpersonal Approaches to
Anger,” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 32, no. 1 (2000): 32.
24. D. L. Nathanson, ed., Knowing Feeling: Affect, Script and Psychotherapy
(New York: Norton, 1996), 4.
25. Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition
(New York: Springer, 2008), 351.
26. Gershen Kaufman, Shame: The Power of Caring (Rochester, VT:
Schenkman Books, 1992), 191.
27. Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” in Hateship,
Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 2001), 275.
28. Ibid., 277.
29. Ibid., 318.
30. Ibid., 279.
31. Ibid., 318.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 289.
36. Ibid., 291.
37. Ibid., 292.
38. Ibid., 295.
39. Ibid., 286.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Tomkins, Affect, 361.
43. Munro, “Bear,” 287.
44. Ibid., 286.
45. Ibid.
46. Christine Lorre-Johnston, “Disease and Care in Alice Munro’s ‘The
Bear Came Over the Mountain’,” in Lire le corps Biomedical/Reading
the Biomedical Body from the Perspective of Canadian Literature, ed.
Daniel Laforest, Guy Clermont, and Bertrand Rouby (Limoges: Presses
Universitaires de Limoges, 2016), 101.
47. Munro, “Bear,” 302.
48. Ibid., 303.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 285.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 287.
53. Ibid., 288.
54. Ibid., 289.
55. Ibid., 279.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 287.
58. Ibid., 277.
59. Ibid., 285.
60. Ibid., 278.
61. Tomkins, Affects, 361.
62. Munro, “Bear,” 279.
63. Ibid., 278.
64. Ibid., 323.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Bartky, Sandra. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Bouson, J. Brooks. Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary

Women’s Writings. Albany: State University of New York, 2009.
Brydon, Diana, and Marta Dvořák, eds. Crosstalk: Canadian and Global
Imaginaries in Dialogue. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012.
Casado-Gual, Núria. “Unexpected Turns in Lifelong Sentimental Journeys:
Redefining Love, Memory and Old Age Through Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear
Came Over the Mountain’ and Its Film Adaptation, Away from Her.” Ageing
& Society 35, no. 2 (2013): 389–404.
Coleman, Daniel, and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. Retooling the Humanities: The
Culture of Research in Canadian Universities. Edmonton: University of
Alberta Press, 2012.
DeFalco, Amelia. “Uncanny Witnessing: Dementia, Narrative, and Identity in
Fiction by Munro and Franzen.” In Alive and Kicking at All Ages: Health,
Life Expectancy, and Life Course Identity, edited by Ulla Kriebernegg,
Roberta Maierhofer, and Barbara Ratzenböck, 221–242. Bielefeld, Germany:
Transcript Verlag, 2013.
———. Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.
Eskin, Michael. “The Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and Literature?” Poetics Today 25,
no. 4 (2004): 557–572.
Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963.
Goldman, Marlene. “Introduction: Literature, Imagination, Ethics.” University
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and Criticism, edited by Marlene Goldman and Kristina Kyser, 76, no. 3
(2007): 809–820.
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Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.” In Alice Munro, edited by Harold Bloom,
167–192. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009.
Jamieson, Sara. “The Fiction of Agelessness: Work, Leisure, and Aging in Alice
Munro’s ‘Pictures of the Ice’.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en
Littérature Canadienne 29, no. 1 (2004): 106–126.
———. “Reading the Spaces of Age in Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came Over the
Mountain’.” Mosaic 47, no. 3 (2014): 1–17.
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VT: Schenkman Books, 1992.
Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leo Roudiez. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991a.
———. “Julia Kristeva Interviewed by Vassiliki Kolocotroni.” Textual Practice 5,
no. 2 (1991b): 157–170.
Life, Patricia. “Long-Term Caring: Canadian Literary Narratives of Personal
Agency and Identity in Late Life.” PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2014.
Lorre-Johnston, Christine. “Disease and Care in Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came
Over the Mountain’.” In Lire le corps biomedical/Reading the Biomedical Body
from the Perspective of Canadian Literature, edited by Daniel Laforest, Guy
Clermont, and Bertrand Rouby, 97–110. Limoges: Presses Universitaires de
Limoges, 2016.
Masters, Robert. “Compassionate Wrath: Transpersonal Approaches to Anger.”
The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 32, no. 1 (2000): 31–51.
McAffee, Noelle. Julia Kristeva. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003.
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Mountain,’ Away from Her, and What It Means to Be Faithful.” Predators
and Gardens Special Issue of Canadian Literature 197 (Summer 2008):
98–113.
Munro, Alice. Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Penguin, 1978.
———. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” In Hateship, Friendship,
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and the Ethical Turn.” University of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (Summer
2007): 821–837.
CHAPTER 5
Alice Munro’s Dramatic Fictions:

Challenging (Dis)Ability by Playing
with Oedipus the King and Embracing the
Queer Art of Failure
Marlene Goldman
Sons and daughters of Thebes, behold: this was Oedipus,

Greatest of men; he held the key to the deepest mysteries;
Was envied by all his fellow-men for his great prosperity;
Behold, what a full tide of misfortune swept over his head.
Then learn that mortal man must always look to his ending,
And none can be called happy until that day when he carries
His happiness down to the grave in peace. (Sophocles, Oedipus the King)
In “An Ounce of Cure,” in Munro’s first collection of short stories,

Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), the narrator recounts her expe-
rience as a shy, naive teenager whose unrequited love for a boy drives
her to drink. Having never previously touched alcohol, while babysit-
ting the neighbor’s children, she downs a full glass of whisky. When
the room begins to spin, she calls her friend for help. The latter arrives
with four of her friends in tow. When the children’s parents return home
M. Goldman (*) 
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_5
80 M. GOLDMAN
unexpectedly early, they find the narrator half naked, hosting what seems
to be a drunken party. As the narrator confesses, this shameful episode
received “extraordinary publicity”:
Within a few days it was all over town and the school that I had tried
to commit suicide over Martin Collingwood. But it was already all over
school and the town that the Berrymans had come home on Saturday
night to find me drunk, staggering, wearing nothing but my slip in a room
with three boys…I had positively the most sinful reputation in the whole
High School.1
Although she “suffered a great deal from all this exposure,” the narrator
admits that the unfolding of the events that Saturday night was mesmer-
izing: “I felt that I had had a glimpse of the shameless, marvelous, shat-
tering absurdity with which the plots of life, though not of fiction, are
improvised. I could not take my eyes off it.”2
With its emphasis on shame/shamelessness, exposure, and the
“improvised” plots of life, the episode cited above highlights Munro’s
enduring fascination with the performative nature of shame. In her sub-
sequent collection Who Do You Think You Are? (1974), shame remains
central, appearing again in the private recesses of the home and in the
realm of childhood. However, it also surfaces there in the guise of phys-
ical and emotional beatings. Reflecting on their experience of shame,
Munro’s mature narrators literally parade their shame. Even as children,
they frequently envision theatrical contexts in which their shame is made
manifest.3
In using the term “shame,” I am drawing primarily on shame theorist
Gershem Kaufman’s (1980) definition. As Kaufman observes,
To feel shame is to feel seen in a painfully diminished sense. The self feels
exposed both to itself and to anyone else present. It is this sudden, unex-
pected feeling of exposure and accompanying self-consciousness that
characterize the essential nature of the affect of shame. Contained in the
experience of shame is the piercing awareness of ourselves as fundamen-
tally deficient in some vital way as a human being. To live with shame is to
experience the very essence or heart of the self as wanting.4
In The Body and Shame, Luna Dolezal further argues that shame is not
only an intersubjective or “social emotion,” but it also “has a necessary
‘inter-corporeality.’”5 She asserts that “shame arises in the interactions
5 ALICE MUNRO’S DRAMATIC FICTIONS: CHALLENGING (DIS)ABILITY … 81
between bodies; it involves an intensification of the body’s surface and its

visibility.”6 Dolezal focuses on “body shame” in particular and explains
that this type of shame is “centred on the body, where the subject
believes their body to be undesirable or unattractive falling short of social
depictions of the ‘normal,’ the ideal or the socially acceptable body.”7
Her account of body shame’s relation to failed social performances
recalls Munro’s portrayal of a teenaged girl found “drunk, staggering,
wearing nothing but a slip in a room with three boys.”8 In other words,
body shame springs from an individual’s perceived inability or unwilling-
ness to mimic the norm. According to Dolezal, body shame is powerful
precisely because “it disrupts our illusion of transcendence—the notion
that we are more than merely animals—and reveals our undeniable and
imperfect corporeality.”9 In addition to recognizing the interpersonal,
corporeal facets of shame, it is also important to appreciate its impact.
As Kaufman explains, “the process by which shame originated…always
involves some kind of severing of the interpersonal bridge,”10 the bond
that connects one individual to another. Shame alienates; we “might
either feel barred from entry forever or forced to renounce the very striv-
ing to belong itself and resignedly accept an alienated existence.”11
In Munro’s fiction, however, shame does not so much irrevocably
sever the “interpersonal bridge,” as re-organize it hierarchically and lend
those relegated to the lower rungs a negative affective charge. To borrow
Kaufman’s metaphor, shame turns “bridges” into perilous social ladders.
As a result of the workings of shame, a host of potentially morally neutral
differences associated with sex, class, race, age, and ability are read in light
of a socially constructed notion of the ideal and, in the process, assigned
a diminished and debased moral valence.12 In reflecting on Munro’s pre-
occupation with staging, exposing, and rehearsing scenes of violence and
shame—a preoccupation evident in the two collections cited earlier and,
indeed, throughout her corpus—Munro’s narratives raise crucial ques-
tions. What roles and agencies are being rehearsed and replayed in her
theatrical portrayals of shame? What roles are afforded to readers who
witness those performances? Are they reduced to mere spectators, “to an
eye,”13 or do Munro’s stories of “royal beatings” offer any alternatives to
that of tacitly sanctioning violence and of passive voyeurism?
In his commentary on Freud’s essay “A Child is Being Beaten”
(1919), psychoanalyst Marcelo Viñar contends that “the object of anal-
ysis lies in bringing the subject to the central position from which…
[she] is deemed to have excluded…[herself]—that is, to a position of
82 M. GOLDMAN
participation in…the violence suffered and inflicted.”14 In what follows,

I likewise explore whether a critical reading of Munro’s scenes of shame
and transgression can support the process of working through rather
than merely acting out the traumatic effects of violence and shame. To
be more precise, as Ildikó de Papp Carrington observes, Munro’s fic-
tion frequently constructs temporal and psychologically split narratives.15
Often, mature third-person narrators reflect on their younger selves—a
detached form of self-watching facilitated by the use of a third person
and by the narrator’s nostalgic reflection on her childhood. Under those
conditions, “working through” is clearly not available to the child, but it
is arguably driving the process of the adult narrator’s recounting of past
events. I would argue further that by transmitting the story in writing,
the task of “working through” is passed on to the reader. One of the
most powerful aspects of Munro’s fiction is its ability, to borrow perfor-
mance theorist Nikki Cesare-Shotzko’s words, “to perform through our
engagement with it.”16 Having been haunted by the violent, shameful
imagery in Who for over 30 years, I can also attest that it “becomes per-
formative through our response to it.”17
In keeping with the inextricable connection between acting out and
working through, in Munro’s fiction, the shamed body—the stigmatized
marker of our “undeniable and imperfect corporeality”18—serves as a
“double-edged force,” containing the potential for both “world shatter-
ing personal and social devastation” and “for individual and social trans-
formation.”19 By circling back to shamed bodies that stagger, tremble,
and limp, Munro’s stories remind us that they serve as profound sources
of insight regarding the ebb and flow of human power and our innate
fallibility. In Munro’s writings, paradoxically, the antidote to violence and
shame can only be found by returning to the original, marvelous scenes
“of shame and outrage.”20
Whereas critics, most notably Magdalene Redekop, have helpfully
interpreted Munro’s fascination with performance and shame as a chal-
lenge to reified notions of femininity,21 my primary contribution to
scholarship on Munro lies in connecting her characters’ preoccupations
with shame and performance to undertheorized considerations of the
links between identity and disability. I contend that Munro’s pairing of
shame and disability is crucial to her stories’ emphasis on shame’s trans-
formative potential. Rather than portray disability as an innate, phys-
ical imperfection, Munro’s narratives repeatedly align disability with
performances that fall short “of social depictions of the ‘normal,’ the
ideal or the socially acceptable body.”22 Furthermore, by demonstrating

that because of our “undeniable and imperfect corporeality” everyone’s
performance is destined to fail because we are mortal, Munro’s stories
emphasize that the power accrued by mimicking the ideal is neither sta-
ble nor enduring. That is precisely the message conveyed at the end of
Sophocles’s play Oedipus the King—cited above in the epigraph—by
the Chorus, which enjoins the audience to “learn that mortal man must
always look to his ending.”
In this chapter, I develop the links between shame, identity, and disa-
bility by drawing on Jack Halberstam’s (2011) writings on “the queer art
of failure” and by reading Munro’s collection Who Do You Think You Are?
in light of the concerns raised in classical Greek theatre about the gulf
between the platonic idea of perfection and its many imperfect copies—
concerns expressed with distinct clarity in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King.
My decision to compare Who with Sophocles’s play about Oedipus is
driven by aesthetic and ethical concerns. For one, as evidenced in Rose’s
fantasy of the “royal beating,” the metaphor of the theatre is integral to
the protagonist’s experience of the imagination and of fantasy.23 Tracing
that comparison allows me to explore as fully as possible the perform-
ative dynamics in Munro’s collection. By fusing the short story with
dramatic intertexts, Who creates what might best be termed imaginative
and temporal folds. For example, Rose’s need “to picture things” in a
theatrical manner results in a dramatic tableau of an earlier moment of
imperial brutality and sacrifice. Due to the narrative’s repeated references
to drama and performance, the more recent genre of the short story
circles back to earlier public, aesthetic, and ethically-inflected genres—
most notably dramas, pageants, and parade—supporting the efforts of
Munro’s stories to expose and critique intergenerational violence and
shame. The ethical dimensions of the collection are inextricably tied to
Munro’s reliance on the discourse of performance. Using Halberstam’s
and Sophocles’s works as a theoretical armature, I identify key instances
in Munro’s stories where shamed and stigmatized individuals challenge
the violent, heteronormative dynamics of shame by engaging in socially
transformative performative utterances or, when words and verbal com-
munication fail, in alternative, gestural forms of communication and
mimesis. Ultimately, I argue that by staging the subversion of the cycle
of Oedipal violence, Munro’s texts offer insight into the revivifying, idio-
syncratic, and embodied origins of creativity that always remain tethered
to shame, failure, imperfection, and death.
84 M. GOLDMAN
Coming to Terms with Oedipal Violence

and the Queer Art of Failure
As Henri-Jacques Stiker asserts in A History of Disability ([1999] 2006),

the myth of Oedipus is one of the major founding myths in antiq-
uity as well as in the West, and “at the very outset of this myth…is
situated the problem of disability: Oedipus, variously lame, with swol-
len or pierced feet, is an exposed infant.”24 In this chapter, I use the
phrase “Oedipal violence”; in doing so, I am gesturing specifically to
Sophocles’s depiction of King Laius and Queen Jocasta’s murderous
treatment of Oedipus as a child. While they are unsuccessful in their
efforts to kill their infant, they nevertheless leave him with a permanent
disability. According to legend, the pair secretly ordered their servant
to pierce their three-day-old son’s ankles with an iron nail and to leave
him to die of exposure on Mount Citheron. Although he is rescued and
remains ignorant of his true parentage, Oedipus harbors shame regard-
ing his disability, as evidenced by his reluctance to speak about it; and,
perhaps owing to his shame, he is also prone to fits of rage. As an adult,
Oedipus’s fiery temper leads to an eruption of murderous violence that
leaves old King Laius and his entire royal retinue dead at the crossroads.
The phrase “Oedipal violence” thus indexes both the parents’ murderous
capacity to disfigure their children and the intergenerational nature of
that violence. According to the fatalistic Oedipal pattern, victims become
victimizers. I argue, however, that Munro’s stories identify performative
strategies that transcend what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick considers “the sti-
fling reproductive logics” of the Oedipal story with its fatalistic, inter-
generational temporality, which dooms successive generations to violence
and shame.25
For the purposes of this chapter and in accordance with Dolezal’s
notion of body shame, it is also worth noting that in Sophocles’s Oedipus
the King, violent and shameful acts—perpetrated by and inflicted on
the individual—are localized to discrete parts of the body. To solve the
existential riddle and answer the question “Who am I?” Oedipus must
learn to read the meaning of his own body’s imperfection to glean cru-
cial information about his true origins. In a key exchange in Sophocles’s
play, readers witness the servant’s insistence on the process and
Oedipus’s reluctance to probe the history of intergenerational violence
associated with his stigmata:
M: The infirmity in your ankles tells the tale.

O: Oh, that old trouble; need we mention it?
M: Your ankles were riveted, and I set you free.
O: It is true; I have carried the stigma from my cradle.
M: To it you owe your present name.26
As that scene indicates, Oedipus, who understands disability abstractly,

wants to negate his own embodied disability—to deny it language: “need
we mention it?” Translating the embodied experience, however pain-
ful and risky, is essential because, as the servant insists, the individual’s
story or “tale” always assumes a particular embodied form. In Oedipus’s
case, the scars on his feet gave him the name Swollen Foot. Only when
he draws the connection between the story of how Jocasta and Laius
tried to murder him and the scars on his feet does he truly know him-
self. Overwhelmed by his personal guilt, Oedipus registers his separation
from humanity and from the gods themselves, calling himself a godless
child of shame.27 In keeping with Sophocles’s localized, embodied notion
of shame, after discovering that he has committed patricide, bedded his
own mother, and fathered his brothers and sisters, Oedipus proceeds to
blind himself to transform his body into a prison. He states, “I would
not rest/Till I had prisoned up this body of shame/In total blankness.”28
When the play opens, the entire city of Thebes is suffering from a plague
that, according to the oracle, springs from the fact that the king’s mur-
derer went unpunished. The plague ceases when Oedipus learns that he,
himself, is the criminal. In this way, Sophocles’s play charts the process
whereby the disfigurement and shameful “affliction” of a community are
gradually embodied in a single individual and then expelled. As we will
see, while never directly referencing Sophocles’s play, Munro’s “queer”
re-telling of the Oedipal drama29 strives to undo the brutal, embodied
effects of shaming and scapegoating of individuals, many of who are men-
tally and physically different from the so-called norm.30
In Who Do You Think You Are? Rose’s precocious imagination—her
“need to picture things and to pursue absurdities”—and her irrepress-
ible love of language prompt her to reject her role as dutiful daughter.
As a result, she is viewed as deviant and becomes the target of shame-
ful beatings. Her imagination and fascination with words are expressed
in her opening question: “How is a beating royal?”31 and in her ensu-
ing fantasy—an elaboration on her confession that her father “was king
of the royal beatings.” Jennifer Murray maintains that conforming to the
86 M. GOLDMAN
Oedipal pattern of intergenerational violence, “the entire scene of the

beating is an exercise in the violent re-establishment of the family hierar-
chy.”32 Who repeatedly alludes to the ongoing traumatic effects of violence
and, more precisely, to Sophocles’s Oedipal drama in its portrayal of a host
of characters who are the victims of parental violence and who betray the
stigma of violence and shame in their smashed and limping bodies.33
Munro’s existential title suggests that Who also directly engages with
the famous dictum attributed “to Socrates and to the oracle at Delphi:
Know thyself—Gnôthi seauton.”34 Owing to its existential preoccupation
with how one person can play many roles, Who, like Sophocles’s play,
wrestles with the central dilemma articulated in Greek philosophy—the
multi-leveled interaction between the one (the ideal) and the many, and
the fact that the one and the many cannot be identical.”35 The classi-
cal tension between the one and the many is perhaps most famously
expressed by the infamous riddle posed by the Sphinx: What walks on
four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in
the evening? The answer offered by Oedipus is “man” (anthropos, human
being). Although it is never spelled out in Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex,
the Sphinx’s riddle informs the language and imagery of the narrative, if
you know where to look.36
In his essay “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through
the Feet,” anthropologist Tim Ingold provides a valuable contempo-
rary perspective on the classical preoccupation with the leg narrative. As
he explains, in European society, the image of the naked leg and, more
specifically, the bare foot planted on the earth contrasts sharply with the
figure of the booted, seated man.37 According to Ingold, the repeated
association between the bare foot and primitive man in European narra-
tives highlights the West’s desire to rise above the ground and, by exten-
sion, the limitations of nature.38
Recalling both Ingold’s insights and Sophocles’s play, the images of
legs in Munro’s stories index both the traumatic impact of violence and
the fact that wittingly or unwittingly individuals often play many distinct
roles throughout their lives—each role associated with varying degrees
of power. To fully appreciate Munro’s use of leg imagery, it is helpful to
recall that in classical Greek literature, both Sophocles’s Oedipus the King
and Aristophanes’s tale of the origins of human beings pondered the rid-
dle of how one man can play many roles. Equally critical, both authors
relied on the transformation of the number of legs to raise the question,
“What is man?”39
In Aristophanes’s legend, humans’ fundamental deficiency springs

from the severing of interpersonal and divine relations. Furthermore,
the crucial marker of this shameful, traumatic event is associated with
legs. According to Aristophanes’s legend, man originated as a spherical,
four-legged creature. His punishment for challenging the gods entailed
being severed into two, two-legged creatures. In Oedipus the King, the
riddle of the one and the many appears twice, once in the guise of the
question posed by the Sphinx—what walks on four legs in the morn-
ing, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night?—and the second
time when Oedipus, still ignorant of his crimes of patricide and incest,
learns from his servant that it was not one but many men who murdered
the former king, Laius, at Phocis, the place where three roads meet.
Although Oedipus is able to solve the riddle of the Sphinx—offering evi-
dence of a philosophical, abstract understanding of the human life cycle
and the vagaries of corporeal power and perfection—he fails to conceive
of how, on an embodied and practical level, he himself is many men: “the
son and the husband of Jocasta as well as the brother and father to his
four children.”40 In keeping with the classical use of the leg narrative,
Munro’s texts rely on leg imagery to subvert static representations of
the “normal” by challenging reductive and fixed portrayals of ability and
disability. Rather than uphold the platonic ideal, Munro’s stories relay
images of imperfection and disability to highlight that perfection inheres
in imperfection, ability within disability, and that, in Dolezal’s words, we
are all “merely animals,” bound to the same mortal end.
In accordance with the social and ethical function of classical Greek
theatre,41 Munro’s stories attain a moral valence by exposing and restag-
ing moments of shameful violence that are typically mobilized to uphold
“the illusion of transcendence.”42 In that context—in the space of play—
however, shame’s disciplinary mechanisms are suspended and rendered
subject to scrutiny. Within the heterotopic realm, Munro’s narratives
rely on a range of gestures associated with “the leg narrative” to recon-
ceive of disability and embrace what Halberstam terms the queer art of
failure.43
Halberstam is not referring solely to non-heteronormative subject
positions in using the term “queer.” Instead, she aligns “queer” more
broadly with generative and productive forms of failure, including the
failures associated with imperfection, illness, and disability. As Halberstam
explains,
88 M. GOLDMAN
To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather

than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of
failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the
silly, and the hopelessly goofy. Rather than resisting endings and limits, let
us instead revel in and cleave to all our own inevitable fantastic failures.44
Munro’s stories likewise champion “the queer art of failure” by expos-

ing the deceptive nature of the social hierarchy that defines the ideal and
its inferior imitations45—a hierarchy which is ultimately leveled by the
inescapable facts of illness, disability, and death. By deconstructing those
social hierarchies, Who affords readers the opportunity to reevaluate the
lowly status that society accords to individuals with anomalous minds
and bodies and, equally critical, to recognize the socially constructed
facets of disability and deconstruct the hierarchical structure of shame.
In Munro’s fiction, subverting the dynamics of shame primarily entails
challenging the violent and repressive patriarchal, heterosexual modes
of reproduction that support the nuclear family and the sex-gender sys-
tem. As Jennifer Murray and Lee Garner observe, theatrical discourse is
integral to this challenge: “In the textual moments when the vocabulary
of the theatrical performances comes to dominate…the social script is
under strain, it is being pushed beyond its accepted variations and the
characters transgress their attributed roles.”46 During her life, Rose pain-
fully learns that individuals repeatedly fail to play their socially sanctioned
roles—parents abuse and disfigure their children’s minds and bodies—
and families are destroyed by intergenerational eruptions of violence.
Because of the deterioration of her own marriage and the violence she
experiences both as a child and as an adult, the idea of and family mar-
riage is nothing more than a “fraud” for Rose.47
Considerations of ideal and imperfect social performances pervade Who,
which reflexively traces the protagonist Rose’s recognition and accept-
ance of her vocation as an actor. However, as Rose confesses, her career
is shadowed by an inescapable sense of shame and failure. She suffers
from the anxiety that “she might have been paying attention to the wrong
things, reporting antics, when there was always something further, a tone,
a depth, a light, that she couldn’t get and wouldn’t get.”48 Rose later
admits that her pervasive sense of failure exceeds her professional life and
states that “it wasn’t just about acting that she suspected this. Everything
she had done could sometimes be seen as a mistake.”49 Rather than
shore up illusions of mastery, owing to its parade of failed performers and
individuals with seemingly unnatural minds and bodies, Who conveys a

keen awareness of humanity’s shared vulnerability to error, disability, and
death.50
Deconstructing Disability and Shame Through

Embodied Communication
In Munro’s “queer” revision of Sophocles’s drama—as in a fun-house
mirror—elements of the Oedipal story appear in a distorted manner;
equally important, seemingly minor features of the original are afforded
greater prominence. For example, whereas in the original, Jocasta, the
Sphinx, and Oedipus’s stepmother remain shadowy secondary characters,
Who? dwells on the predicament of women who are deemed imperfect
copies in the sex-gender system. In the social worlds depicted in the col-
lection—which traces the experience of a young girl, Rose, growing up
in a Depression-era small town in Ontario—women, particularly lower-
class women and women with disabilities, are the super-conductors of
shame. Male bodies seemingly possess greater insulative properties. The
ten linked stories trace Rose’s shame-filled childhood and adolescence
growing up on literally the wrong side of the tracks in West Hanratty.
Although she attends university briefly, Rose leaves school to marry
a wealthy young man. Undermined from the start by class differences,
their marriage quickly falters. Although Rose discovers her vocation as an
actor after her divorce and supports herself by performing and teaching
in colleges, her life is punctuated by a series of losses, which, in keeping
with Kaufman’s account of shame, always involve “some kind of severing
of the interpersonal bridge.”51 Her mother and father die when she is a
child, her marriage ends in divorce, she gives up custody of her daughter,
and she can never seem to maintain a lasting connection with the many
lovers who drift in and out of her life. Critics such as Jennifer Murry,
Lee Garner, and Christine Maksimowicz contend that Rose’s enduring
sense of shame and her failure to connect, spring from her experience as
a child. In keeping with Oedipus the King, Munro’s stories afford insight
into intergenerational, male violence and women’s complicity in support-
ing the cycle of intergenerational violence, trauma, and shame.
Although Rose’s father is dubbed the “king of the royal beatings,”
it is in fact Rose’s stepmother Flo who instigates the violence,52 which,
as in Sophocles’s drama, spans generations. In “Royal Beatings,” readers
90 M. GOLDMAN
are told that as a child, Flo was also the victim of domestic abuse. After
her mother died when she was 12 years old, Flo was given away by her
father and raised by the bishop’s sister. Like Rose, Flo was a precociously
talented mimic as a child. At one point, Flo unwittingly blundered by
offering a public transgressive performance: she gave a perfectly ren-
dered imitation of her mistress’s private, mocking dismissal of her hus-
band. When the bishop’s sister got Flo alone, “she hit her such a clout
that Flo was knocked across the room into a cupboard.”53 Although her
scalp was cut, “the bishop’s sister didn’t get the doctor, she didn’t want
talk.”54 Although the wound “healed in time without stiches…Flo had
the scar still.”55 After the beating, however, Flo never returned to school.
In addition to the physical trace, Flo bears the psychological scars from
the beating; her meager education is an enduring source of shame.
In “Royal Beatings,” Flo’s ignorance is painfully exposed and she suf-
fers grievously from shame. Unlike Rose and her father who received an
education, Flo has never heard of the planet Venus. In her husband’s
eyes, she is on par with the ignorant, old men who mistake the planet for
a machine. The men believe that “what looked like a star in the western
sky…was in reality an airship…lit by ten thousand electric light bulbs.”56
When she learns the truth, Flo pretends to be in the know, but “Rose
knew and her father knew, that Flo had never heard of the planet Venus
either.”57 Instead of remaining at the mercy of the father’s scorn, Flo
offers an embodied performance that attests to her strength and ability
in accordance with Sophocles’s emphasis on the body as both a potential
site of traumatic shame and a source of wisdom. Thanks to Flo’s embod-
ied gesture, Who affords insight into an embodied method of working
through shame.
Following the Venus discussion, Flo performs a “trick” that involves
lying flat with her head and feet on two different chairs. Recalling
Kaufman’s image of the interpersonal bridge which is severed by shame,
Flo refashions the bridge with her body. Echoing the classical “leg
narrative”—specifically, the riddle of the Sphynx with its allusion to the
powerful two-legged, adult human—we are told that Flo does “not rely
on her arms at all but just her strong legs and feet.”58 In the space of
Flo’s embodied “trick” or play, the mechanism of shame is suspended;
for a moment, reason and fantasy happily coexist. We are told that
there “was a feeling of permission, relaxation, even a current of happi-
ness, in the room.”59 If, as Dolezal argues, shame arises in the interac-
tions between bodies and involves an intensification of the body’s surface
and its visibility, then, as Flo’s embodied gesture suggests, the body has
the potential to challenge the stigma associated with shame. By self-
consciously putting her powerful body rather than a vulnerable body on
display on the chairs and by relying on her feet—by putting her heels
over her head, in Ingold’s words—to create an interpersonal bridge, Flo
challenges European discourses’ privileging of the mind and its reductive
association between the foot and animality. Flo’s reliance on the chairs
specifically recalls W. Lewis’s observation, cited by Ingold, that in the
West, the shod foot and the chair establish a “technological foundation
for the separation of thought from action and of mind from body–that is
for the fundamental groundlessness so characteristic of modern metropol-
itan dwelling.”60 “It is as though,” Ingold elaborates, “for inhabitants of
the metropolis, the world of their thoughts, their dreams and their rela-
tions with others floats like a mirage above the road they tread in their
actual material life.”61
Although Flo initiates those leveling, playful moments, for the most
part she remains in the grip of shame, identifies with her abuser (the
bishop’s sister), and projects her rage and shame onto Rose. In Who, it
is women, already on the lower rung of the social ladder, who are most
threatened by younger women’s insubordination. While Flo’s threats
and futile attempts at physical violence fail, she successfully shames and
orchestrates “royal beatings,” directing scenes of paternal violence that
target Rose. In the end, Rose realizes that whatever “Flo has said or
done, whatever she herself has said or done, does not really matter at all.
It is the struggle itself that counts, and that can’t be stopped, can never
be stopped, short of where it has got to, now.”62 Recalling Oedipus
who, at the end of Sophocles’s play, embodies his family’s and, indeed,
all of Thebes’s shame, Rose likewise recognizes that she is caught in an
ancient, dramatic struggle with defined roles, and she must play the part
of the scapegoat. As an adult, her body, like Oedipus’s, also serves as
shame’s prison-house. Rose explains:
She would lie there wishing she had some plain defect, something her
shame could curl around and protect. As it was, she would have to be
ashamed of, burdened by, the whole physical fact of herself, the whole out-
spread naked digesting putrefying fact. Her flesh could seem disastrous;
thick and porous, grey and spotty. His body would not be in question, it
never would be.63
92 M. GOLDMAN
Any hint of rejection from an intimate partner or, in fact, from an

acquaintance triggers shame’s corrosive impact—vestigial, embod-
ied memories of “royal beatings,” and the feeling of being “smashed.”
For example, when she is rejected by her lover, Clifford, Rose confesses
that it was “as if she had taken a hammer and deliberately smashed her
big toe.”64 At the party where she meets Simon, Rose is positioned
on the other side of the intergenerational divide: she has become the
“Establishment.”65 When a drunken student verbally attacks Rose, one of
the party-goers quips, “It’s parent-substitute rejection time!”66 No mat-
ter how much power Rose has or what side of the divide she occupies,
she ends up feeling “smashed, under the skin.”67 As noted earlier, in the
final, titular story, Rose admits to carrying the burden of shame all her
life—a burden literally associated with her failure to perform as an actor.
In contrast to the fleeting experience of shame that occasionally vis-
its those with social power, Rose’s enduring experience of shame recalls
Dolezal’s analysis of the fate of the “shame-prone” socially subordinated
subject.68 For the latter, chronic shame becomes “a permanent possibility
as the normative values of the milieu in which this subject is situated ren-
der him or her perniciously and permanently disadvantaged within social
relations.”69 As a lower-class woman graced with intelligence and imagi-
nation who was considered deviant by her small town community, Rose
is doomed to chronic shame.
Like the bewildered Chorus in Sophocles’s tragedy, Munro’s readers are
left wondering what possible meaning can be gleaned from Who’s repeated
shameful scenes and the psychological and physical trauma they engen-
der. One of the basic lessons that Who conveys concerns the difficult and,
potentially, interminable task of deconstructing the specular and hierarchi-
cal mechanisms of shame. Equally critical, Munro’s narratives suggest that
disability is not only tied to bodily imperfection, but is also aligned with the
inability to engage in mimesis. For example, Flo’s trick draws attention to
the abilities that persist despite the stigma attributed to individuals who, for
several reasons, rely on embodied modes of communication. Flo’s abilities
are epitomized by the strength of Flo’s legs and her capacity to repair the
families’ broken intersubjective relations—that task, as noted earlier, entails
viewing the shamed body as a source of power and meaning and, simulta-
neously, recognizing that power is not static and enduring.
Who Do You Think You Are? continues to subject the mechanisms
of shame to scrutiny in “Privilege,” the third story in the collection.
“Privilege” relates the short, unhappy life of Franny McGill—a girl with
developmental challenges who is repeatedly raped by her brother and
other men in Hanratty. In Franny’s case, disability does not lie in her
inability to communicate, but in the public’s inability or unwillingness
to read her embodied forms of communication as meaningful.70 Munro
admitted during interviews that the haunting scene of incest and abuse—
which first appears in the story “Walking on Water” in Something I’ve
Been Meaning to Tell You (1974)—is “the most autobiographical thing in
Who Do You Think You Are?” and it galvanized her fierce desire to doc-
ument her experiences at the school she “actually attended.”71 At first
glance, Franny’s story seemingly reinstalls some aspects of the familiar,
Oedipal tale of paternal violence and the genesis of the hero’s disabil-
ity. According to Flo, Franny “had been smashed against the wall, by
her father, drunk, when she was a baby.”72 In Franny’s case, however,
there is no definitive, truthful story regarding the origins of her disability.
Instead, untrustworthy fictions proliferate. We are told that “[a]nother
story had Franny falling out of a cutter, drunk, kicked by a horse. At
any rate, smashed.”73 Not only then are the many stories about Franny’s
defects, but she herself seemingly embodies that imperfection.
Franny’s physical imperfection and the violent response it provokes
in her peers recall Dolezal’s astute observation, cited earlier, that body
shame is powerful because it “disrupts our illusion of transcendence—
the notion that we are more than merely animals.”74 Rose recalled that
Franny’s “face had got the worst of it.”75 Her nose “was crooked, mak-
ing every breath she took a long, dismal-sounding snuffle. Her teeth
were badly bunched together, so that she could not close her mouth and
never could contain her quantities of spit.”76 In the protracted descrip-
tion of Franny’s features, specifically, the “snuffle” and the “spit,” the
narrator suggests that her facial anomalies combined with her muteness
provoke a form of disgust that, as Martha Nussbaum proposes, is tied to
an effort to ward off both “animality in general and the mortality that
is so prominent in our loathing of our animality.”77 The text also juxta-
poses the description of Franny’s open, crowded, and leaking mouth to
the extended account of her repeated pregnancies:
The use Shortie was making of her, that others made, would continue. She
would get pregnant, be taken away, come back and get pregnant again, be
taken away, come back, get pregnant, be taken away again. There would
be talk of getting her sterilized, getting the Lions Club to pay for it, there
would be talk of shutting her up, when she died suddenly of pneumonia,
solving the problem.78
94 M. GOLDMAN
Rather than remaining complicit in aligning Franny’s anomalous body

with monstrosity, that juxtaposition highlights the cost of being per-
ceived as an animal or monster. In Franny’s case, she is subjected to disa-
vowed, communal violence—repeated rapes—which forcibly identify her
with transgressive and excessive forms of reproduction that seemingly
render her “the problem.”79
What if, following the servant’s advice in Sophocles’s play, readers
of Munro’s story attend to the embodied tale? What happens if read-
ers grant meaning and eloquence to Franny’s gestures? We are told that
while Franny is being raped, she “let out howls, made ripply, phlegmy,
by her breathing problems and kept jerking one leg.”80 Although the
jerking of her leg may be an involuntary response, rendering her as
Shortie’s puppet, Franny’s howls are unequivocal signs of protest and
distress. Her human agency and personhood are likewise conveyed by
the fact that despite the relentless sexual abuse she endures, “there was
something hopeful about her. She would follow after anybody who did
not immediately attack and insult her; she would offer bits of crayon,
knots of chewed gum pried off seats and desks.”81 Taken together, the
narrative’s emphasis on Franny’s gestures of distress, kindness, and socia-
bility attest to the fact that both words and gestures serve as modes of
communication and, by extension, indicators of personhood. Equally
significant is that Rose speculates that Franny “may not have been so
stupid as everybody thought, but simply stunned, bewildered, by contin-
ual assault.”82
Franny’s subjectivity is not only confirmed by the text’s emphasis on
the sounds of her distress, but also by the narrator’s attention to her legs
and feet. In contrast to Oedipus’s visible disability—the swollen foot
for which he is named—Franny’s “white leg and bare foot, with muddy
toes”—which serve as a punctum in Munro’s narrative—strike Rose as
“looking too normal, too vigorous and self-respecting, to belong to
Franny McGill.”83 Franny’s “vigorous” legs, in turn, recall Flo’s equally
“strong legs and feet.”84 Collectively, the text’s attention to Franny’s
face, her “self-respecting” legs and feet, and her evocative gestures desta-
bilize society’s hierarchal arrangement whereby people with physical and
mental disabilities are stigmatized and devalued.
Franny’s fate in Who Do You Think You Are? instigates Rose’s pro-
tracted critical consideration. As an adult, Rose would “think of Franny
when she came across the figure of an idiotic, saintly whore, in a book
or a movie.”85 Rose realizes, however, that male authors “cheated…
when they left out the breathing and the spit and the teeth.”86 In other
words, stories by men (including Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, the
ürtext with respect to royal beatings, incest, and shame) cheat when they
align female figures solely with ‘normalcy—“soothing blankness” and
passive figures such as Jocasta, who accept violence and martyrdom—or
with ‘monstrosity’—the Sphinx. Furthermore, in prompting readers
to assume a critical distance—not merely to feel but also to account for
“the aphrodisiac prickles of disgust” aroused by scenes of beating and
rape—Who subverts Rose’s traumatic disavowal of her part in the vio-
lence. Her disavowal is epitomized both by her role as silent witness87
and by her assertion that an “act performed on Franny had no general
significance.”88 On the one hand, the narrative exposes the pervasive vio-
lence perpetrated by and against women and children—including Rose—
within the sex-gender system. On the other hand, it offers alternatives
to acquiescing to the artificial, yet entrenched social hierarchy in the
form of embodied forms of communication, as evidenced by Flo’s trick
and Franny’s gestures of civility. In that way, Who acts out and works
through society’s shameful, sadomasochistic mechanisms of control.
Thus far, I have advocated for the ethical and aesthetic stakes in read-
ing Who in the light of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, a play featuring
intergenerational, paternal, and incestuous scenes of shame and vio-
lence. Within the narrative, Rose initially cleaves to masochistic fantasies
of patriarchal control. For example, she repeatedly grants all her lovers,
most obviously Simon, absolute power to validate or annihilate her sense
of self-worth. Gradually, Rose learns that her fantasies of absolute male
power are not wholly credible. While they provide the consoling illusion
of a single, immutable locus of control, they suppress the complex nature
of female agency, on the one hand, and men’s vulnerability to disability,
illness and death, on the other. Ultimately, for Munro, undoing shame
entails realizing that men, as well as women, are, in Halberstam’s words,
also adept at failing, bungling, disappointing, and dying.
The final, titular, story in Who features a disabled man who fails spec-
tacularly. After a night spent drinking at the Legion, Rose’s childhood
friend Ralph Gillespie mistakes the door to the basement for the exit.
Losing his balance—which was already precarious due to an injury suf-
fered in the war that left him disabled—he falls down the stairs to his
death.89 In its depiction of Rose’s platonic friendship with Ralph, Who
offers another characteristically “queer” alternative to the misleading
pursuit of the ideal and, its corollary, sadomasochistic Oedipal relations.
96 M. GOLDMAN
Rose explains that her relation to Ralph is based not on filiation but
affiliation, a family similarity based not on looks but on gestures, “hab-
its and tendencies” that align them with the “queer art of failure.” For
example, both Rose and Ralph “lost or misplaced” school supplies; they
were equally “sloppy with ink, subject to spilling and blotting mishaps”;
and both “were negligent about doing homework.”90 In a scene rem-
iniscent of Aristophanes’s “leg narrative,” we are told that Rose’s and
Ralph’s “shoes and boots became well acquainted, scuffling and pushing
in friendly and private encounter, sometimes resting together a moment
in tentative encouragement.”91 What begins as a four-legged creature
is ultimately severed and becomes two lost bipedal creatures. Worse, in
Ralph’s case, the two-legged creature is further disabled. Emphasizing
again the nonessential nature of physical and mental anomalies, the
narrator explains that Ralph’s disability springs from neither familial
nor paternal violence. Instead, due to a grievous accident suffered in
the Navy—which, as Flo says, put Ralph in the hospital for three years,
where they rebuilt him “from scratch”—Ralph, like Oedipus, “walks
with a limp.”92
Of all the people Rose encounters, it is Ralph alone who manages
to ease her feelings of lifelong shame. It is tempting to suggest this is
because Ralph, like Rose, is a precocious imitator. He knows firsthand
the risks involved in “falling short of social depictions of the ‘normal,’
the ideal or the socially acceptable body.”93 Owing to their willingness to
play different roles ranging from the ideal to the deviant, Rose and Ralph
run the risk of being stigmatized.94 Throughout his life, Ralph excels at
imitating Milton Homer, a “mimic of ferocious gifts and terrible energy”
who grew up with them in Hanratty.95 Rose explains that Milton is
disabled insofar as he is entirely lacking in social inhibition; yet he has
immense privileges. In keeping with the texts’ portrayals of agential indi-
viduals with disabilities, Milton’s performative utterances are so convinc-
ing that by virtue of his gestures he initiates new social rituals on the
one hand, and destabilizes and debases solemn, traditional celebrations
on the other. The narrator recalls that Milton invented a ceremony sim-
ilar to a baptism that he performed whenever a baby was born.96 Rose
also recalls that when his staid Methodist aunts try to gather signatures
on a petition that would prevent the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
from airing programs that interfered with going to church on Sunday
nights, Milton used the pen to draw on his face. The narrator explains
that “he had made himself so comical a sight that the petition which
nobody really wanted could be treated as a comedy, too, and the power
of the Milton sisters, the flax-mill Methodists, could be seen as a leftover
dribble.”97 Rather than attempt to copy ideal forms and thereby engage
in idolatry, Ralph, and later Rose, imitate Homer. While one could argue
that they are debasing the latter via imitation, and that is certainly part
of the appeal, the narrative also repeatedly emphasizes the power that
Milton wields. Watching Ralph doing his imitation, Rose realizes that
she wants to copy Ralph—not be Ralph or Milton, for that matter—but
“to fill up in that magical, releasing way, transform herself; she wanted
the courage and the power.”98 The words “magical” and “releasing” in
that passage recall the earlier description of Flo’s physical trick, highlight-
ing the reparative power afforded by embodied play—a power that miti-
gates the effects of Oedipal violence.
The power of play is seemingly available to anyone—young or old—
and equally important, may withstand the corrosive effects of shame.
For example, in “Spelling,” Rose interacts with an old, blind woman
and their playful game reminds Rose of her own private fantasies as a
child—fantasies comprised of words and images that crowded the the-
atre of her mind. When Rose arrives to visit Flo, she observes that the
societal preoccupation for installing shameful hierarchies extends to
the nursing home in which “the old people were arranged in tiers.”99
Nevertheless, even on the third floor—where people’s bodies “seemed
to be without purpose or control”—“you might get some surprises.”100
Rose recalls her encounter with the elderly, blind woman on the third
floor: “crouched in her crib, diapered, dark as a nut, with three tufts of
hair like dandelion floss sprouting from her head, she was making loud
shaky noises.”101 Whereas as a child, Rose could not understand Franny’s
noises or gestures—a failure that rendered the latter defenseless—in
the case of the old woman, Rose attends carefully, forging a bridge as
it were, and understands that she is spelling. Furthermore, the nurse
explains that the only way the staff and the old woman can communicate
is through play.102 When the nurse invites Rose to think of a word for
the woman to spell, she obliges and blurts, “celebrate.”103 In accordance
with the text’s celebration of embodied communication, Rose’s response
suggests that in whatever form it takes—be it words or gestures—
mimesis both constitutes and is cause for celebration.
Significantly, the old woman’s spelling game echoes a rhyme
that enchanted Rose as a child.104 Due to its apparently transgres-
sive language, the rhyme played a role in instigating Rose’s beating.
98 M. GOLDMAN
Nevertheless, Rose recalls that the absurd phrase had her in its spell and
she delighted in repeating it: “Two Vancouvers fried in snot!/Two pick-
led arseholes tied in a knot!” In her mind, she saw the words “shaped
rather like octopuses, twitching in the pan. The tumble of reason; the
spark and spit of craziness.”105 Later, as a middle-aged woman, Rose
contemplates the old woman and wonders about the theatre in her mind:
What the words were like, when she held them in her mind. Were they like
words in dreams or in the minds of young children, each one marvelous
and distinct and alive as a new animal? This one limp and clear, like a jelly-
fish. That one hard and mean and secretive, like a horned snail. They could
be austere and comical as top hats, or smooth and lively and flattering as
ribbons. A parade of private visitors, not over yet.106
In the passage cited above, Rose’s description of the old woman’s fantasy
includes words such as “ribbons” and “parade,” echoing Rose’s beating
fantasy. I draw attention to the repetition because it suggests that, for
Rose, an imaginative engagement with language and modes of private
fantasy endures through and beyond the corrosive societal mechanisms
that rely on violence and shame to inflect difference.
As an actor, Rose shares that imaginative, playful realm with Ralph,
the man who inspired her to embark on a career as a performer. After
speaking with him as an adult, Rose realizes that her “mistakes appeared
unimportant.”107 Whereas Rose typically idolizes and sexualizes men and
allows them a kind of sadistic power over her, in her platonic friendship
with Ralph, the relationship is undistorted by shame. To use Kaufman’s
metaphor, their relationship is akin to a bridge rather than a ladder. Their
non-hierarchical relationship based on contiguity is articulated in the
novel’s closing statement. Rose confesses that she feels Ralph’s life to
have been “close, closer than the lives of men she’d loved, one slot over
from her own.”108
The “queer” ending in Who Do You Think You Are raises a key ques-
tion that recalls Halberstam’s insistence on the need to abandon the fam-
ily to escape its repressive and violent mechanisms of reproduction.109
Does Munro’s narrative advocate rejecting heterosexual relations and
families altogether? I would suggest that rather than promote a flight
from the family, and more generally from intimacy, Who instead affirms
that by paying attention to failure and with it the tragic fate of all royal
figures, it may well be possible to undo the spell of shame. In “Spelling,”
for instance, Rose mourns the loss of her relationship to Flo. Early on,
we learn that Rose put Flo in a home after the latter began showing signs
of advanced dementia. In the Home, however, Flo stopped talking. The
narrator explained that she “had removed herself, and spent most of her
time sitting in a corner of her crib, looking crafty and disagreeable, not
answering anybody, though she occasionally showed her feelings by bit-
ing a nurse”110—a potent gesture indeed. Nostalgic and yearning for
connection, Rose recalls the time when Flo’s anger was directed at her.
Rose particularly remembers Flo’s reaction to her performance in the
play The Trojan Women—Euripides’s story about the tragic fate of the
royal women of Troy. She only had a bit part that required her to bare
one breast—a gesture that outraged Flo. With her “stiff swollen fingers,
crippled almost out of use with arthritis,” Flo sent Rose a letter on which
was printed a single word: “shame.”111 Rose confessed that she read the
letter to her friends “for comic effect, and dramatic effect, to show the
gulf that lay behind her.”112 As an adult, however, Rose realizes that
“the gulf was nothing special since most of friends…could lay claim to
being disowned or prayed for, in some disappointed home.”113 Shame, it
would seem, runs in virtually every family.
Rather than remain in the grip of shame and respond with rage or
attempt to flee from intimacy (in essence, becoming “shameless”), Rose
maintains her connection to Flo by recognizing the value of “the gulf”
itself—its role as the preserver against the impossible, psychotic fanta-
sies of sameness and unity.114 Although shame and, by extension, social
hierarchies entail being leashed to misleading ideals, fundamentally they
mark out a difference. It is that difference which, as Socrates demon-
strates, instigates and facilitates the need for thought and communica-
tion.115 The “gulf” transforms monologues into dialogues and thereby
instigates and sustains the creative gap between performer and audience.
In the case of Flo’s letter, Rose realizes that her “reproaches were pain-
fully, truly, meant; they were all a hard life had to offer.”116 Although
they were vastly different in “tone, light, and depth” from Flo’s trick,
Franny’s gestures of distress, and the old woman’s spelling game. Flo’s
act of spelling—which comes from her “crippled” fingers—is granted
attention and respect. Paradoxically, in Munro’s fiction, alternatives to
Oedipal violence are contained, often unseen in the moment in marve-
lous scenes of shame and outrage. The desire for closeness is buried in
the “reproach”—from Middle English and from Old French reproch-
ier (verb), meaning “bring back close,” based on the Latin prope “near”
100 M. GOLDMAN
(OED). Readers of Munro’s narrators, as noted earlier, are part of the

process of working through. As spectators and decoders of the story and
the characters’ embodied gestures (some of whom may be children of
shame), readers are invited to participate in textual play. By operating in
the embodied and affective economy of shame and by focusing on the
riddle of disability, Munro ensures that readers also know their place: one
slot over from her narrative’s beautiful losers.
Notes
1. Alice Munro, “An Ounce of Cure,” in Dance of the Happy Shades
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 86–87.
2. Ibid., 87–88.
3. As Ildikó de Papp Carrington observes, in Munro’s works, “the key
words shame and humiliation recur with disquieting frequency,” and
death is portrayed as “the inevitable” and “ultimate humiliation of the
flesh” (5, 146). She argues further that another key word related to
shame is “watch” (10). She also offers a helpful comparison between
Munro’s formulation of the story “Royal Beatings” and Freud’s essay
(44–45).
4. Gershen Kaufman, Shame: The Power of Caring (Cambridge, MA:
Schenkman Publishing, 1980), 15.
5. Luna Dolezal, The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the
Socially Shaped Body (New York: Lexington Books, 2015), 5.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 7.
8. Alice Munro, “An Ounce,” 86.
9. Dolezal, The Body and Shame, 7.
10. Kaufman, Shame, 15.
11. Ibid., 27.
12. As critics such as Robert Thacker and Amelia DeFalco observe, in
Munro’s case, shame and disability could not be closer to home, and are
frequently tied to the female body in her stories. Munro’s sensitivity to
disability and shame may well stem from her first-hand experience of her
mother’s disabling neurodegenerative illness, which caused her mother’s
early death in 1959 (see DeFalco, 7).
13. Marcelo N. Viñar, “Construction of a Fantasy: Reading ‘A Child Is
Being Beaten’,” in On Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten”: Turning
Points and Critical Issues, ed. Ethel Spector Person (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1997), 183.
14. Ibid., 187.
15. Ildikó Papp Carrington, Controlling the Uncontrollable: the Fiction of

Alice Munro (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989), 7.
16. T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko, Learning How to Fall: Art and Culture After
September 11 (London: Routledge, 2015), 29.
17. Ibid., 29.
18. Dolezal, The Body and Shame, 7.
19. Ibid., xv.
20. Alice Munro, “Privilege,” 31.
21. Munro’s reliance on theatrical language has been analyzed by a host of
critics including Ajay Heble (1994), Ildikó de Papp Carrington (see
above), Deborah Heller (2009), Coral Ann Howells (1998), Smaro
Kamboureli (1986), Christine Maksimowicz and Jennifer Murray
(2014), and Anca-Raluca Radu (2008).
22. Dolezal, 7.
23. Munro’s story opens with the protagonist conjuring a beating fantasy:
Royal Beating. That was Flo’s Promise. You are going to get one
Royal Beating.
…. Rose had a need to picture things, to pursue absurdities, that
was stronger than the need to stay out of trouble, and instead of
taking this threat to heart she pondered: how is a beating royal?
She came up with a tree-lined avenue, a crowd of formal specta-
tors, some white horses and black slaves. Someone knelt, and the
blood came leaping out like banners. (Who, 1)
24. Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 47.
25. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2011), 73.
26. Sophocles, “Oedipus the King,” in The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling
(London: Penguin, 1988), 54.
27. Ibid., 63.
28. Ibid., 64.
29. Both Murray and Maksimowicz explore how Munro translates and exor-
cizes her experience of having been beaten by her father first in fiction
in “Royal Beatings” (1978) and later in “Fathers,” published in A View
from Castle Rock (2006).
30. See Lennard Davis’s fine account of normality and its enforcement,
Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and The Body (London and
New York: Verso, 1995).
31. Alice Munro, Who, 1.
32. Jennifer Murray and Lee Garner, “From Participant to Observer:
Theatricality as Distantiation in ‘Royal Beatings’ and ‘Lives of Girls and
Women’ by Alice Munro,” Journal of the Short Story in English 51 (2008): 4.
102 M. GOLDMAN
33. In interviews, Munro is extremely candid about the autobiographical

nature of her accounts of parental violence, which were common in the
closed rural society of southwestern Ontario where she grew up during
the Depression. Although Munro contextualizes her beatings by her
father, she nevertheless admits to their psychological toll (see Interview
with Awano 183). In “Royal Beatings” Munro fictionalizes her experi-
ence of abuse, but in her quasi-autobiographical account of the beatings
in “Fathers,” written almost thirty years later, the narrator maintains
that the parental violence was an attempt to crush her individuality. As
she says, “I felt as if it must be my very self that they were after, and in a
way I think it was” (194). Pondering the beatings she endured, the nar-
rator in “Fathers” also attests to the shame it instilled in her and shame’s
corrosive link to her masochistic desires for self-abnegation: “Shame.
The shame of being beaten, and the shame of cringing from the beat-
ing. Perpetual shame. Exposure” (195). As the narrator confesses, “I
did not hate him, could not consider hating him. Instead, I saw what he
hated in me” (195).
34. Freddie Rokem, Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 44.
35. Ibid., 46.
36. Teriesias’s prophecy that Oedipus will walk with a staff (“point before
him with a stick” l. 456) is perhaps the most direct reference to the
Sphinx’s riddle. For the purpose of my argument, it is significant disabil-
ity (blindness) rather than age necessitates Oedipus’s use of a staff. I am
grateful to Elinor Irwin for her help parsing the classical references to
the leg narrative in Sophocles’s and Plato’s writing.
37. Tim Ingold, “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived Through
the Feet,” Journal of Material Culture 9, no. 3 (2004): 323.
38. Ibid.
39. Roken, 39.
40. Ibid., 47.
41. As Nicholas Rideout insists, “theatre is a social art form” in that it “tends
to represent people in social relationship with one another, rather than
in isolation” (2009, 13). Equally relevant, as Paul Corey explains in
Messiahs and Machiavellians: Depicting Evil in the Modern Theatre, the
word “theatre” is derived from the Greek “theatron” (theatre) which
literally means “watching place” or “place of seeing” and is derived from
the verb theosthai (to watch, to look at). “Theatre,” Corey notes, “is a
peculiar form of public dialogue and contemplation. The issues raised
within the theatre are, subsequently relevant for life outside the thea-
tre. They have a potential impact on how we understand the world and
how we live” (2008, 9). One need only ponder the question “How
shall I act?”—a question taken from Sophocles’ play Philoctetes (Athens,

409 BCE) which, as Rideout observes, “opens the moment of ethical
choice,” to appreciate the complex relationship Munro’s stories forge
between ethics and theatre.
42. Dolezal, 7.
43. I am grateful for the help of the following drama and performance theo-
rists: Elinor Fuchs, Nikki Cesare-Shotzko, and Lawrence Switzky.
44. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2011), 186–187.
45. In this essay, I often use the terms “ideal” and “normal” as if they are
interchangeable because they function this way in contemporary west-
ern society. As Dolezal observes, the “‘rhetoric of body perfection’ has
increasingly come to dominate social hierarchies, and what is considered
a ‘normal’ and allegedly attainable standard of attractiveness is in fact an
ever-shifting and unattainable body ideal” (108).
46. Garner and Murray, 2.
47. Munro, Who, 167.
48. Ibid., 255.
49. Ibid.
50. Munro’s fiction, as de Papp Carrington notes, “connotes neither perma-
nence nor control” (4). In interviews, Munro attests to not seeing “life
very much in terms of progress” or believing that “people develop and
arrive somewhere” (“Interview,” Hancock, 102); instead, she acknowl-
edges that there is only one very simple resolution: “we finally end up
dead” (“Interview,” Hancock, 102).
51. Kaufman, Shame, 15.
52. As Murray and Garner argue in “From Participant to Observer,” in
the beating episode in “Royal Beatings,” “father and daughter are act-
ing out a scene which springs not from their own feelings but from the
humiliation of Flo.” They argue further that “through Flo’s transparent
strategy, the tradition of socially sanctioned violence is ironically inserted
into the text.” Not only does Flo instigate the violence, she also ensures
that it remains a secret. As they assert, Flo “circumscribes the effects of
the violence by keeping it ‘in the family’: she locks the door to the store,
puts up a sign saying ‘BACK SOON’ and declares: ‘Well we don’t need
the public in on this, that’s for sure.’”
53. Munro, Who, 52.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 24.
57. Ibid., 34–35.
58. Ibid., 25.
104 M. GOLDMAN
59. Ibid.
60. Ingold, “Culture,” 323.
61. Ibid.
62. Munro, Who, 18.
63. Ibid., 210.
64. Ibid., 162.
65. Ibid., 197.
66. Ibid., 195.
67. Ibid.
68. Dolezal, The Body, 92.
69. Ibid.
70. De Papp Carrington astutely observes that Munro’s experience of her
mother’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease and its impact on the latter’s
ability to speak left Munro sensitive to the power associated with speech;
in Munro’s fiction, shame is often tied “to ‘misshapen’ language, distor-
tions produced by illness or the character’s lower-class, Huron County
accent” (de Papp Carrington 194). As I argue elsewhere, in Munro’s
fiction, one of the greatest source of helplessness and shame is the ina-
bility to access language (Goldman).
71. Alice Munro, interview by Geoff Hancock, Canadian Fiction Magazine,
43 (1982): 93.
72. Munro, Who, 31.
73. Ibid.
75. Munro, Who, 31.
76. Ibid.
77. Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 89.
78. Munro, Who, 32.
79. In “Privilege,” the narrative emphasizes that the treatment of a single
disabled person is, in fact, part of more systemic abuse; this is in contrast
to most narrative representations, which, as Mitchell and Synder assert,
typically portray disabled individuals in isolation (2013, 225). For a
detailed account of the violence directed at unnatural bodies in Munro’s
fiction, see Dilia Narduzzi’s (2011) thesis, which offers a close reading
of Munro’s story “Child’s Play” about two girls who murder a disabled
child.
80. Munro, Who, 32.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid., 33.
84. Ibid., 25.
85. Ibid., 32.
86. Ibid.
87. In “Fathers,” the narrator confesses to her inability to stand up for any-
body “who was being humiliated”; as she says, “I could never rise above
a feeling of relief that it was not me” (184).
88. Munro, Who, 29.
89. Ibid., 255.
90. Ibid., 246.
91. Ibid., 247.
92. Ibid., 249.
94. As Dolezal explains, stigma arises when “an individual’s bodily identity
within a social group does not correspond to normative expectations
of the attributes that the individual should possess” (88). According
to Erving Goffman, the stigmatized person “is reduced in our minds
from a whole and usual person to a tainted and discredited one” (qtd in
Dolezal 88).
96. Ibid., 236.
97. Ibid., 246.
98. Ibid., 247.
99. Ibid., 226.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., 227.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid.
104. In her essay, Maksimowicz aligns the nonsense rhyme with what psycho-
analyst Christopher Bollas terms one’s “idiom.” Drawing on Bollas’s
insights, Maksimowicz argues that this can be understood simply as
“one’s unique creative inner complex, present at birth…that must be
recognized and fostered within a child in order to establish his personal-
ity ‘in such a way as to feel both personally real and alive, and to articu-
late the many elements of his true self.’”
106. Ibid., 228.
107. Ibid., 255.
108. Ibid., 256.
109. Halberstam, The Queer Art, 70–73.
111. Ibid., 230.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid.
106 M. GOLDMAN
114. For information on Munro’s thoughts about connections among sto-

ries and individuals in her fiction, see de Papp Carrington, p. 1; see also
Lorraine York’s “‘Gulfs and Connections’: The Fiction of Alice Munro”
(1987).
115. In Book 7 of the Republic, in his discussion of arithmetic, Socrates
claims that the apparent contradiction of the one and the many activates
the process of thought itself:
If the one is adequately seen itself by itself or so is perceived by
any of the other senses, then, as we were saying in the case of the
fingers, it would draw the soul towards being. But if something
opposite to it is always seen at the same time, so that nothing is
apparently any more than the opposite of one, then something
would be needed to judge the matter. The soul would then be
puzzled, would look for an answer, would stir up its understand-
ing, and would ask what the one is. And so this would be among
the subjects that lead the soul and turn it around toward the
study of that which is (Plato qtd. in Roken, 47).
116. Munro, Who, 231.
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———. Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Macmillan, 1996 [1978].
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CHAPTER 6
“Chunks of Language Caught in Her

Throat”: The Problem of Other(ed) Minds
in Alice Munro’s Stories of Cognitive
Disability
Heidi Tiedemann Darroch
Perceived deficits in linguistic ability and reasoning are unsettling to

Alice Munro’s highly verbal and acutely self-conscious protagonists.1
Over the span of several decades, Munro’s fiction has examined how
cognitive disabilities evoke a range of problematic responses, from
patronizing pity to revulsion. In the most extreme example, “Child’s
Play,” first published in 2007, an act of murderous violence is instigated
by a young girl’s inability to negotiate a relationship with a peer, Verna,
who “had not learned to read or write or skip or play ball,” whose “voice
was hoarse and unmodulated, her words oddly separated, as if they were
chunks of language caught in her throat.”2 Notably, the narrator views
Verna as threatening rather than vulnerable. In Lives of Girls and Women,
published more than three decades earlier, Del responds similarly to her
cousin, who has disabilities related to a traumatic birth. In each work the
H. T. Darroch (*) 
Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_6
110 H. T. DARROCH
narrator believes that the character who has a cognitive disability is also
invested with a dangerous power that the protagonist resents and resists.
Illnesses, injuries, and disabilities feature in a vast number of Alice
Munro’s works. Critics have identified the many Munro stories that
return to the suffering, increasingly debilitated mother figure, modeled on
Munro’s own mother, whose long struggle with Parkinson’s disease had
a profound impact on Munro’s youth. Less remarked upon are Munro’s
recurring depictions of cognitive disabilities, which utilize strikingly sim-
ilar imagery and even specific word choices across stories, so that Clara
in the early story “The Idyllic Summer” and Franny McGill in Who Do
You Think You Are?, more than twenty years later, are both described as
“bewildered.” Munro’s interest in the fate of characters with intellectual
disabilities is clearly enduring. As with Munro’s narratives of sick mothers,
there may be some autobiographical impetus. Munro gave birth to four
daughters, including one who died within hours. Catherine was born in
1955 with impaired kidneys, and Munro and her husband initially antic-
ipated that the child would need life-long care.3 Sheila Munro notes that
her parents discussed institutionalization because “for my mother, the
prospect of having to care for a child with Down’s syndrome [the new-
born’s facial features suggested Down’s] after looking after her mother for
all those years would have meant the death of her creative self.”4
People with intellectual disabilities are simultaneously acutely vul-
nerable in Munro’s fiction—chiefly to sexualized forms of violence and
coercion, but also to other injuries—yet are also perceived as unnervingly
controlling, capable of precipitating intense shame, humiliation, or fear.
The stories’ central characters are aware that the range of socially accept-
able responses to the disabled other includes compassion and more con-
descendingly, pity; instead, they repeatedly experience disgust. Munro’s
protagonists are typically committed to intellectual pursuits; minds that
are affected by disability subsequently disturb, provoking a desire to
repudiate and expel.5 Those stories identify the psychological dynamics
that precipitate rejection and exclusion.
The nuanced appraisals of the power dynamics that are inherent in
relationships between characters whose identities are inflected by a cog-
nitive disability and those who view themselves as intellectually able are
also important for understanding Munro’s depiction of the gendered
politics of empathy and affect. Munro’s female protagonists often resist
conforming to the gendered expectation to provide care; they refuse to
identify with the vulnerable other’s needs and capacities. Munro locates
6 “CHUNKS OF LANGUAGE CAUGHT IN HER THROAT” … 111
those lapses in responses that include projection, denial, and internal

splitting, all strategies for a non-disabled self to shore up her sense of
identity, safety, and superiority at the expense of the other. Furthermore,
Munro’s fiercely intelligent female protagonists, whose capacities are
disdained by men, have additional reasons to be wary of comparisons
to girls and women who are less able. In Who Do You Think You Are?
Rose’s father believes that a woman should be “naïve intellectually, child-
like,” claiming that “[w]omen’s minds are different…You can’t follow
their thought.”6 Del, in Lives of Girls and Women, is evaluated “frankly”
by her first boyfriend as possessing memory and language aptitudes,
but “fairly weak reasoning powers, and almost no capacity for abstract
thought.”7
Munro’s central characters are avid consumers and producers of
words, thinkers and ruminators and storytellers. Self-examination—
through memory reconstruction and via narration—is critical, especially
for her first-person female narrators. But as Michael Bérubé describes,
fiction often treats an intellectually disabled character as a “form of
human embodiment that cannot narrate itself” and can “only be nar-
rated,” and this may present a threat to “all narrators…that perhaps
they too, someday, will be unable to tell a coherent story.”8 This can be
seen when Munro’s protagonists seek to differentiate themselves, even
violently, by projecting their own fear onto the person whose grasp of
language is more tenuous, the one who is unable to provide a coherent
account of herself, thus forestalling identification.
In the stories that I examine for this chapter, intellectual disabil-
ities are either congenital, acquired at birth, or result from an early
childhood incident; in some cases, the cause is not entirely known.9
However, the characters share the painful experience of living in a cul-
ture that treats them, at best, with polite dismissiveness. In the title
story of Munro’s first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, the arrival of
children with Down’s Syndrome is disconcerting to the audience at a
piano recital; when one young girl performs brilliantly, her feat is viewed
as a “trick…perhaps not altogether in good taste.”10 The girl’s appear-
ance is so at odds with her superb playing that it cannot be “reconciled”:
her talent is viewed as “useless, out-of-place” by everyone except her
eccentric teacher.11 Characters demonstrating signs of intellectual dis-
abilities evoke similar discomfort and unease throughout Munro’s fic-
tion, and that response mirrors the reality that despite several decades
of disability rights activism and discourse, people with intellectual
112 H. T. DARROCH
disabilities remain among the most stigmatized in society.12 Even now,

“In comparative studies of attitudes to social interactions with mem-
bers of different groups, people with intellectual disabilities consistently
emerge as one of the least desirable,” writes Katrina Scior. “Further,
behavioral intentions towards them are more negative than towards peo-
ple with physical disabilities.”13 Munro’s fiction charts how social exclu-
sion and denigration are linked to cognitive differences—both intellectual
disabilities, as I examine in this chapter, and the various mental illnesses
that her stories depict, but that fall outside the scope of this discussion.14
Such stigma is particularly important to understand because of the
limited attention to cognitive disabilities in many key disability studies
texts and within the disability rights movement. Michael Bérubé notes
that there is a clear “disability hierarchy, and the unfortunate but per-
sistent fact [is] that intellectual disability is more readily and widely
deployed as a device of dehumanization than is physical disability,” even
while most of the writing about disability, including in literary studies,
allows physical disability to represent “disability in toto.”15 One strat-
egy for making claims on behalf of people with physical disabilities, for
instance, has been to insist on their cognitive intactness. While a signif-
icant amount of progress has been made in destigmatizing physical dis-
abilities and emphasizing the need for an enabling physical and social
environment,16 people with cognitive disabilities experience substan-
tial barriers to inclusion, including in academic settings, where they are
severely underrepresented.17 Disability studies theorist and activist Tom
Shakespeare writes that access and equity concerns related to intellectual
capacities are particularly challenging to address because “cognitive abil-
ities are required for full participation in many areas of contemporary life
in developed nations.”18
This chapter explores the deployment of intellectual disability in fic-
tion that calls attention to the problematic status and exploitative treat-
ment of characters with cognitive disabilities in two overlapping but
distinctive ways. Munro’s depictions of people with cognitive disabili-
ties frequently use analogies to animals, an overtly dehumanizing trope.
By tracing that approach in a very early story and in the recent “Child’s
Play,” I explore how Munro’s portrayals coincide with the controversial
philosophical debate about moral personhood that uses severely cog-
nitively disabled people’s capacities for reasoning as the foundation for
theorizing about justice. Bioethicist Peter Singer relies on the capacities
of severely disabled people to found animal rights claims that extend
recognition beyond species membership based on shared intelligence.

Philosopher Jeff McMahan cites severely cognitively disabled people as a
test case in assessing what is owed to persons and what constitutes moral
personhood. Second, I consider how sexual vulnerability is attributed to
female characters with intellectual disabilities, an approach which enables
Munro’s protagonists to disavow their own susceptibility to male vio-
lence. By projecting victimization onto a disabled other, Munro’s central
characters in Who Do You Think You Are? and Lives of Girls and Women,
her two full-length narratives about female development across different
life stages, assert their own autonomy and bodily integrity. This effort,
however, repeatedly falters as female characters are confronted with their
similarities to the girls and women they attempt to shun.
Munro’s depictions of the repudiation of the other’s vulnerabil-
ity focus on female characters who reject cognitively disabled girls and
women. While there are a handful of male characters who have intellec-
tual disabilities, such as Milton Homer in Who Do You Think You Are?,
or the young brother who dies from accidental scalding in “The Time
of Death” from Dance of the Happy Shades, most of Munro’s portrayals
of intellectual disabilities feature young girls and women and draw atten-
tion to their sexual vulnerability. Those depictions align with a broader
cultural preoccupation about controlling the reproductive capacities of
people deemed intellectually deficient, a concern particularly evident in
Canada when First Wave feminists such as Nellie McClung advocated
eugenicist policies, and involuntary sterilizations were legal. While “men-
tal retardation never became a ‘female malady’ in the way that hyste-
ria and other mental illnesses have become associated with women and
feminine characteristics,” Licia Carlson explains that ideas about wom-
en’s sexual frailty, and the fear that intellectually disabled women would
reproduce, creating children like themselves, meant that “the feeble-
minded woman became representative of the nature and dangers of the
category [of people with intellectual disabilities] as a whole.”19 The
infamous Carrie Buck case decided by the American Supreme Court,20
as well as the Canadian sterilization of Leilani Muir and other women
who were deemed intellectually deficient, point to the intense social anx-
iety aroused by the sexual activity and potential reproductive capacity of
women with cognitive challenges.21
Munro’s earliest depiction of intellectual disability appears in “The
Idyllic Summer,” published in the Canadian Forum when she was in her
early twenties. The story juxtaposes the letters of a supercilious Classics
114 H. T. DARROCH
professor with a sympathetic third-person narrative voice that portrays

his intellectually disabled adult daughter, Clara. Clara is a disappoint-
ment to her father, and until his wife’s death he thinks of her “as little
as he thought of the stray kittens his wife brought up in the house.”22
At the end of the story that comparison is reinforced: the professor
announces that he intends to drown their pregnant cat, and Clara is
horror-stricken, because she too is pregnant. Clara’s intellectual disability
occasions her sexual vulnerability, and her relationship with her lover is
portrayed as exploitative. But Clara also fears sexual danger in her home:
“Sometimes she dreamed that her father stood by the bed and stared
down at her…she always wakened then, but what would happen if she
did not waken, what would he do?”23 In that relatively brief and straight-
forward story, Munro anticipates the two approaches to representing
people with cognitive disabilities evident in her later work: the use of ani-
mal analogies, which in this instance represent shared vulnerability and
innocence, and the suggestion that cognitive disabilities exacerbate sex-
ual vulnerability, particularly in girls and young women.
Munro’s attention to the nature of relationships with characters who
are cognitively disabled explores ethical concerns that are contentious
within the discipline of philosophy. The question of what is due to peo-
ple with disabilities, and especially to those whose cognitive disabilities
are so pronounced that they appear to be denied the opportunity to
participate in civil life, has produced a lively debate. Social contract the-
ory assumes participants “possessing a roughly equal amount of both
physical and mental capacity”; however, Martha Nussbaum argues that
approaches like John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice cannot “do justice to
people with cognitive and even physical disabilities” without a redistribu-
tion of resources to support their flourishing.24
Advocacy for the entitlements of people with disabilities is at distinct
odds with another element of philosophical discussion, also dependent
on theories of justice, that seeks to advance rights claims to cognitively
advanced non-human animals. Bioethicist Peter Singer has posed ques-
tions about the personhood status of infants with profound cognitive
deficits, using those claims as a foundation for asserting rights on behalf
of (more) intelligent animals. In a recent collection of essays edited by
Carlson and Feder Kittay, Singer insists that pursuing those comparisons,
as repugnant as they are to parents insisting on the value of the lives
of their cognitively disabled children, enables a fuller understanding of
how we assign value to particular lives. Troublingly, he wonders if even
having a stake in the debate about moral personhood should be reserved

for those with a capacity for “understanding language, and perhaps even
rational argument?”25 Similarly, philosopher Jeff McMahan uses severely
cognitively disabled people as a test for determining what treatment is
owed under theories of justice, controversially concluding that the most
reasonable of the options he surveys is that “the treatment of animals
is governed by stronger constraints than we have traditionally supposed,
while the treatment of the cognitively impaired is in some respects
subject to weaker constraints than we have traditionally supposed.”26
Reviewing those approaches, Licia Carlson and Eva Feder Kittay note
that philosophy is uncomfortable considering people with profound
intellectual disabilities as experiencing lives worth living, or even as being
fully human: “Philosophers conceive of the mark of humanity as the
ability to reason,” which is “generally taken to be the ground for human
dignity,” and thus the justification for the “special accord and moral sta-
tus we attribute to humans.”27
What is at stake when animals are compared with people who have
cognitive disabilities? Munro’s fiction highlights how such analogies
not only serve to illustrate but also reinforce stigma through rhetorical
strategies that subtly dehumanize people with disabilities, but the spe-
cific nature of the animal comparison is also salient. While the compari-
son of Clara and kittens emphasizes the character’s innate innocence and
childlike-qualities in “The Idyllic Summer,” in “Child’s Play” the young
protagonist characterizes her disabled neighbor through comparisons
with animal features to indicate revulsion and fear. Marlene claims that
Verna’s “small head…made me think of a snake” and suggests her fingers
were like “so many cold snouts.”28 When the narrator head-butts Verna’s
wool-covered stomach, “it seemed to me that I had actually touched
bristling hairs on the skin of a gross hard belly.”29 Marlene concludes
coolly and impersonally, “I suppose I hated her as some people hate
snakes or caterpillars or mice or slugs.”30 Munro highlights how similes
and metaphors that attribute animal-like characteristics to Verna function
as a prelude to the act of violence carried out against her, a deliberate
drowning perpetrated by Marlene and her camp friend, Charlene (and
mirroring the threat made by Clara’s father to drown her pregnant cat,
in “The Idyllic Summer”).
Verna’s abject state, conveyed through those animal analogies,
is echoed when Marlene visits a dying Charlene in the hospital dec-
ades after the murder, noting her scrawny and shrunken appearance,
116 H. T. DARROCH
her “chicken’s neck.”31 The sick, like the disabled, are thus reduced met-
aphorically to animalistic features, suggesting shared weakness and the
dehumanization with which others view them. Similar imagery is used
elsewhere in Munro’s fiction, as when a beaten woman in “Menseteung”
is described as having a “brown nipple pulled long like a cow’s teat,” her
“unbruised skin…grayish, like a plucked, raw drumstick.”32 However,
animal comparisons are not inevitably pejorative: in contrast to how
Verna is characterized at other points in the story, when she is immersed
in water she is described as “turning in a leisurely way, light as a jelly-
fish in the water.”33 Marlene, in turn, is ironically greeted by the nurse
in Charlene’s hospital room as “the Marlin,” hinting, in that association
with water, at the kind of “open secret” evident in many of Munro’s
stories about violence and its aftermath.34
Marlene disdains Verna as soon as they meet and repudiates her inept
gestures of friendship. Marlene asserts that Verna’s look is dangerously
intrusive. Verna would “stand at the corner…watching me”; she was often
“staring at just one thing. Usually me.”35 Rosemary Garland-Thomson
explains that staring is typically provoked by interest in an atypical sight,
something unexpected or abnormal, such that people with apparent dis-
abilities become the objects of the stares of others.36 However, as well
as withholding empathic listening, Munro’s non-disabled characters
refuse to look, even investing the gaze of the cognitively disabled charac-
ter with malice. In that case we see a reversal of a usual dynamic: instead
of the person with a disability being the object of the stare of the other,
she assumes subjectivity as the one who looks, and whose look unnerves.
Marlene perceives Verna’s ocular attention as unnerving and threaten-
ing. At camp, Marlene and Charlene collaborate to “hide” Marlene from
Verna’s view, and Marlene fears her “power…that was specifically directed
at me. I was the one she had her eye on.”37 In “Privilege,” which I discuss
more extensively in the next section, a protagonist similarly situates the
threat of the disabled other in the act of looking: Rose knows that in deal-
ing with Franny she must “fend her off firmly,” especially by “scowl[ing]
warningly whenever she caught your eye.”38
Looking can promote empathy or disgust, and the impressions
gleaned through sight can then transfer to touch, or taste. Marlene and
Charlene establish a bond first by scrutinizing each other and then, hav-
ing established approval of each other’s appearance, by telling stories,
forging intimacy by comparing their physical similarities and differ-
ences and then by offering up confidences. They enjoy sharing candy.
Those forms of female affiliation are withheld from Verna; Dilia

Narduzzi has analyzed perceptively that a shared sense of enmity is a key
dynamic in Marlene and Charlene’s attachment to one another, their
closeness reinforced by their shared sense of disgust.39 While Charlene
and Marlene accept an identification as “twins,” Verna is most threaten-
ing to Marlene when she seeks to dissolve the boundary between the two
of them: standing too close, or, most intrusively, attempting to thrust
mint-flavored candies into Marlene’s mouth, which makes such a strong
sensory impression that “I dislike peppermint flavoring to this day.”40
The link between disgust and orality is reinforced when Marlene’s
mother asks her if she fears that Verna is “going to eat you?”41 Even
Verna’s name sounds less like “spring…or like green grass or garlands
of flowers,” Marlene complains, and “more like a trail of obstinate pep-
permint, green slime.”42 Sara Ahmed points out that the fear of incor-
porating the other is part of disgust and also connects disgust to other
emotions in that “the subject may experience hate towards the object,
as well as fear of the object, precisely as an effect of how the bad feeling
‘has got in’.”43
Disgust inhibits empathy. Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim
point out that empathy involves engagement with the other’s perspec-
tive or concerns that tends to propel “ethical thought and action.”44
Philosopher Lou Agosta defines empathy in terms of a “a receptiv-
ity (‘openness’) to the communicability of the affect of other people
and connects empathy to sharing stories,” suggesting that an effective
demonstration of empathy “enables the other to appreciate that he or
she has been the beneficiary of a gracious and generous listening.”45
However, empathy requires a generous extension of the self that
Munro’s conflicted characters, beset by anxiety and vulnerable to shame,
often feel that they cannot afford. Ildikó de Papp Carrington indicates
that “the key words shame and humiliation recur with disquieting fre-
quency,” and are repeatedly linked to both “the abdication of power”
and “graphic images of exposure and helplessness.”46 Elspeth Probyn
notes that “Etymologically shame comes from the Goth word Scham,
which refers to covering the face”47; Munro’s protagonists experience
shame in moments of nakedness, with shame and humiliation typi-
cally used near-synonymously in passages describing a proverbial loss of
face or a literal or imagined stripping to nudity and full exposure. Fear
of experiencing shame, in turn, motivates the rejection of vulnerability
and powerlessness. The refusal of empathy is typically a symptom of a
118 H. T. DARROCH
protagonist’s wish to avoid being associated with a disabled other’s

dejected state, to avoid a traumatic identification. The heightened visi-
bility and vulnerability that accompany cognitive disability intensify the
need to deny compassion in Munro’s work.
A refusal to admit susceptibility to violation and exposure is explicit
in one of Munro’s most disquieting depictions of intellectual disability,
“Privilege,” the second story in Who Do You Think You Are? in which
Rose witnesses a sexual assault at school on a young girl by her brother.
Rose cannot empathize with her suffering, signaled through howls of
protest and the jerking of her leg: “An act performed on Franny had no
general significance, no bearing on what could happen to anyone else. It
was only further abuse.”48 Franny’s pronounced vulnerability, her status as
a perennial victim, places her outside Rose’s concerns, reflecting Lauren
Berlant’s observation that some “scenes of vulnerability produce a desire
to withhold compassionate attachment” and thus motivate a “desire to
not connect, sympathize, or recognize an obligation to the sufferer…”.49
The lack of compassion or empathy may be rooted in a threatening
parallel that Rose wishes to disavow. Like Franny, Rose has experienced
abuse; Shortie McGill’s assault on his sister Franny conjures up the
expression “relations performing” for Rose, which recalls how in the pre-
vious story, “Royal Beatings,” Rose considers her own beatings by her
father as ritualized, theatrical events. The occurrence of family violence
links the experiences of the two young girls, contradicting Rose’s belief
that she and Franny are radically different.
If shame is a central affective state for Munro’s protagonists, one way
to view their responses to cognitively disabled characters is as a form of
envy for the lack of self-consciousness they ascribe to those with lesser
intellectual abilities. To be shameless, in a Munrovian world of pervasive
shame and humiliation, is a kind of imperviousness that is paradoxically
also the consequence of such intensified vulnerability that the object of
abuse cannot even contemplate her own experience, cannot reflect on,
and thus resent the violence she is subjected to by indifferent others.
Instead of cultivating self-protective traits, the characters persistently dis-
play intense vulnerability and blatant neediness. In contrast to Rose, who
is conscious of some degree of agency, Franny is utterly abject. Her fate
is summarized briskly: “The use Shortie was making of her, that others
made, would continue. She would get pregnant, be taken away, come
back and get pregnant again, be taken away again. There would be talk
of getting her sterilized…there would be talk of shutting her up, when
she died suddenly of pneumonia, solving the problem.”50 In her ironic

depiction of the “problem” as Franny’s vulnerability, rather than the
exploitative way men used her sexually, Munro accentuates how violence
is defined as a normative rather than an aberrant part of women’s lives.
A similar insight is offered in Lives of Girls and Women. Mary Agnes,
the narrator-protagonist’s cousin, has a relatively mild brain injury from a
traumatic birth; she is not visibly disabled, and her communicative abili-
ties are intact. Despite those relative advantages, and the fact that, unlike
Franny, she is a member of a loving and protective family, she is acutely
vulnerable, while Del refuses to acknowledge that she herself is equally
susceptible to vagaries of accident or assault. Del is aghast at the story of
Mary Agnes’s birth, with its potential “implication…I myself might have
been blunted, all by lack of some nameable, measurable, ordinary thing,
like oxygen.”51 Amelia DeFalco points out that “The possibility of asso-
ciation, of being like Mary Agnes, is a recurrent source of distress for Del
since Mary Agnes’ exaggerated vulnerability is a reminder of Del’s own
vulnerability, which she longs to deny.”52
The consequences of susceptibility to violence are evident in the ellip-
tical story that Del’s mother recounts. Mary Agnes was coaxed out of
her yard by five boys, who “took her out to the fairgrounds and took off
all her clothes and left her lying on the cold mud, and she caught bron-
chitis and nearly died.”53 That account, with its insistent repetition of the
conjunction “and” to create simplified causal links between the events, is
oddly incomplete, suggesting details of the assault had been redacted for
Del’s benefit, although Del fills them in:
I supposed that the degradation…lay in having all her clothes taken off, in
being naked…I thought of Mary Agnes’s body lying exposed on the fair-
grounds, her prickly cold buttocks sticking out—that did seem to me the
most shameful, helpless-looking part of anybody’s body—and I thought
that if it had happened to me, to be seen like that, I could not live on
afterwards.54
Del envisions Mary Agnes, substitutes herself imaginatively, and then

rejects the identification by distinguishing her own fantasized reaction—
certain death—from Mary Agnes’s survival. By casting herself in that
light, Del affirms her own dignity and self-regard at Mary Agnes’s
expense. Crucially, however, the cautionary account of Mary Agnes then
fails, because Del does not connect her mother’s story, and her warning
120 H. T. DARROCH
about avoiding walks with boys, to the invitation that is eventually

proffered: a car ride with a man.
Mary Agnes is associated with seeing and death in two linked
moments that further emphasize her association with bodily vulnera-
bility, cognitive disability, and the power of vision. During a walk, Del
and Mary Agnes discover a decaying cow carcass. Del is both drawn
to it and repulsed; she touches it with a stick and avoids contact with
its face, and especially its eye. Del’s response to the cow is “contempt”
because “being dead, it invited desecration”; yet she also acknowledges
its “power,” and she dares Mary Agnes to touch it.55 Mary Agnes’s
response is shocking when she dares to touch the eye, as if “she knew
I had been wondering about it.” Mary Agnes then threatens Del, con-
veying that power has been transferred to her through her contact with
the eye: “You’d be scared to let me catch you now.”56
In the second scene, Mary Agnes utilizes “shocking strength,” her
“clutch like a bear’s” as she grabs Del’s arm and attempts to maneuver
her to view their Uncle Craig’s body. The imagery recalls Munro’s fre-
quent use of animal similes, although the comparison is then projected
onto Del, who bites Mary Agnes and is accused of being a “mad dog.”57
While ingesting the blood of the disabled other might seem to be a source
of threat that would invoke disgust, Del experiences it as a moment of
terrifying and unfettered freedom; the bite is the most culpable action
she can envision, and she anticipates that it will place her beyond
her family’s care, but also outside the scope of their ability to make
demands on her. Instead, Del’s behavior is excused, an act of forgive-
ness that undermines her sense of freedom and fills her with a “peculiar
shame…far beyond sexual shame” and “helplessness, which was revealed
as the most obscene thing there could be.”58 Ironically, her very attempt
to reject Mary Agnes’s control over her produces the state of abject vul-
nerability that Del feared.
In Munro’s fiction, a lack of empathy repeatedly marks relation-
ships to characters with intellectual disabilities, with Munro’s pro-
tagonists acting out violently or simply ignoring suffering that they
witness. In those disquieting stories, Munro provides a careful elucida-
tion of the nature and impact of stigma experienced by the characters
with those disabilities, and in doing so she models the empathy and
affect that vulnerable characters did not inspire in non-disabled pro-
tagonists in her fiction. By emphasizing vulnerability and the potential
for suffering, Munro demonstrates that the call of the other is founded
not on equivalencies of abilities but on a shared susceptibility to harm.
While her protagonists are reluctant to acknowledge a mutual

vulnerability, it is a potential foundation for compassion. In referring
to how people with cognitive disabilities experience ostracism, stigma,
and dehumanization via animal analogies and repudiation of affiliation,
Munro makes urgent ethical claims on her readers to reconsider their
own complicity in upholding normative values about intelligence. Those
representations connect Munro’s stories of cognitive disability to her
many representations of various forms of disability and bodily trauma,
and are also linked to Munro’s ongoing attention to how the body
invokes shame, humiliation, and disgust, as well as pleasure and comfort.
Notes
1. Cognitive and expressive language disabilities do not always coincide in
Munro’s stories, and she is attentive to how those disabilities are inaccu-
rately perceived to function in tandem.
2. Alice Munro, “Child’s Play,” in Too Much Happiness (Toronto: Penguin,
2010), 195.
3. Robert Thacker, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (Toronto: McClelland
4. Sheila Munro, Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing up with Alice
Munro (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), 43.
5. That is not the case in Munro’s stories in the rare instances where mater-
nal feelings about children with disabilities are depicted.
6. Munro, “Half a Grapefruit,” in Who Do You Think You Are? (Toronto:
Penguin, 1996 [1978]), 55.
7. Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (New York: Vintage Books and Random
House, 2001 [1971]), 215.
8. Michael Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry
Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We
Read (New York and London: New York University Press), 63.
9. While those portrayals have received limited attention, Munro’s work
about adult cognitive decline has been analyzed in many critical discus-
sions, including Wendy Roy’s “The Word is Colander: Language Loss
and Narrative Voice in Fictional Canadian Alzheimer’s Narratives,”
Canadian Literature 203 (Winter 2009): 41–61; and Amelia DeFalco’s,
Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).
10. Alice Munro, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” in Dance of the Happy Shades
(Toronto: Penguin, 2005 [1968]), 198.
11. Munro, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” 198.
122 H. T. DARROCH
12. Katrina Scior, “Public Awareness, Attitudes and Beliefs Regarding

Intellectual Disability: A Systematic Review,” Research in Developmental
Disabilities 32 (2011): 2163–2182.
13. Scior, 2176.
14. Munro’s portrayals of mental illness include the stories “Images”
(Dance of the Happy Shades), “Forgiveness in Families” (Something
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You), Bobby Sherriff in the “Epilogue: The
Photographer” Section of Lives of Girls and Women and “Powers”
(Runaway).
15. Bérubé, 27.
16. Tanya Titchkosky’s important work on disability points out that our point
of reference remains the accommodation of the individual, while the dis-
abling environment is treated as inevitable. See The Question of Access:
Disability, Space, Meaning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).
17. One disability rights movement slogan, “Nothing About Us, Without
Us,” is particularly salient because academic discussions of intellec-
tual disabilities rarely include the perspectives of people who have those
differences.
18. Tom Shakespeare, Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited, 2nd ed.
(London and New York: Routledge, 2014 [2006]), 201.
19. Licia Carlson, The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 57.
20. Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the
Sterilization of Carrie Buck (New York: Penguin Press, 2016).
21. Pamela Block, “Sexuality, Fertility, and Danger: Twentieth-Century
Images of Women with Cognitive Disabilities,” Sexuality and Disability
18, no. 4 (2000): 239–254; and Cecily Devereux, Growing a Race:
Nellie L. McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism (Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
22. Alice Laidlaw Munro, “The Idyllic Summer,” Canadian Forum (August
1954): 107–110.
23. Munro, “The Idyllic Summer,” 107.
24. Martha Nussbaum, “The Capabilities of People with Cognitive
Disabilities,” Metaphilosophy 40, no. 3–4 (2009): 333.
25. Peter Singer, “Chapter 19: Speciesism and Moral Status.” In Cognitive
Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and
Licia Carlson (Chichester and West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell and
Wiley, 2010), 336.
26. Jeff McMahan, “Cognitive Disability, Misfortune and Justice,” Philosophy
& Public Affairs 25, no. 1 (1996): 31. McMahan is more explicit than
Singer in limiting the scope of his arguments, specifying that they are not
applicable to people who are mildly or moderated cognitively disabled.
27. Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson, “Chapter 1: Introduction: Rethinking

Philosophical Presumptions in Light of Cognitive Disability,” in
Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, ed. Feder
Kittay and Carslon (Chichester and West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell
and Wiley, 2010), 1–25.
28. Munro, “Child’s Play,” 195.
29. Ibid., 198.
30. Ibid., 200.
31. Ibid., 213. I am indebted to Amelia DeFalco, who points out that Munro
uses similar chicken imagery to describe the dying man’s body in “Some
Women,” published in 2008 in The New Yorker and included in Too Much
Happiness, alongside “Child’s Play.”
32. Alice Munro, “Menseteung,” in Friend of My Youth (Toronto: McClelland
34. Ibid., 213.
35. Ibid., 197.
36. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
38. Munro, “Privilege,” in Who Do You Think You Are? 32.
Munro’s ‘Child’s Play,’” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies
7, no. 1 (2013): 71–88.
41. Ibid., 200.
42. Ibid., 195.
43. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2004), 88.
44. Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim, “Introduction,” Rethinking
Empathy Through Literature (New York: Routledge, 2014), 7.
45. Lou Agosta, A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of
Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 4.
46. Ildikó de Papp Carrington, Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of
47. Elspeth Probyn, “Writing Shame,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed.
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010), 72.
48. Munro, “Privilege,” 29.
49. Lauren Berlant, “Introduction” to Compassion: The Culture and Politics
of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York and London: Routledge,
2004), 9.
124 H. T. DARROCH
50. Munro, “Privilege,” 32.

51. Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 46.
Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 99.
53. Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 49.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 51.
56. Ibid., 52.
57. Ibid., 62, 63.
58. Ibid., 65.
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———. “Dance of the Happy Shades.” In Dance of the Happy Shades. Toronto:
Penguin, 2006 [1968].
———. “The Time of Death.” In Dance of the Happy Shades. Toronto: Penguin,
2006 [1968].
———. Lives of Girls and Women. New York: Vintage Books and Random
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———. “Privilege.” In Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Penguin, 1996
[1978].
———. “Royal Beatings.” Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Penguin, 1996
[1978].
———. Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Penguin, 1996 [1978].
———. “Menseteung.” Friend of My Youth. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1990.
———. “Child’s Play.” Too Much Happiness. Toronto: Penguin, 2010.
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CHAPTER 7
Alice Munro and the Shame of Murder
Susan Warwick
A middle-aged man kills his wife and then himself, three boys dis-
cover the drowned body of a possible murder victim, a father kills his
three young children, a stranger recounts the murder of his family to
a dying woman, a disabled child is drowned by two of her fellow sum-
mer campmates. These acts and accounts of murder stand at the heart
of five of Alice Munro’s stories—“Fits,” “The Love of a Good Woman,”
“Dimensions,” “Free Radicals,” and “Child’s Play.” Published between
1986 and 2009, the five stories form a cluster of narratives that, in their
representations of those who enact and endure murder, provoke fun-
damental questions about the human capability to inflict fatal violence
upon the bodies of others. As the ultimate manifestation of the denial
of the other, foremost among the questions that murder incites are
those which circulate around the ethical demand that the other makes
upon the self. Emmanuel Levinas writes, “in ethics, the other’s right
to exist has primacy over my own, a primacy epitomized in the ethical
edict: you shall not kill, you shall not jeopardize the life of the other.”
Yet Levinas also paradoxically contends that “the face of the other in
its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the tempta-
tion to kill, and the call to peace, the ‘you shall not kill’”1 (1996, 167).
S. Warwick (*) 
York University, Bolton, ON, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_7
128 S. WARWICK
Standing in the space between the temptation to kill and the ethical
edict, the moment of murder’s potential execution brings into stark relief
the choice between repudiation and responsibility that marks all encoun-
ters with those other to the self.
Importantly, as Colin Davis argues‚ “Levinas offers an account of
the subject as ethical in its very foundations, involved in ethical rela-
tions whether it likes it or not. This does not mean that I cannot behave
unethically;…For Levinas, the ethical is the condition of my existence
whatever the worth or worthlessness of my actions.”2 In other words,
the fact that the subject’s encounter with the other is inescapably ethical
does not necessitate or dictate that the subject will respond to the other
in an ethical way, respond with respect and nonviolence. Emphatically,
murder provokes these questions: If the other’s right to exist has ethical
authority over my own, and yet my response to the other is the desire
to kill, on what grounds is that desire annulled? On what grounds does
the ethical edict break down and allow the fulfillment of the temptation?
Phrased differently, what prompts the desire to kill another? What arrests
that desire?
As Judith Butler inquires and observes of Levinas:
Why would it be that the very precariousness of the Other would produce
for me a temptation to kill? Or why would it produce the temptation to
kill at the same time that it delivers a demand for peace. Is there something
about my apprehension of the Other’s precariousness that makes me want
to kill the Other? Is it the simple vulnerability of the Other that becomes a
murderous temptation for me? If the Other, the Other’s face, which after
all carries the meaning of this precariousness, at once tempts me with mur-
der and prohibits me from acting upon it, then the face operates to pro-
duce a struggle for me, and establishes this struggle at the heart of ethics.3
Butler speculates here, almost counterintuitively, that it is not apprehension

of the power and strength of the Other that provokes the desire to kill,
but rather the Other’s helpless vulnerability. Butler further suggests that
the recognition of an “injurability” in the face of the Other “means to be
awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of
life itself.”4 Such “awakeness” calls into play, as it were, a fear about one’s
own mortality, a fear that seemingly might be allayed by acting on the
“murderous temptation” to eliminate the defenseless Other. What is inti-
mated here is that apprehension of the Other’s precariousness speaks the
7 ALICE MUNRO AND THE SHAME OF MURDER 129
self’s anxiety about its own continued existence and identity, an anxiety
that the self, misguidedly and mistakenly, imagines can be alleviated by the
absolute denial of the Other. As Roger Burggraeve, in his consideration of
the subject of murder in Levinas’s work, argues:
Murder…renounces absolutely all “comprehension” of the other, for one

no longer wishes to include the other in the “same,” that is, in one’s own
project of existing, but on the contrary, to exclude him, because he is “too
much” in the way of one’s struggle for identity. Murder manifests itself as
the effort and realization of an inexorable struggle for omnipotence: The I
plays not “all or nothing” but “all and nothing.”5
As such, Joshua James Shaw writes: “Murder might be said to repre-

sent a certain fantasy of isolation and insulation,”6 a desire to repudiate
and foreclose the call that others make upon the self in its own strug-
gle for identity amid the precariousness of life. But, as Butler main-
tains, “if the first impulse towards the other’s vulnerability is the desire
to kill, the ethical injunction is precisely to militate against that first
impulse.”7
In Munro’s stories of murderous acts and subjects, we witness an
ongoing exploration of that pivotal moment between the foundational
command of the ethical encounter of self and Other—the “you shall not
kill”—and the deadly abrogation of that command. If the original ethi-
cal moment, in the Levinasian configuration, arises when the self is met
by the presence of the Other, that moment does not necessarily herald
an ethical response. As Davis underscores, “the fact that the encounter
with the Other is ethical does not mean I will respond to it in an ethical
way”8 (49). Significantly, in the developmental arc of these stories over
Munro’s writing career, there is an intriguing trajectory to be observed
in the shift from an attention to murder as an outside event or action
in the early stories to closer confrontation with the subject who mur-
ders in the stories that come later, a movement that brings into clearer
focus that moment when the ethical injunction fails to militate against
the first impulse to kill, the moment when responsible subject becomes
murderer.
Of equal consequence and concern, these stories also evocatively engage
the issue of how those who are called upon as witnesses to such lethal
acts become implicated in the subject of murder. As Belinda Morrissey
writes, “Murders traumatize…not only in their persistent reminders that
130 S. WARWICK
non-being is the ultimate and inevitable end for all beings, but also in their
uncomfortable confirmation of every individual’s power to force others to
undergo the terror of non-being, the appalling transformation from person
to expellable detritus, waste, corpse.”9 While the act of murder, in its fun-
damental manifestation, takes place between killer and victim alone, there
are always others included and implicated in its effects and consequences.
As Judith Butler establishes, “within the ethical frame of the Levinasian
position, we begin by positing a dyad…but there are always more than two
subjects at play in the scene.”
Indeed, I may decide not to invoke my own desire to preserve my life as a

justification for violence, but what if violence is done to someone I love?
What if there is an Other who does violence to another Other? To which
Other do I respond ethically? Which Other do I put before myself? Or do
I then stand by?10
What propels and compels Munro’s narratives of murder are thus simul-
taneously questions about the human capacity for murder and questions
about how to respond to the deadly enactment of that capacity.
Making Meaning of Murder

The fact that Munro’s work has been marked by an ongoing interest
in manifestations of violence in multifarious forms has received signif-
icant attention by critics, and certainly in critical considerations of the
five individual stories addressed in this chapter.11 That said, her engage-
ment with the singular subject of murder and the murderous subject as
reflected in this grouping of stories has not been taken up in an inte-
grated or interconnected fashion. As a form of violence against others,
murder is unique in that, as W. H. Auden writes, “it abolishes the party
it injures.”12 That the victims of murder cannot speak, cannot offer tes-
timony about the total destruction of being, leaves the struggle to make
sense of, comprehend, to respond to murder’s deadly enactment to those
family, friends, neighbours, and onlookers, who encounter its aftermath.
And in its intentionality, its determined destruction of another, the act
of murder produces a particular kind of horror and fear that circulates
around, as Morrissey suggests, every individual’s capacity to force others
to experience “the terror of non-being.”
In all five stories, as we witness the ongoing and anxious attempts of

the many individuals affected by acts of murder to locate the explana-
tory grounds for their occurrence, to make meaning of murder, not sur-
prisingly it is the language of incomprehensibility that first marks those
efforts. In “Fits,” as the community of Gilmore struggles to under-
stand the murder-suicide of Nora and Walter Weebles, “the talk turned
to reasons…Nobody knew the reason, nobody could imagine,”13 while
Enid in “The Love of a Good Woman,” having heard from her patient
Jeannette Quinn, the story of her husband Rupert’s possible murder of
Dr. Willens years earlier, wrestles with “[what] had happened–or what
she had been told had happened–on one side. What to do about it on
the other.”14 For Marlene in “Child’s Play,” the recollection of her
involvement in the killing of a childhood campmate, Verna, leads her
to wonder if “[t]his could have been an accident…in the sense that we
did not decide anything, in the beginning.”15 Attendant upon this lan-
guage of the incomprehensibility of murder as act is the underlying cul-
tural notion that “there is something intrinsically different, unique, and
exceptional about those who kill”16 (Downing, 1). However, despite
the seeming impossibility of making sense of murder, it remains, as
Emmanuel Levinas informs us, “a banal fact; one can kill the Other.”17
Clearly the ethical injunction against murder has lost its hold in the
encounter with the other in these five stories, and the immediate effect
of that lost purchase is equally plain and clear: the body of the other
transformed to corpse. In reading relatively little about the moment of
murder itself in the five stories, the implication is that the act of the cata-
strophic annihilation of another being has become prosaic and ordinary,
has indeed become Levinas’s “banal fact.” While Munro is unquestion-
ably interested in the reasons for the failure of the ethical command
against murder, she is equally engaged with the question of what is called
for as response to the possibility and the fact of murder.
In her analysis of Levinas’s reflections on murder, Lisa Guenther
writes:
At the very moment I am commanded not to murder, I appear to myself

as both a murderer and a responsible subject…Shame is Levinas’ name for
the radical ambivalence of this moment as a pivot-point between murder
and ethics, between violence and goodness…In a sense, all of Levinas’
work could be read as a sustained meditation on ethical shame, under-
stood as a feeling of remorse and responsibility for the suffering of others,
whether or not I have done anything to cause this suffering.18
132 S. WARWICK
Here Guenther takes up not only the issue of the Levinasian encoun-
ter with the face of the Other that tempts to murder and calls to peace,
but equally importantly the affective response to the experience of that
ambivalent moment, the feeling or sense of shame. Why shame? For
Levinas, as for others, shame looks to the self and foregrounds a rela-
tionship in which the other sees what the self does not wish to show
or have seen. Thus, the feeling of shame arises not only when we have
acted poorly, but also simply when we feel exposed before the face of the
Other. As Guenther argues, “Shame itself is neither good nor evil, but
is rather the feeling of inescapable exposure to these alternatives posed
by the face of the Other”19—the simultaneous call to violence and to
goodness. In what follows, these related issues of the interdiction against
murder called for in the encounter with the face of the other, the fail-
ure of that interdiction, and the experience of shame as both exposure
before the other and as “remorse and responsibility for the suffering of
others” give shape to a consideration of Munro’s work and the subject of
murder.
Munro and the Subject of Murder

Munro’s engagement with the matter of murder begins with the murder-
suicide of Nora and Walter Weebles in “Fits.” Before going to work on
a cold January morning, Peg Kuiper makes her way over to the
home of her neighbours, the Weebles. Receiving no response to her
repeated knocks on their side door, and finding the door unlocked,
Peg “stepped into the shelter and called…She called again from the liv-
ing room doorway…No answer.”20 Reflecting later on her discov-
ery of the bodies of Nora and Walter, Peg thinks “[s]he must have
known then or she would have called” again.21 Instead she makes
her way across the living room and up the stairs to the house’s sec-
ond floor. Peg’s decision to climb the stairs to the Weebles’ bed-
room, all the while knowing on some instinctive level what she will
find there, and her subsequent failure to exhibit the anticipated reac-
tion to the dreadfulness of her discovery, have been read variously as a
sign of her “moral alienation,”22 of a “morbid fascination,”23 and of
“a frozen, rigid, and deeply repressed nature.”24 In the days follow-
ing the murder-suicide, the residents of the town drive by the Weebles’
home “to see where it happened,”25 visit Peg in the hope of hearing
more about her discovery of the bodies, and her son Kevin asks “Was
there blood and guck all over?”26 As her husband reflects, “[p]erhaps
they wanted from Peg just some kind of acknowledgment, some word or
look that would send them away, saying ‘Peg Kuiper is absolutely shat-
tered’,”27 but she remains “shockingly serene.”28 Compounding the dis-
concerting impression of her emotional detachment from the horror of
the dead bodies found at the top of the stairs is the discrepancy between
her version of what she saw there and that of the official police report.
Describing the scene to her husband Robert, Peg says “Then I saw his
leg, I saw his leg stretched out into the hall, and I knew then, but I had
to go in and make sure.”29 But Robert has already learned that “the force
of the shot threw Walter Weeble backward…His head was laying out in
the hall. What was left of it was laying out in the hall.”30 Virginia Pruitt
suggests that while the reason for Peg’s altered version of what she wit-
nessed remains elusive, the brutality of the scene may remind her of vio-
lent exchanges with her first husband, and as a result “she instinctively
engages in the defense mechanisms of suppression and displacement.”31
More than suppression or displacement, what Peg’s altered account illu-
minates is the experience of shame understood as “everything we would
like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover up.”32 “Not a leg. Not the
indicative leg, whole and decent in its trousers, the shod foot. That was
not what anybody turning at the top of the stairs would see and would
have to step over, step through, in order to go into the bedroom and
look at the rest of what was there.”33 What Peg has “to step over, step
through” in the bloody remains of Walter Weeble offers her both bare
and powerful evidence of the human capacity for deadly violence, and a
stark reminder of all that she cannot forget or disavow about the brutality
of her relationship with her first husband. As she and Robert discuss the
Weebles’ deaths, her son Clayton tellingly reminds her of the fights she
and his father used to have, fights that made him think that one of them
“was going to come and kill [him] with a knife.”34 Peg’s first response
to this is curious; she simply says “That’s not true.” As Clayton insists
that this is indeed true, indeed what he thought, Robert tries to shift the
conversation by suggesting that such an event as the murder-suicide of
the Weebles was “a fit, a freak occurrence” and looks to Peg to confirm
that their marriage is not subject to such “fits.” “But Peg was looking at
Clayton. She who always seemed pale and silky and assenting, but hard to
follow as a watermark in fine paper, looked dried out, chalky, her outlines
fixed in steady, helpless, unapologetic pain.”35 In Peg’s “steady, helpless,
unapologetic pain” can be read the experience of ethical shame. In her
134 S. WARWICK
initial denial of the legitimacy of her son’s felt fear about the possibility
that the violent exchanges between his parents might result in his mur-
der, Peg endeavors to push aside recognition of that pivotal point between
murder and responsibility. But as she finally and fully looks at Clayton,
acknowledges his vulnerability, we understand the deaths of the Weebles
have led her to confront, without apology, the steady and helpless pain of
her own involvement in and responsibility for the suffering of others.
A similar moment of confrontation with the affects and effects of
murder awaits Enid in “The Love of a Good Woman.” Structured with
a prologue followed by four titled sections of varying length, the nar-
rative opens with a description of the contents of a museum in Walley
which include “a red box, which has the letters D. M. WILLENS,
OPTOMETRIST printed on it.” The note beside it establishes that the
box “belonged to Mr. D. M. Willens, who drowned in the Peregrine
River” and that it had “escaped the catastrophe.”36 Following the first
section, “Jutland,” in which three young boys discover the body of Dr.
Willens in his partially submerged car, we arrive at what Brad Hooper
describes as “the story’s story: the actual heart of the narrative, which, it
is to be assumed, will explain the first section, at least the background to
Dr. Willens’ strange, fatal accident.”37 What we ultimately know about
that strange and fatal accident remains, in characteristic Munro narra-
tive fashion, obscure and elusive. What we read are versions of the story
that Jeannette Quinn tells Enid, her caregiver, just days before she dies,
a story of murder that may or not be true. In brief outline, the story
that Enid hears, and with which she must then contend, is that during
one of Dr. Willens’s regular visits to examine Mrs. Quinn’s eyes, visits in
which he subjects her to repeated acts of sexual violence, her husband,
Rupert, “supposed to be cutting wood down by the river,” had “sneaked
back” and “opened the door to this room just easy, till he saw Mr.
Willens there on his knees holding the thing up to her eye and he had
the other hand on her leg to keep his balance.”38 Quickly taking in what
he sees happening between his wife and the optometrist, a scene we are
led to assume he interprets, and correctly we believe, as sexual, Rupert
“landed on Mr. Willens like a bolt of lightning” and “banged his head
up and down on the floor…banged the life out of him.”39 Confronted
with the reality of Mr. Willens’s dead body, “the stuff coming out of his
mouth…that looked exactly like when the froth comes up when you’re
boiling the strawberries to make jam,” Jeanette and Rupert determine to
place him in his car and drive it into the river at Jutland where “it could
look like he just drove in from the road and mistook his way.”40
As Enid grapples with the implications of what Mrs. Quinn has told
her about Rupert’s murder of Dr. Willens, even “moving her body shook
up the information that she was trying to arrange in her head and get
used to.”41 In conversation with the Quinn children, Sylvie and Lois,
Enid wonders “if a person does something bad, do they have to be pun-
ished?” and concludes that punishment is indeed called for “because
of how bad they are going to feel, in themselves. Even if nobody did
see them and nobody ever knew.”42 As she imagines how she will con-
front Rupert with what Mrs. Quinn has told her about his murder of
Dr. Willens, to ask about its truth, and if true, to encourage him “to
tell,” she fantasizes that she will ask him to take her out to the middle of
the river where she could get a picture of the riverbank. That fantasizing
takes her in various directions from consideration of the possibility that,
confronted with her knowledge of the murder, he will kill her as well, or
that he will hate her for asking, especially if the story is a lie, or that he
will decide to confess, to tell. That final possibility propels Enid into a
further fantasy where she imagines that
…she will go to see him in jail. Every day, or as often as they will let her, she
will sit and talk to him in jail, and she will write him letters as well…And in
court – yes, every day in court, she will be sitting where he can see her.
She does not think anyone would get a death sentence for this sort of
murder, which was in a way accidental, and was surely a crime of passion,
but the shadow is there, to sober her when she feels that these pictures of
devotion, of a bond like love but beyond love, are becoming indecent.43
But it is also suggested that Enid will not act upon her imagined
confrontation with Rupert as she contemplates, even hopes, that
Mrs. Quinn’s story is “all lies.”
Could a person make up something so detailed and diabolical? The answer

is yes. A sick person’s mind, a dying person’s mind, could fill up with all
kinds of trash and organize that trash in a most convincing way. Enid’s
own mind, when she was asleep in this room, had filled up with the most
disgusting inventions, with filth. Lies of that nature could be waiting
around in the corners of a person’s mind, hanging like bats in the corners,
waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness.44
136 S. WARWICK
Unlike Peg Kuiper in “her steady, helpless, unapologetic pain,” Enid’s

encounter with murder, or its possibility, may, it is intimated, lead else-
where. While she acknowledges, if only to herself, that she believes the
story to be true, she endeavors to turn away from the implications of
that recognition.
…It was still before. Mr. Willens had still driven himself into Jutland Pond,
on purpose or by accident. Everybody still believed that, and as far as
Rupert was concerned Enid believed it, too. And as long as this was so,
this room and this house and her life held a different possibility…all she
needed to do was keep quiet and let it come. Through her silence, her
collaboration in a silence, what benefits would bloom. For others, and for
herself…This was how to keep the world habitable.45
In resisting the call of the ethical shame that knowledge of murder must
compel, Enid seemingly chooses instead the shelter of a shared and col-
laborative unspeaking. And yet there remains something else in play. In
the immediate aftermath of hearing Jeannette’s story of the murder of
Mr. Willens, we read that every movement of Enid’s body becomes “an
effort,” that every move “jammed her thoughts together” as she strug-
gles with “what to do about it.”46 The disturbing intensity of those
moments eventually lead her outside and down to the riverbank where
she watches “a plain old rowboat being lifted very slightly, lifted and let
fall…as if it could say something to her. And it did. It said something
gentle and final. You know. You know.”47 It is to the liminal space between
the imagined benefits that would bloom from her silence, her repudia-
tion of the necessity of punishment for doing “something very bad,” and
the acknowledgment of what she knows to be the truth that the story’s
enigmatic ending takes us. Here “the boat was waiting, riding in the
water, just the same.”48 We do not know what follows with any certainty,
whether Enid heads out in the boat with Rupert and confronts him
with the story of the murder or not; we never know if he does indeed
kill her.49 What we do know is that both in the immediate aftermath of
hearing Jeannette’s story of the murder and in the ambivalent moments
of deciding whether to confront Rupert with what she has heard, we
find Enid at the riverbank watching the motion of an old rowboat.
The differences between these two scenes are telling. While in the first
scene, the movement of the boat says to her “You know. You know,” in
the second, as she concentrates “on the motion of the boat, a slight and
secretive motion, she could feel as if everything for a long way around
had gone quiet.”50 What emerges in the space between the acknowledg-
ment of what she “knows” and the implicit desire for a quieting of that
knowledge is the register of the experience of shame.
As Enid imagines a future with Rupert in which “she would make this
house into a place that had no secrets from her and where all order was
as she had decreed,” the wish to clean up, shut out, the failures of her
past encounters with others and her own “indecent” desires speaks to
the hope of an escape from the experience of shame, but the narrative
suggests that such escape may not be easily achieved.51 As she prepares
for the boat ride with Rupert, Enid smells “under the whiskey the bit-
ter breath that came after a sleepless night and a long harsh day…the
deeply sweat-soaked skin of a hardworked man that no washing…could
get quite fresh,” and we are reminded of the revulsion at the body’s
secretions and behaviors that permeates the narrative.52 As Dennis Duffy
writes, “‘The Love of a Good Woman’ reeks of semiwashed bodies, of
the dead and the dying, of soiled stockings, of greasy frying pans, of sour
milk and stale food, of dried semen and feverish sweat. The body here
is indeed sown in corruption.”53 As Enid tends the dying Mrs. Quinn,
someone she acknowledges that she cannot, and cannot even want to,
comfort, she expresses her deep-seated dislike of “this particular body,
all the particular signs of its disease. The smell of it and the discolora-
tion, the malignant-looking nipples and the pathetic ferretlike teeth.”54
Arising from this disgust and revulsion is her subsequent refusal to com-
fort Mrs. Quinn at the moment of her death, a refusal that exposes the
failure to answer the call of the vulnerable other. And during the nights
when she sleeps in Mrs. Quinn’s room, her dreams of copulation “with
utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners. With fat squirmy babies or
patients in bandages or her own mother” find her waking to “shame
and disbelief…shivering with disgust and humiliation.”55 At the story’s
conclusion, Enid, despite her desire for a life of “different possibility,”
remains suspended between the shame and humiliation of the body
“sown in corruption” and the imagined hope of an ordered and “habit-
able” world, a suspension generated from the affects and effects of mur-
der’s story.
In “Free Radicals,” readers are presented with another scene of mur-
der that comes by way of a story told, albeit gruesomely accompanied
this time by photographic evidence as visible proof of the reality of the
victims’ dead and destroyed bodies. At the beginning of the story, we
138 S. WARWICK
are introduced to Nita, a widow still struggling to come to terms with

her husband’s sudden and unexpected death as well as her own impend-
ing death from terminal cancer. As she wakes each morning in the home
that she and her husband Rich once shared, her thoughts revolve around
“the places where Rich was not,”—bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, deck,
study—in the attempt to firmly fix and establish “his absence.”56 Then,
on one such morning, as she opens the front door to let the breeze in,
a man appears outside the screen door claiming to be there to check
on her fuse box. That this is not the real reason for his arrival does not
take long to establish as he does not depart after his supposed check on
the fuse box, instead asking Nita if she could fix him something to eat.
Sitting at her kitchen table, he explains that his real interest is the car
sitting in the driveway, having walked all night from his home for rea-
sons yet unknown. Nita knows that “he wanted her to ask what he had
done,” but she resists the unspoken request. However, despite her appeal
that he leave, he proceeds to tell her the story of “what he has done.” As
prelude to that story, he shows her a photograph.
It was a photograph of three people, taken in a living room with closed

floral curtains as a backdrop. An old man – not really old, maybe in his
sixties – and a woman of about the same age were sitting on a couch. A
very large younger woman was sitting in a wheelchair drawn up close to
one end of the couch…it was the younger woman who monopolized the
picture. Distinct and monstrous in her bright muumuu, dark hair done up
in a row of little curls along her forehead, cheeks sloping into her neck.
And in spite of all that bulge of flesh an expression of some satisfaction and
cunning.57
There is, of course, another photograph to be shown and seen. In this

one “The old man’s head was fallen sideways, the old woman’s back-
wards. Their expressions were blown away. The sister had fallen forward
so there was no face to be seen, just her great flowery swathed knees
and dark head with its elaborate and outdated coiffure.”58 Between
the moments when the “before and after” photographs were taken, we
learn that, as the man’s parents and sister wait for the first to develop,
he took out his “nice little gun” and “bin-bang-bam” shot “the works
of them.”59 The explanation he offers for those murders is, in his mind,
simple and clear. Having initially been told that his parents’ house would
be his upon their deaths, he has now learned that this arrangement is
contingent upon his agreement that his sister also remain in the house
and that he take care of her for as long as she lives, a sister he already has
described as “born funny,” who “set out to torment” him in whatever
ways she could.
As Nita listens to the story, one told with detached and cold compo-
sure, she, unsurprisingly, becomes increasingly frightened, and acknowl-
edges that “the fact that she was going to die within a year refused to
cancel out the fact that she might die now.”60 What follows is, in many
respects, curious. After the intruder asks her if she thinks he’s a mur-
derer, immediately asserting that “Yeah, I killed them but I’m not a
murderer,” Nita offers that “there’s a difference” and tells him that she
knows “what it’s like to get rid of somebody who has injured you,” that
she has done the same as he did.61 It is difficult to determine exactly
how to interpret Nita’s subsequent “confession” of her murder by poi-
son of her husband’s lover, a woman whom she describes as threaten-
ing the breakup of her marriage, since we know that it was Nita herself
who occasioned, in part, the collapse of Rich’s marriage to his first wife,
Bett. Perhaps it can simply be read as an effort to form a bond of shared
complicity with the intruder to ward off her own death at his hands.
However, another possibility is that in witnessing, by way of story and
photograph, the suffering of the man’s parents and sister, Nita comes
to an acknowledgment of her shameful contribution to the suffering
she caused another. “Later, when she and Rich had settled down, she
became somewhat embarrassed to think how readily she had played the
younger woman, the happy home wrecker, the lissome, laughing, trip-
ping ingénue.”62
In the extensive detail of Nita’s fabricated story of her murder of her
husband’s lover come further indications of the shame she feels for the
suffering she caused another. Rather than “the happy home wrecker,” in
this instance Nita becomes the injured party, the one who will be kicked
out “for this useless whiner who worked in the registrar’s office.”63 In
putting herself in the place of the abandoned Bett, and imaginatively
transforming her into a murderer, Nita offers both a reflection on the
ways in which the ethical edict against killing can gain ground and justifi-
cation and on her shameful complicity in the pain of another. As she tells
the intruder, “I had done everything for him…He was my whole life…
She poisoned my life so I had to poison hers.”64 More intriguing than
this rather predictable explanation for murder’s assumed necessity are
Nita’s accounts of herself in this inverted story. “She was one of those
140 S. WARWICK
girls who had rheumatic fever as a child and coasted along on it, can’t
play sports or do anything much…She’d have got sick on him, almost
certainly. She was just the type. She’d have been nothing but a burden to
him.”65 What we read here is Nita’s shame-driven assessment of herself—
her inability to do all that Bett had done, her humiliation in the face of
her dying body, her failure to her husband—an assessment that emerges
through the recognition of the suffering that her actions as “the happy
home wrecker” had occasioned for another.
The difficult acknowledgment of one’s involvement in the suffering of
others also stands at the center of Doree’s experience in “Dimensions.”
When we first encounter Doree, she is on a bus traveling to visit her
husband, Lloyd, in London. As the story unfolds we learn that Lloyd
is in a secure psychiatric institution having been found criminally insane
in the murders of their three young children a few years earlier. Again
as elsewhere, we read little about the actual acts of murder, only their
ultimate result. “Dimitri still in his crib, lying sideways. Barbara Ann on
the floor beside her bed, as if she’d got out or been pulled out. Sasha
by the kitchen door – he had tried to get away. He was the only one
with bruises on his throat. The pillow had done for the others.”66 As
explanation for these horrific acts, Lloyd offers only that he had killed
the children to “save them the misery…of knowing that their mother
had walked out on them,” telling Doree with bleak and pitiless calm,
that she had brought it all on herself.67 While Doree’s immediate reac-
tion to the brutal deaths of her children is primal and visceral, the years
that follow elicit other responses that speak to different and more com-
plicated affects and effects. Doree’s initial response to the sight of her
dead children, “holding her arms tight across her stomach as if she had
been sliced open and was trying to keep herself together,”68 is presented
as “a non-conscious experience of intensity” registered in the body as a
force, an affective response from which others will inevitably ensue. If
affect is understood as “the name we give to those forces – visceral forces
beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital
forces insisting beyond emotion,” it also serves, as Gregory J. Seigworth
and Melissa Gregg argue, “to drive us toward movement, toward
thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us…that can even
leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability.”69 On the
surface, it might appear that Doree’s struggle to comprehend the mer-
ciless reality of her children’s murders leads her to a recognition of her
guilty complicity in them, a state of suspension that precludes movement
and extension, as if she in some way accepts Lloyd’s accusation that she
had precipitated his murderous acts by leaving the house that night, and
more importantly by failing throughout their relationship to acknowl-
edge his unquestionable mental instability. On the night of the murders,
having escaped to her friend Maggie’s house, to wait until Lloyd “was
scared out of his craziness,”
…Doree didn’t want to blurt out the whole truth and let Maggie know
that she herself was at the heart of the problem. More than that, she
didn’t want to have to explain Lloyd. No matter how worn out she got
with him, he was still the closest person in the world to her, and she felt
that everything would collapse if she were to bring herself to tell someone
exactly how he was, if she were to be entirely disloyal.70
It is more than a feeling of guilt that is in play in Doree’s efforts to come

to terms with her implication in the murders of her children. It is shame.
Stanley Cavell writes, “Under shame, what must be covered up is not
your deed, but yourself. It is a more primitive emotion than guilt, as
inescapable as the possession of the body, the first object of shame.”71
A critical moment in this regard arises as Doree considers “the thought
that Lloyd, of all people, might be the person she should be with now.”
I didn’t say ‘forgive,’ she said to Mrs. Sands in her head. I would never say
that. I would never do it.
But think. Aren’t I just as cut off by what happened as he is? Nobody
who knew about it would want me around. All I can do is remind people
of what nobody can stand to be reminded of.
Disguise wasn’t possible, not really. That crown of yellow spikes was
pathetic.72
While it might be argued that Doree’s contemplation, after the deaths

of her children, that her only “use…in the world” was “at least to listen
to him” speaks to an acknowledgment of her complicity in those deaths,
there is another possible dynamic in play here. It is not that Doree
accepts guilt for the deed, but that she experiences, through her imme-
diate connection with the children’s murders, ethical shame, the “feeling
of remorse and responsibility for the suffering of others, whether or not
I have done anything to cause this suffering.” And her disconnection from
others can be understood as grounded in the desire of those others to
keep that feeling at bay. What nobody can stand to be reminded of is
not simply the horrific deaths of three children, but the potential capac-
ity of each and everyone to cause the suffering of others. Doree is not a
142 S. WARWICK
murderer, but her experience of murder’s affects and effects positions her
as the repository of the ethical shame that arises as remorse and responsi-
bility for the suffering of others.
If none of the central figures in the stories considered thus far occupy
the ground of the murderous subject, except by way of possibility or
invention, this is clearly not the case with “Child’s Play.” Here the killing
of Verna, a disabled child at a summer camp, by Charlene and Marlene,
two of her fellow campmates speaks compellingly about the provoca-
tion to murder that arises in the encounter with the “precariousness and
defenselessness” of the face of the Other and of the failure of the ethical
injunction against acting upon that provocation. From the outset of the
story, we know that something “awful” has happened, but Munro’s nar-
rative strategy of delay forestalls, until the end, our encounter with that
awful something: Verna’s murder by drowning at the hands of Charlene
and Marlene. Yet there is an unsettling and apprehensive sense of the
inevitability of that awful moment as we are led through the narrative
by Marlene’s recollections of her past relationships with both Verna and
Charlene.
For Dilia Narduzzi “Child’s Play” foregrounds the ways in which
affect operates as a constitutive part of a system that works to exclude
non-normative bodies and she regards the murder of Verna by Marlene
and Charlene as “an example of the way to imagine affect’s effects.”73
Throughout her analysis, Narduzzi offers a detailed reading of the
ways in which feelings of disgust and fear regarding Verna’s disabled
body govern the responses of Charlene and Marlene to her, and lead
to her eventual murder. Without question, “Child’s Play” is replete
with instances of revulsion and aversion to Verna that are determined
by disgust at her physical and mental differences from the able-bodied
Charlene and Marlene, a disgust not unlike that of the intruder in “Free
Radicals” toward his “monstrous” sister, and the fear of possible contam-
ination that would result from contact with such a body. There is even
the fear, unfounded as it may be, that Verna could murder them. But as
the adult Marlene recalls her childhood reactions to Verna, it is clear that
there was something more than disgust and fear at work.
Verna was decently clean and healthy. And it was hardly likely that she
was going to attack and pummel me or pull out my hair. But only adults
would be so stupid as to believe she had no power. A power, moreover,
that was specifically directed at me. I was the one she had her eye on. Or
so I believed. As if we had an understanding between us that could not be
described and was not to be disposed of. Something that clings, in the way
of love, though on my side it felt absolutely like hate.74
Marlene’s recollection of her childhood understanding of her relation-

ship with Verna offers, in brief, an example of Levinas’s theory of the
relationship between self and Other, a relationship that cannot be fully
expressed and that cannot be eradicated. Without the other, the self
has no meaning, but the other also threatens the self. And we recog-
nize here, in the meeting between self and other, the moment when
that encounter prompts the temptation to kill and the call to peace, calls
forth both hate and love.
Given Marlene’s adult perspective throughout “Child’s Play,” with
its assured knowledge of her conscious participation in Verna’s death,
there is a clear understanding of the failure to heed the ethical injunc-
tion against murder. In Marlene’s recollection of the moment of Verna’s
murder, we witness the intense struggle to comprehend and make sense
of that failure, and in its complexity Munro’s shaping of that recollection
calls for close attention.
This could have been an accident. As if we, in trying to get our balance,
grabbed on to this nearby large rubbery object, hardly realizing what it
was or what we were doing. I have thought it all out. I think we would
have been forgiven. Young children. Terrified.
Yes, yes. Hardly knew what they were doing.
Is this in any way true? It is true in the sense that we did not decide
anything, in the beginning. We did not look at each other and decide to
do what we subsequently and consciously did. Consciously, because our
eyes did meet as the head of Verna tried to rise up to the surface of the
water.
…
Charlene and I kept our eyes on each other, rather than looking down
at what our hands were doing. Her eyes were wild and gleeful, as I sup-
pose mine were too. I don’t think we felt wicked, triumphing in our wick-
edness. More as if we were doing just what was – amazingly – demanded
of us, as if this was the absolute high point, the culmination, in our lives,
of our being ourselves.
We had gone too far to turn back, you might say. We had no choice.
But I swear that choice had not occurred, did not occur, to us.75
144 S. WARWICK
Circling between and around the language of self and other, accident
and intention, unconscious action and conscious decision, demand and
injunction, goodness and wickedness, choice and necessity, the scene of
murder offered here is compelling in its evocation of the ethical strug-
gle at the heart of our encounter with the Other. As Marlene wrestles
with the “truth” of what she and Charlene “did,” the leeway of accident
appears as a possible escape from responsibility for Verna’s death.76 But
it is clear from the outset of this remembered event that Marlene knows
that such escape has never been and will never be possible. The “almost
not” apprehension of what “they were doing,” registered in the “hardly
realizing” and “hardly knew,” belies the possibility of the accidental.
Once that possibility is foreclosed, the matter turns then upon questions
of decision and choice. Marlene reflects that “in the beginning” she and
Charlene did not “decide anything,” “did not decide to do what we sub-
sequently and consciously did.” But in the fleeting moments between
beginning and end, on the pivot between murder and ethics, between
violence and goodness, things turn tragically askew. While Marlene wants
to believe, “swears” that “choice had not, did not, occur to us,” she
knows that this is not true. Instead, she knows that they already “had
gone too far to turn back,” knows that the ethical demand presented by
the face of the precarious and defenseless other had already been refused.
That that refusal is understood as “the culmination…of our being our-
selves” is particularly telling in the context of understandings of relations
between self and other.
For Narduzzi “Child’s Play” “is particularly worried about intimacies:
encounters with ‘others’ that have the potential to transform or disrupt
everyday life.”77 But the worry and the anxiety that intimacies engen-
der are not only about disruptions of everyday life, but about assaults
upon the integrity of the self, about the terrifying power of the other in
the self’s struggle for identity. The power that Marlene imagines Verna
directs at her rests, at heart, in her otherness to Marlene, in the elemen-
tal “understanding” between them that “could not be described and was
not to be disposed of.” That inexpressible and inescapable understand-
ing is that which establishes the very condition of existence as ethically
founded in the relation between self and other. It is an understanding
that “clings, in the way of love” and feels “absolutely like hate.” It is
the face of the other that calls at once to peace and to violence. That for
Marlene, the high point of being her “self” finds its culmination in the
annihilation of the “other” speaks to the ultimate failure of the ethical
encounter.
The After of Murder

The provocation to murder and the provocation of murder, murderer and
witness, share common ground in the Munro stories addressed in this
chapter, and in these provocations the register of shame holds particu-
lar weight, both in its disavowal and in its felt affect. While the incite-
ment to murder often seems ordinary and prosaic, sometimes is simply
unknown—adultery, disloyalty, disappointment, aversion—the after
effects of murder, its witnessing and knowledge, obtain a stronger res-
onance in these stories. The evidentiary fact, banal as it is, that one,
anyone, can murder another inevitably inaugurates the difficult work
of response, a response that founds itself in shame. Steven Tudor sug-
gests that it is “shame which connects one to others and the wider social
fabric” and that “the experience of shame can lead one to experience
remorse”78 (179). In Tudor’s account, remorse gains its meaning as a
response “to an original suffering – a meaning which is unavailable to the
original sufferer.” For Elspeth Probyn
There is something pure about shame as a feeling, even as it publicly twists

the very sense of self. Yet, shame always plays on that doubledness of the
public and the private, the extraordinary and the mundane. It is perhaps
the most intimate of feelings but seemingly must be brought into being by
an intimate proximity to others. Shame makes our selves intimate to our
selves, and equally it is social and impersonal…If shame is felt as ‘a sickness
of the soul,’ it is also the affect most clearly placed in the positivity of inter-
est…Shame is the body’s way of registering that it has been interested and
that it seeks to reestablish interest.79
The question of what such reestablishment of interest could and might

entail is answered variously and differently in these five stories. For Peg
Kuiper, possible reparation comes only by way a painful and wordless
acknowledgement of her involvement in the suffering of others. For her
husband, the awareness that he will never be able to ask Peg about the
“discrepancy, a detail, in the midst of so many abominable details” compels
the recognition that “it would never be all right…that it would never have
anything to do with him.”80 In this unspoken acceptance of the difficult,
perhaps forever unbridgeable, but always necessarily approached, space
between self and other, they are not entirely unlike Enid in her ambiva-
lent wavering between silence and speaking, between recognition of the
vulnerability of the other and its denial, between ethical shame and its
refusal. At the ending of “Dimensions,” the shame Doree has carried with
146 S. WARWICK
her following the murders of her children reaches some promise of sur-
render. Traveling to London again to visit her husband, Doree witnesses
an accident in which the driver of a pickup truck flies through the air and
lands in the gravel by the roadside, “a trickle of pink foam” coming out
from under his head that looked “like the stuff you skim off from straw-
berries when you’re making jam.”81 (In its intriguing echo of the descrip-
tion of the injured body’s excretions that look like “the froth” that comes
“when boiling strawberries for jam” in “The Love of a Good Woman,”
we are reminded both of the banality of violence, its ordinary everyday-
ness, and of its seeming incomprehensibility, an incomprehensibility
that turns encounters with it toward linguistic disguise and evasion.) In
Doree’s saving of the boy’s life comes the suggestion that she will need
no longer continue to feel the shame occasioned by her children’s deaths,
a suggestion registered in her final statement that no, she no longer has to
get to London. And for the dying Nita, we are left with her thought that
she should write to Bett to tell her that Rich had died and that “I have
saved my life by becoming you,”82 a thought that carries a tentative but
still present understanding of the pain she had caused Bett. For Marlene,
Munro offers nothing beyond the desolate and fully aware acceptance of
the failure her murderous act signifies. While her friend Charlene seeks
atonement through her religious faith, Marlene finds no redemptive possi-
bility there, or elsewhere. “Was I not tempted, during all this palaver? Not
once? You’d think that I might break open, be wise to break open, glimps-
ing that vast though tricky forgiveness. But no. It’s not for me. What’s
done is done. Flocks of angels, tears of blood, notwithstanding.”83
In the haunting last line of “Child’s Play,” as Verna’s dead body is
seen floating “out there in the water,” Marlene can only say “But
I believe we were gone by then.”84 They are, of course, literally “gone”
from the sight of the dead child whose life they had taken, but more
importantly Marlene and Charlene have “gone” from the ethical
encounter with the precariousness and vulnerability of the Other. Levinas
writes, “At the very moment when my power to kill realizes itself, the
other has escaped me…I have not looked at him in the face, I have not
encountered his face.”85 In acting upon the temptation to kill that the
face of the Other announces, they have failed the primary ethical call
that the Other also and always makes upon the self: thou shall not kill.
For Charlene recognition of this failure can be understood as guilt,
a guilt that she hopes may be assuaged through religious confession
and its attendant forgiveness. For Marlene, however, forgiveness is not
imagined as a possibility. “What’s done is done,” and all that remains is
the shame that attends upon the collapse of the ethical edict, “the feel-
ing of remorse and responsibility for the suffering of others.” But this
remainder is not entirely without promise however, not without hope of
movement forward. For Elspeth Probyn,
Shame is an everyday fact of human bodies and life. Sometimes it leads

to reactionary acts, sometimes it compels close inspection of how we live,
and becomes the necessary force to catalyse an ethics of the everyday: a
visceral commitment to more generous identities, responsibilities and con-
nections…‘the nature of the experience of shame guarantees a perpetual
sensitivity to any violation of the dignity of man.’ (Silvan Tompkins)86
If the act of murder exemplifies the ultimate violation of the ethical rela-
tion between self and other, it is in shamed response to its fatal effect
that the possibility of a restored and deeper understanding of the respon-
sibility we bear for others, in all their precariousness and vulnerability,
is imagined. Murder may well and simply be “done,” but more signifi-
cantly for Munro’s work, murder inaugurates, in its effects and affects,
an ongoing meditation on what the encounter with the face of the other
compels and obliges.
Notes
1. Emmanuel Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” in Basic Philosophical
Writings, ed. Adrian Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 167.
2. Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1996), 53–54 (emphasis added).
3. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
(London: Verso, 2004), 134–135.
4. Ibid.
5. Roger Burggraeve, “Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other: The
Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and Our Responsibility,” in
Emmanuel Levinas: Beyond Levinas, ed. Claire Elise Katz and Lara Trout
(London: Routledge, 2005), 60.
6. Joshua James Shaw, Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics (Amherst:
Cambria Press, 2008), n.p.
7. Butler, Precarious Life, 137.
8. Davis, Levinas, 49.
9. Belinda Morrissey, When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity
(London: Routledge, 2003), 1–2.
148 S. WARWICK
10. Butler, Precarious Life, 139–140.

11. See Sandra Djwa (1981) for an early discussion of psychological violence
in Munro’s writing. See also Ildiko de Papp Carrington (1989) for analy-
sis of the eruption of external violence in Munro’s fiction, and the essays
by Caitlin Charman, John C. Van Rys, Judith McCombs, Virginia Pruitt,
and Heliane Ventura on the stories addressed here.
12. W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an
Addict,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1948, 407.
13. Alice Munro, “Fits,” in The Progress of Love (Toronto: Penguin, 1995),
155.
14. Alice Munro, “The Love of a Good Woman,” in The Love of a Good
Woman (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998), 63.
15. Alice Munro, “Child’s Play,” in Too Much Happiness (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 2009), 221–222.
16. Lisa Downing, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the
Modern Killer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 1.
17. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillipe Nemo
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982), 87.
18. Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the Temporality of Social Life,” Continental
Philosophy Review 44, no. 1 (2011): 28, 33.
19. Ibid., 33.
20. Munro, “Fits,” 146–148.
21. Ibid., 148.
22. Heliane Ventura, “‘Fits’: A Baroque Tale,” in Recherces Anglaises et Nord
Americianes 22 (1989): 94.
23. Ajay Heble, The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 152.
24. Ildiko de Papp Carrington, Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of
25. Munro, “Fits,” 163.
26. Ibid., 160.
27. Ibid., 156–157.
28. Ibid., 162.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 171.
31. Virginia Pruitt, “Alice Munro’s ‘Fits’: Secrets, Mystery and Marital
Relations,” Psychoanalytic Review 89, no. 2 (April 2002): 163.
32. Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape/De l’Evasion (Stanford: Stanford
33. Munro, “Fits,” 171.
34. Ibid., 164.
35. Ibid., 164–165.
36. Munro, “The Love of a Good Woman,” 3.

37. Brad Hooper, The Fiction of Alice Munro: An Appreciation (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 2008), 116.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 59.
41. Ibid., 63.
42. Ibid., 66.
43. Ibid., 73.
44. Ibid., 74.
45. Ibid., 75–76.
46. Ibid., 63.
47. Ibid., 64.
48. Ibid., 78.
49. Judith McCombs contends that on the basis of the appearance in the
Walley museum of Mr. Willens’ equipment case, “Enid did survive to
marry Rupert, then, and to search in all his hidden chambers till she found
the dark-red telltale box where Mrs. Quinn had hidden it,” but other read-
ings of the story point to its insistent absence of closure. See John Gerlach
(2007) who maintains that closure is replaced by an intensified sense of
presentness, of continuing uncertainty, particularly thematic uncertainty.
51. Ibid., 77.
52. Ibid.
53. Dennis Duffy, “‘A Dark Sort of Mirror’: ‘The Love of a Good Woman’ as
Pauline Poetic,” in The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro,
ed. Robert Thacker (Toronto: ECW Press, 1999), 182.
55. Ibid., 51.
56. Alice Munro, “Free Radicals,” in Too Much Happiness (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart Press, 2009), 120.
57. Ibid., 127–128.
58. Ibid., 130.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., 131.
61. Ibid., 132.
62. Ibid., 119.
63. Ibid., 133.
64. Ibid., 133–134.
65. Ibid.
66. Alice Munro, “Dimensions,” in Too Much Happiness (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart Press, 2009), 15.
150 S. WARWICK
67. Ibid., 17.
68. Ibid., 16.
69. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,”
in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg
71. Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Must We Mean What We Say?
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 278.
Munro’s ‘Child’s Play,’” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies
7, no. 1 (2013): 72.
75. Ibid., 222.
76. The possibility of the “accidental murder” here, as in “The Love of a
Good Woman,” draws attention to Munro’s astute understanding that
the lines distinguishing the intentional act of killing another person from
the seemingly involuntary mistake that results in another’s death are rarely
certain and unambiguous demarcations. Two other stories, “The Time
of Death” and “Gravel,” offer evocative representations of that shadowy
space between “accident” and “murder.” Throughout the former, there is
the veiled suggestion that the death of Benny, Patricia’s disabled younger
brother, may have occurred when Patricia created, on purpose, the acci-
dent that scalds him, while the latter quietly intimates that Caro’s acciden-
tal drowning death may have been the result of her older sister deliberately
pushing her into a water-filled gravel pit near their home. While neither
story explicitly describes the deaths as murders, in blurring the distinc-
tions between intention and careless mistake, between murderer and non-
murderer, they speak to Munro’s commitment to engaging the question of
agency, even in the matter of murder, with cautious and careful hesitancy.
77. Narduzzi, “Regulating Affect,” 87.
78. Steven Tudor, Compassion and Remorse: Acknowledging the Suffering
Other (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 179.
79. Elspeth Probyn, “Everyday Shame,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2004):
329.
80. Munro, “Fits,” 169.
82. Munro, “Free Radicals,” 136.
84. Ibid., 223.
85. Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” 9.
86. Probyn, “Everyday Shame,” 346.
Bibliography
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Addict.” Harper’s Magazine (May 1948): 406–412.
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of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and Our Responsibility.” In Emmanuel
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Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London:
Verso, 2004.
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Charman, Caitlin J. “There’s Got to Be Some Wrenching and Slashing: Horror
and Retrospection in Alice Munro’s ‘Fits.’” Canadian Literature 91 (Winter
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the Fiction of Alice Munro.” In Violence in the Canadian Novel Since 1960,
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Memorial University of Newfoundland Press, 1981.
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by Robert Thacker, 169–190. Toronto: ECW Press, 1999.
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———. “Peace and Proximity.” In Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan
Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, 161–170. Bloomington:
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152 S. WARWICK
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———.“The Love of a Good Woman.” In The Love of a Good Woman, 3–78.
———. “Child’s Play.” In Too Much Happiness. Toronto: McClelland and
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———. “Dimensions.” In Too Much Happiness. Toronto: McClelland and
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———. ‘Free Radicals.” In Too Much Happiness, 116–137. Toronto: McClelland
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328–349.
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168. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.
CHAPTER 8
Child’s Play: Ethical Uncertainty

and Narrative Play in the Work of Alice
Munro
Katherine G. Sutherland
In the work of Alice Munro, a disturbing number of children are

abandoned, neglected, harmed or even killed under the care of adults
with whom attachment ideally and ethically should be a mutually con-
structive subjective situation. Even when children are made safe, the
thought of harm may overwrite relief. When the narrator’s young daugh-
ter is saved from drowning in “Miles City, Montana,” for example, the
narrator is unable to focus on the happy outcome, instead thinking,
“I was compelled to picture the opposite…Meg removed from us, Meg’s
body being prepared for shipment.”1 It seems reasonable to wonder why
the narrator is so compelled toward a metafictional self-reflection when
she could spare herself the pain it brings.
In “My Mother’s Dream,” the protagonist wonders, “What is it about
an infant’s crying that makes it so powerful, able to break down the
order you depend on, inside and outside of yourself?”2 Munro’s stories
include many scenes of harm that work to “break down the order you
K. G. Sutherland (*) 
Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_8
154 K. G. SUTHERLAND
depend on, inside and outside of yourself.” Harm to children functions

in Munro’s work as a trope related to complex narratological consider-
ations. In focusing on trauma, particularly to children, Munro’s stories
often exhibit what Lauren Berlant describes in Cruel Optimism as “tem-
poral whiplash,”3 in which “trauma detaches the subject from the his-
torical present”4; Berlant describes “living trauma as whiplash, treading
water, being stuck, drifting among symptoms, and self-forgetting, which
is different from amnesia.”5 In the context of Munro’s fiction, ‘narrator’
might be substituted for “subject” here, and ‘narrative trauma’ for “liv-
ing trauma”; as I discuss below, the affective force of trauma in Munro’s
fiction involves narrative self-forgetting and, paradoxically, intensive
self-reflection. The resultant “drifting” in narrative perspective is not
in the least amnesiac, as Berlant notes of “living trauma,” but rather is
acutely involved in the past, or in past narrative perspectives, particularly
in recollections of childhood by adult narrators.
That “break down” in narrative “order” links to problematic attach-
ments between children and adults and further to a deconstruction
of subjectivity that foregrounds what Brian Massumi calls affective
“force-effects”6 in the narrative rather than a singularity of narrative per-
spective. These force affects flow across boundaries of time and space,
emerging in “webbed…relations” between things, feelings, and charac-
ters and/or narrators in what Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg
describe in the “An Inventory of Shimmers” as a “perpetual becoming”:
…affect is integral to a body’s perpetual becoming (always becoming oth-

erwise, however subtly, than what it already is), pulled beyond its seem-
ing surface-boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed its composition
through, the forces of encounter. With affect, a body is as much outside
itself as in itself—webbed in its relations—until ultimately such firm dis-
tinctions cease to matter.7
In describing “order” as constituted “inside and outside of yourself” and

as something that can be “brok[en] down” by an infant’s cries, Munro
situates characters and narrators in fictional worlds that are in a state of
perpetual deconstruction and reconstruction, “webbed in its relations”—
in this case, the founding attachment relation between mother and child.
This representation of being as fluid, relational, and provisional runs
throughout Munro’s work.
8 CHILD’S PLAY: ETHICAL UNCERTAINTY AND NARRATIVE PLAY … 155
In this chapter I will explore links between Munro’s narrative method

and themes of attachment; this analysis will extend further to the argu-
ment that Munro connects relational and fluid narrative perspectives and
themes of attachment to an ethics of “uncertainty,” to borrow a term
from Brian Massumi’s Politics of Affect: “Ethics…is completely situa-
tional. It’s completely pragmatic. And it happens between people, in the
social gaps. There is no intrinsic good or evil…Ethics are about how we
inhabit uncertainty together.”8 This concept of ethics is not to be con-
fused with moral relativism but rather with a continual renewal of ethical
feeling and action situated in a social collective: ‘being ethical’ is not a
fixed state for Munro’s characters and narrators; it is a process initiated in
response to affective forces and worldly boundaries. Massumi states that,
“the ‘good’ is affectively defined as what brings maximum potential and
connection to the situation.”9 As will be examined, characters and nar-
rators in Munro’s work “inhabit” ethically ambiguous situations, expe-
riences and perspectives without either restrictive self-judgments or easy
self-pardoning but rather as sites of ethical quandary and potential. What
happens at these textual sites is, perhaps, the most interesting aspect of
Munro’s work, and it should be noted that there are often child charac-
ters at those sites. In the following I will explore a set of Munro’s stories
that clearly exemplify that theme, although this selection is by no means
exhaustive.
There are several techniques relating to child characters and narrators
through which Munro explores disrupted narratives and, by extension,
concepts of disrupted subjectivity in her work. First, she consistently
problematizes narrative perspective through a complex deconstruction of
adult narrators who reflect on childhood incidents at a temporal remove.
Second, and closely linked to this, Munro returns to a concept of inco-
herence that reflects an understanding of subjectivity as an ongoing con-
structive process rather than a fixed ontological singularity. Third, even
in the face of such narrative disruption, the characters and/or narrators
seek ethical ways to “inhabit uncertainty together,” although often in
strained or unhappy collectives. Again, child characters or narrators are
often implicated in this process, often in paradoxical terms. For example,
even though children are often shown to be impotent, incoherent, or
even mute in the stories, they are also disarmingly, disturbingly powerful
and disruptive to the text, generating intense affects and often becoming
sites of potent narrative agency. That paradoxical and powerful childish
inscrutability exposes the instability of language, temporality, and per-

formed subjectivities, potentially opening an affective space liberated
from normative habitude. That paradoxical affective space opens into a
kind of ethical potentiality.
In addition to this, Munro’s work contrives a precise but unstable
realism through a writerly technique that enacts supreme control while
simultaneously sabotaging it: her stories defy control, closure, culminat-
ing insights, or even plot certainty, as many critics have noted over the
years. Lorraine McMullen observes that “paradox is central to [Munro’s]
work: her characters are always becoming aware of, and often trying to
come to terms with, the paradoxical nature of the world and of human-
ity.”10 McMullen concludes that “[Munro’s] careful and accurate struc-
turing of situations and juxtaposition of incidents reveal the coexistence
of the bizarre with the ordinary, the genuine with the fraudulent, the
immutable with the transient.”11 Nathalie Foy describes Munro’s obscur-
ing narrative perspective as a darkened nullity or “un” that speaks of
and through difficulty: “The mute spaces…the unarticulated layers, the
uncut gatherings, the unspoken secrets—all remain darkened so that we
may approximate Munro’s sense of her work, that it is mysterious and
difficult.”12
Turning more directly toward children in Munro’s stories, a read-
ing of “Child’s Play” aims directly at the heart of those links between
a self-reflexive and ambiguous narrative perspective, trauma, affective
force, and situational and uncertain ethical acts. In “Child’s Play,” two
girls who meet at summer camp are mistaken for twins because of their
names (Marlene and Charlene) and because of their “coolie hats.”13 The
story opens in media res, with an immediately shifting narrative perspec-
tive that escapes the boundaries of the first-person focalization through
Marlene, the protagonist:
I suppose there was talk in our house, afterwards.

How sad, how awful. (My mother.)
There should have been supervision. Where were the counsellors?
(My father.)
It is possible that if we ever passed the yellow house my mother said,
“Remember? Remember you used to be so scared of her? The poor thing.”
My mother had a habit of hanging on to—even treasuring—the foibles
of my distant infantile state.14
The passage situates the narrative perspective as equivocal—“I suppose”

and “it is possible”—but also shared or at least strongly influenced by
collective memory, the bracketed mother and father, marked as simul-
taneously present and absent through the use of those brackets. It
becomes clear further in the story that the use of a first-person narrator
as a filter for a collective, communal perspective is linked to ethical con-
siderations; the internally focalized narrative perspective is a provisional
singularity, emerging from collective forces, both social and affective.
For example, the narrator’s reflection on the casual racism of her
childhood is linked to the first meeting with Charlene, as both girls wear
“coolie hats”: the image of “coolie hats,” a term taken from the child
perspective of Marlene, is then linked to images from “later on in the
century, from television shots of the war in Vietnam,” that is, images
taken from the perspective of the now adult narrator. The narrator
goes on to reflect that “It was possible at that time—I mean the time
when Charlene and I were at camp—to say coolie, without a thought of
offence. Or darkie, or to talk about jewing a price down.”15 Two impor-
tant things are implied in this case. First, that this casual racism was made
“possible” by social compact; and second, that the narrator recognizes
that this is no longer possible. It is not clear at this point in the story
how the narrator feels about the modern and adult impossibility of say-
ing such things without thinking.
At the time of the events, the child narrator is un-self-reflexive about
her hateful attitude toward the disabled child, Verna, who is the central
antagonist to the narrator’s world view. Verna is described by Marlene as
physically grotesque: “She was skinny, indeed so narrowly built and with
such a small head that she made me think of a snake. Fine black hair lay
flat on this head, and fell over her forehead. The skin of her face seemed
dull to me as the flap of our old canvas tent, and her cheeks puffed out
the way the flap of that tent puffed in a wind [my italics].”16 The narra-
tor dehumanizes Verna in this description, undermining Verna’s agency
with the reference not to “her head” but to “this head.” As the story
unfolds, Marlene are Charlene are so overwhelmed by their shared revul-
sion for Verna that they drown her, the incident cited above and referred
to in the opening passage of the story. Yet despite the intensity of her
hatred of Verna, Marlene does not understand her own childish feelings,
reflecting as an adult that “I suppose I hated her as some people hate
snakes or caterpillars or mice or slugs. For no decent reason. Not for any
certain harm she could do but for the way she could disturb your innards
and make you sick of your life.”17 If Marlene does not know the origin
of her feelings, then where do they come from?
Perhaps the blame for the wicked acts of childhood in “Child’s Play”
does not fall entirely on children, even as the adult narrator continues to
carry the guilt that the child may not feel—yet. Furthermore, wicked,
childish acts are not assigned entirely to individuals in this case; there is
a social responsibility attached to a child and by extension to the acts
of a child. Indeed, beyond the failures of a single child, “Child’s Play”
exposes the failed social attachment of the ‘able’ to the ‘disabled,’ called
“Specials” by camp counsellors. This is an ethical failure of care that
is broad and external to Marlene and Charlene, a social failure with-
out which they might not have acted as they did. That social failure is
partly attributed to adults: “I don’t believe my mother really liked Verna
either,” the narrator writes, and later “Even grown-ups smiled in a cer-
tain way, there was some irrepressible gratification and taken-for-granted
superiority that I could see in the way they mentioned people who were
simple or a few bricks short of a load.”18 In this context, adulthood might
be understood not as an achieved state or perspective but rather as an
unending negotiation between past acts and perspectives and future
selves idealized or imagined in the process of living. There is an unde-
niably naïve or cruel optimism in this narrative perspective: despite the
potential projection of a more ethical future frame, it is explicitly adults
who model the hatred for the “Specials.” Even in the face of that, the
stories sometimes hinge on the optimism of imagined adult perfectibility
as the only pragmatic way to move forward.
The narrator of “Child’s Play” reflects on Verna’s death not only in
the context of her singular history, but also in a relational context (“our
eyes did meet”), wondering how agency (“decide”) and self-reflection
(“consciously”) informed the profoundly unethical, shared act of murder:
Is this in any way true? It is true in the sense that we did not decide any-
thing, in the beginning. We did not look at each other and decide to do
what we subsequently and consciously did. Consciously, because our eyes
did meet as the head of Verna tried to rise up to the surface of the water.19
“The head of Verna” is described as “a dumpling in a stew,” her bathing

cap as “a fish, a mermaid, a flower,”20 as anything but the head of a fel-
low human being. Thus, Marlene and Charlene are affectively detached
from their act, and from any empathy for Verna, sharing instead in the
traumatic moment the unethical uncertainty of a thoughtless impulse.
Their eyes connect and communicate, while their hands, and thus
actions, seem disconnected from a sense of personal or social responsibil-
ity; furthermore, hands and head are not subjectively continuous in this
instance but rather are disconnected body parts (or members) of uncer-
tain, remembered selves:
Charlene and I kept our eyes on each other, rather than looking down at
what our hands were doing. Her eyes were wicked and gleeful, as I sup-
pose mine were too. I don’t think we felt wicked, triumphing in our wick-
edness. More as if we were doing just what was—amazingly—demanded of
us. As if this was the absolute high point, the culmination, in our lives, of
our being ourselves.21
Arguably, this describes a moment of affective intensity a priori to any

formed or felt emotion, such as guilt, that might arrest the harm to
Verna’s body by the paradoxically disembodied but physically brutal
child narrator. In drowning Verna, Charlene and Marlene experience a
kind of affective ecstasy as they detach themselves from any ethical sense
of what it means to feel embodied, vulnerable, empathetic, and human.
Or at least Marlene does; while she assigns glee and wickedness to
Charlene, this is clearly Marlene’s perspective. There is an almost syn-
esthetic confusion there, where one feeling stands in place of another,
that is, glee in place of horror which creates an affective disconnect—or
rather, a purely affective reaction, unmediated by ethical thinking.
Lauren Berlant contends in Cruel Optimism that violence is desira-
ble precisely because it produces a state of affective suspension: “forms
associated with ordinary violence remain desirable—perhaps because of
a kind of narcotic/utopian pleasure in their very familiarity.”22 Notably,
Berlant places the children in the films La Promesse and Rosetta in a rela-
tion to violence different from adults: “children do not know fully what
they are doing, flinging themselves at life in order to be in proximity
to a feeling of something that is strangely both enigmatic and simplify-
ing [author’s italics].” She adds of the child characters, “both children
are impulsive: they act urgently to calibrate life in an affective economy
and then make emotional sense of it later.”23 Finally, she connects the
thoughtless urgency of action to “their parents’ perverse approxima-
tion of the normative good life” and to a failure of attachment: “It is as
though the children, knowing nothing but that index of projected hap-
piness, were compelled to repeat attachment to the very forms whose
failure to secures the basic dignities of ordinary existence is central
to the reproduction of the difficulty of their singular stories and lived
struggle.”24 The idea that failed attachment to parents leads to urgent
rehearsals of failed actions and ethics is germane to Munro’s story.
Certainly, in the moment of violence the two murderers feel the “some-
thing” described by Berlant: “this [is] the absolute high point” of their
lives—or, again, Marlene assumes that Charlene feels the same thrill that
she does. This un-self-reflexive narrative of unmediated feeling produces
narrative uncertainty, as each character goes on to live with the conse-
quences of the act differently. Indeed, Charlene’s adult life choices sug-
gest stronger feelings of guilt than Marlene’s.
The state of affective ecstasy is simultaneously brief (“no more than
two minutes”) and eternal for both Marlene and Charlene, always
informing their negotiation of adult subjectivity. Nevertheless, the final
surrender to a sense of guilt and reparation with which the story ends is
ethically uncertain. At the end of the story, Charlene clearly is in bodily
and ethical pain, the latter framed by her character in a spiritual context:
dying of lung cancer, she has seemingly converted to Catholicism for the
primary purpose of confessing her terrible crime. In contrast, the nar-
rator denies that she has guilty feelings—or perhaps absolvable feelings
of guilt: at one point she claims she is “ashamed” but “not ashamed at
[her] lack of feeling so much as [her] lack of fortitude.”25 At the thought
of confessing, as Charlene has done, she thinks, “It’s not for me. What’s
done is done.”26 Despite her rejection of guilt and/or absolution, how-
ever, her body betrays her. Although she claims she has insulated herself
from her childhood act through “the journey [she] has made since, the
achievement of adulthood,” arriving at a place of adult “Safety,”27 the
protagonist nevertheless undermines her own claim of “safety.” One
single use of the word “special” in a letter from Charlene (recalling the
term “Specials”) causes a “small jolt”28 in Marlene’s body. On the two
occasions when she has fallen in love, Marlene has felt that “the time
[comes] when you want to split open, surrender far more than your
body, dump your whole life safely into one basket with his” but she has
“kept [herself] from doing so, but just barely,” reflecting “So it seems
I was not entirely convinced of that safety.”29 The painful reattachment
of the childish act to feelings (of guilt) is perhaps too much for Charlene
to fully acknowledge, in part because she does not have the comfort of
confession. Or perhaps her confession takes a different form; the story

itself is a confession to an implied reader. Marlene’s struggle to come
to terms with her guilt is in essence the whole story; her resistance to a
thoughtless reattachment to or reconciliation with her childish perspec-
tive disables an easy return to a childish fantasy of forgiveness or whole-
ness, instead creating a difficult, uncertain, and enduring state of remorse
that is perhaps the most ethical perspective for this particular narrator.
Munro’s work does not imply that shame and guilt are necessary to
“the achievement of adulthood.” Such feelings may be harmful, includ-
ing to childish perspectives. Deleuze and Guattari wrote of child psycho-
analysis, “look at what happened to Little Hans…an example of child
psychoanalysis at its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME
and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his
every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt.”30 This
relates to a further complexity of Munro’s adult/child narrators, in that
the analyst and analysand are one and the same, a narrative singularity
that is split into multiple temporalities of perspective. In other words,
the adult narrator is in a sense psychoanalyzing her childish self/perspec-
tive. This self-analysis is not exclusively what helps Marlene in the end,
however; what helps her perhaps even more is the reconnection, however
pathetic, with her old friend and co-conspirator, with whom she shares
a secret and a relentless need to be a better person than this terrible
moment would reflect.
This narrative perspective—the slippage between past and present
perspectives on truth, however provisional—might be described as an
enfolded perspective, as the child and adult perspectives fold into and
over one another. The enfolded narrator is an important site through
which children form attachment to adults in Munro’s work, enacting
child/adult attachment through adult attachments to their own child
perspectives. Sometimes in the narrative mirroring process, the adult self
is more vulnerable than the child self, as when the adult Marlene suffers
more for her actions than the child (or so her adult perspective leads both
her and the implied reader to believe). In this context, it is important
to consider the fact that these stories imagine not only abused children
but also adult characters who are, in fact, disabused children: hardened
into “their parents’ perverse approximation of the normative good life,”
to echo Berlant’s point as mentioned above. We have seen that cruelty
in Munro’s stories is not always delivered from adults to children, either
in actions or narrative perspectives, but also from child to adult or child
to child. In this way, the child’s perspective may upset “the local b
alance
of power.” Deleuze and Guattari characterize it thus: “In the case of the
child, gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their
freedom and extricate themselves from the ‘tracing,’ that is, from the
dominant competence of the teacher’s language—a microscopic event
upsets the local balance of power.”31 While the murder of Verna is not
a “microscopic event,” it does upset the “dominant competence” and
“balance of power” of adults (“There should have been supervision.
Where were the counsellors?”). Additionally, the enfolding of child and
adult reminds the reader that the mirror stage is ongoing and that adult-
hood is always a becoming rather than a state of being. The child is always
falling or lapsing into the adult—or is it the other way around?
Munro frequently uses an adult/child narrator to capture the sense
of oscillation between childish and adult orders of subjectivity. Multiple
scholars have made this point about the narrative perspective in Munro’s
work, including John Orange, who borrows the phrase “double sense of
present time” from Margaret Laurence:
The invention of a “double sense of present time,” as Margaret Laurence

calls it, in which the narrative voice has to speak as a child and an adult
simultaneously, is not new to fiction. Usually, the narrator, often the
implied writer of the story after he or she has reached maturity, describes
an event as experienced by a child or adolescent but written in the style of
an adult who is more detached and judicial than the child could have been
at the time of the event.32
Orange goes on to cite Brandon Conron’s description of Munro’s work

as having a “bifocal point of view” and then Munro herself stating that
“The adult narrator has the ability to detect and talk about the confusion
[of the child]. I don’t feel that the confusion is ever resolved.”33 Beverly
Rasporich states that in Munro’s work “the sense of voice is cumulative,
kaleidoscopic.”34 Munro’s narrative technique comprises more than a
doubling of perspective; the narrative perspective moves fluidly between
characters and from adult to infant and through all stages in between.
In other words, Munro’s narrators are not simply adults recounting
episodes of childhood but rather adults falling into childish memory
so vividly that the adult is submerged in the child and the child in the
adult—or perhaps drowned is more apt. In “My Mother’s Dream,” for
example, the narrator is an infant tucked away under a couch; although
hidden, drugged, and pre-articulate, she exerts control over the narrative
in several ways. As the story begins, the mother has fallen into a vivid
dream, having drugged herself and her infant in a moment of mater-
nal desperation produced by the infant narrator’s relentless scream-
ing. Naomi Morgenstern’s essay “The Baby or the Violin: Ethics and
Femininity in the Fiction of Alice Munro” takes into consideration the
question of ethics in the story, as summarized by Amelia DeFalco in
Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency and Canadian Literature:
“As Morgenstern makes clear…Munro conjures ethical quandaries that
refuse easy summary and solution, implying that ethical dilemma itself
is a false dichotomy that expunges the multitude of particularities and
possibilities that make ethical action so challenging.”35 I would extend
this argument to narratological considerations; the narrative perspective
of “My Mother’s Dream” deconstructs itself and the ethical quandaries
faced by characters, including the infant, in part through affective pres-
sures on the text.
The infant describes her crying as “like a storm—insistent, theatrical,
yet in a way pure and uncontrived…it comes out of a rage that can’t be
dealt with, a birthright rage free of love and pity, ready to crush your
brains inside your skull.”36 The baby has enormous affective power: she
“punish[es] the world,”37 she is granted a “birthright rage free of love
and pity”38 (a rage free of love and pity that may recall the violence of
Marlene and Charlene in “Child’s Play”). Interestingly, the persistent,
affectively coherent violence of the baby’s crying produces adult inco-
herence and impotence. In their article “Eff the Ineffable,” Steven D.
Brown and Ian Tucker note that “the ineffability, the inexpressibility of
affect becomes its key motif.”39 In “My Mother’s Dream,” the affective
force of inexpressibility generates adult anxiety-perhaps few things pro-
duce as much adult anxiety as the hysterical crying of a pre-verbal child
who cannot explain exactly what is wrong.
The baby’s mother, a violinist, feels that the baby’s cries contain “the
distant threat of annihilation”40 and “the powers of a demon,”41 and the
infant herself confesses that “My crying is a knife to cut out of her life all
that isn’t useful. To me.”42 The phrase, “to me,” is humorous, as is much
of the story. A running joke in the story involves hysteria, both in the
sense of wild or hysterical crying but also in the Freudian senses of dream
analysis and hysterical pregnancy. While there is a danger of over-analysis
in reading Jill as suffering from postpartum depression, she has certainly
failed to bond with her child, the narrator, prior to the “long battle”43
between baby and mother. This is understandable, as she has given up

her education and her music, has lost her husband, and has thus been
forced to move in with her husband’s domineering sisters and mother,
all in order to raise this child. During the very theatrical climax of “My
Mother’s Dream,” an invasive, hyper-maternal aunt, Iona, enacts a hys-
terical pregnancy, while a befuddled grandmother suffering from demen-
tia makes inappropriate (and very funny) comments to the neighbors. The
scene culminates with the violin and the baby both being shoved under
a fussy-looking couch in a send-up of Freudian readings and symbolism.
The story ultimately relies on a talking cure; the baby eventually learns to
talk, as she is the narrator of the story, and thus is finally able to explain
what she meant in her state of inarticulate hysteria. Or is she?
Neither mother nor infant ultimately controls the narrative of
“My Mother’s Dream.” The story (including the dream) can only come
from the mother’s memories, but the narrator does not describe the
story as it has been told to her by her mother; instead, she narrates as an
infant writing from the mother’s perspective. The effect is that the infant
seems to have an omniscient narrative perspective focalized through the
character of the mother while at the same time internally focalizing the
entire narrative through the infant/adult enfolded narrator. Notably, this
story’s enfolding adult/child narrative is uniquely complex because the
child and adult of the “Mother’s Dream” are two different characters,
not one character at different ages. In other words, the adult narrator is
remembering, from an infantile perspective, the dreams and thoughts of
another character, the mother, which is obviously impossible but oddly
plausible and compelling. The mother cannot make sense of the baby’s
crying; the baby, meanwhile, retrospectively figures the sensible not just
through Freudian double entendre, but through a complex, doubled or
enfolded set of narrative self-interpretations. This highlights Munro’s
representation of adult/child dynamics as much more complex than a
doubling of narrative perspective; there is also a doubling or enfolding
of self-reflection in which both child and adult reflect on their present
perspectives; the adult reflects on the past child perspective; and the child
reflects on (or projects) her adult perspective. For example, the baby
‘remembers’:
I woke in distress, as if I could feel Iona [the aunt] being removed from
me. Iona had fed me such a short time before that Jill did not think
that I could possibly be hungry. But she discovered that I was wet, and
though she had read that babies did not need to be changed every time
they were found wet and that wasn’t usually what made them cry, she
decided to change me…I made it as hard as I could—I flailed my arms
and legs, arched my back, tried my best to turn over, and of course kept up
my noise. Jill’s hands shook, she had trouble driving the pins through the
cloth. She pretended to be calm, she tried talking to me, trying to imitate
Iona’s baby talk and fond cajoling, but it was no use, such stumbling insin-
cerity enraged me further.44
Clearly, this memory can only have come from the mother, not the
infant, but Munro’s choice to have the infant narrate the story exposes
the contingent nature of adulthood, the fluid boundary between adult-
hood and childhood, and the erasure of boundaries between past and
present, between language and pure expression. Ironically, the baby
communicates her needs much more effectively throughout the story
than the adults, who repeatedly misunderstand, mislead, and miscommu-
nicate. It makes perfect sense in this context that she, of all the charac-
ters, attempts to control the narrative.
Because the pre-verbal infant verbalizes a story of infant attachment
(or lack of attachment) from direct experience, a story that she may have
experienced but could not possibly recall, the narrative is impossible as
a singularity by its very structure. It can only be composed collectively
between mother and daughter and is wonderfully redemptive: the very
existence of the story implies a closeness between mother and daughter
that defies popular ideas about attachment that may be unfair to moth-
ers. It is critical to note that the mother, Jill, is not breastfeeding. The
breast, in Kleinian theory, is the primary site of infantile attachment. In
“My Mother’s Dream, the infant narrator takes responsibility for refus-
ing “to take [her] mother’s breast” and instead “scream[s] blue mur-
der,” imagining that “the big stiff breast might just as well have been a
snouted beast rummaging in [her] face.”45 It is made clear by the infant
that the refusal to breastfeed is her choice; furthermore, she drives her
mother to resort to drugging her to sleep. The infant narrator, in short,
places herself in an ethical relation to her mother; therefore, guilt and
ethical dilemmas, like redemption, are collectively produced. The use
of a bottle rather than breast makes it much easier to feed narcotics to
the infant; nevertheless, Munro resists blaming the mother exclusively,46
instead complicating the tendency in psychoanalytical theories. On one
hand, there is a failure of attachment between child and adult laid bare
by the affective intensity of the baby’s screams and the mother’s inability
to breastfeed. On the other hand, there is a deep sense of mother-child

attachment in the narrative perspective, the blurring of the mother-child
narrative boundary, the enfolding of the child back into her mother’s
body, in the body of the text, through a narrative enfolding. Indeed,
there is a sense of deep reconciliation between mother and child.
When the narrator describes her mother’s dream, a dream in which the
baby is found unharmed (foreshadowing the baby in fact being found
unharmed), she says “What a reprieve…to find her baby lying in its crib.
Lying on its stomach, its head turned to one side, its skin pale and sweet
as snowdrops and its head reddish like the dawn. Red hair like her own,
on her perfectly safe and unmistakable baby. The joy to find herself for-
given.”47 In the enfolded narrative, the mother forgiving herself is insep-
arable from the infant forgiving her mother in a passage that is suffused
with love: the love with which the daughter describes the love of her
mother for both her child and herself, “red hair like her own.”
Munro’s stories present us with children who are both attached and
unattached, who represent affective potential for adults, including their
own adult selves. For example, in “The Children Stay” Pauline leaves
her children for her lover and wakes up in a motel room with him, feel-
ing disconnected from her things, her past life; “Her connection with
the cottage where Brian [her husband] lay asleep or not asleep was
broken, also her connection with the house that had been an expres-
sion of her life with Brian.”48 She only realizes later, when she speaks
to her husband, that she has lost her children as well, or that she must
choose between her freedom and her children, “A fluid choice, the
choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens.”49
Although she detaches from her young children, she negotiates a provi-
sional attachment to them as adults: “Her children have grown up. They
don’t hate her. For going away or staying away. They don’t forgive her,
either.”50 Pauline experiences this choice as a singularity chosen from
multiple possibilities: “This is acute pain. It will become chronic…Say to
yourself, You lose them anyway. They grow up…And still, what pain. To
carry along and get used to until it’s only the past she’s grieving for and
not any possible present [my italics].”51 Note the subtle shift from second
person perspective (“you”) to third person (“she’s”), as each potential
plotline aligns with different perspectives of a single narrator.
This sense of emergent potential narrative perspectives suggests mul-
tiple (infinite, infant) storylines that are unarticulated but exist poten-
tially alongside the story as plotted. In a Morningside interview with
Peter Gzowski in 1994, Munro said that “I want to move away from
what happened, to the possibility of this happening, or that happening,
and a kind of idea that life is not just made up of the fact, the things
that happened…But all the things that happen in fantasy, the things that
might have happened, the kind of alternate life that can almost seem to
be accompanying what we call our real lives.”52 Perhaps, in a sense the
“alternate” but untold stories are like missing (or murdered) children in
Munro’s work. The “alternative life” that Munro imagines is hinted at,
lying beyond the text, affective without being articulated, recalling the
narrator with which this discussion opened: compelled toward the alter-
native fiction of her child having drowned. Although never articulated,
those imaginary narratives press on the present and refuse the closure of
a singular narrative perspective, a single ending. In affective terms, those
untold but threatening alterities are no less real because of their unar-
ticulated state. In his essay “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact,”
Massumi states that “Threat is not real in spite of its nonexistence. It
is superlatively real, because of it.”53 Note that he uses the metaphor of
“birth” to describe unarticulated but immanent affective pressures, or
unborn infant threats.
Perhaps the word “threat” is too limiting in the context of Munro’s
work; as noted previously, there is often beauty and joy projected from
the uncertain realm of the inarticulate or the unarticulated. In the inter-
view with Gzowski in 1996, Munro stated that “I like to play with struc-
ture. This isn’t just a game. It’s very important to get at the kind of
story I want in which light shines from different angles.”54 In this con-
text, attachment applies to stories, not just to people and things; there
are multiple, competing versions of stories, multiple narrative perspec-
tives, but characters, narrators and readers attach themselves to particular
versions that have affective power for them-or through which they can
affect events or exert affective power.
Attachment is an affectively powerful and ongoing negotiation of
connecting and disconnecting, engaging and disengaging, latching on
and off, falling toward and away from the (m)other.55 Citing Honneth
in her essay “Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect,” Megan
Watkins describes “ways in which infants gain a sense of bodily schema
through the process of being held. Intercorporeality, skin acting on the
skin, the sense of touch, and the affective realm allows one to know
one’s body.”56 The relationship between the child and parent in many
ways is an elaborate struggle for control of that mutual attachment. In
the context of the adult/child narrator, the evolving narrative perspec-

tive becomes the “skin,” or zone of connection between child and adult.
Thus, rather than “intercorporeality,” the enfolded narrative has a quality
of interperspectivity.
In attachment theory, not only skin but also bodily fluids mark criti-
cal connections between individuals, blurring bodily boundaries as one
body absorbs fluids from another body. There is a temporal and semiotic
quality to bodily fluids that may be linked to narrative flows; for instance,
a baby cries, the let-down occurs in the mother’s body in an embodied
expression (a pun I have used elsewhere) of attachment between infant
and mother. That is a fluid but embodied affective conversation that
occurs “inside and outside of” a singular body; it escapes bodily bound-
aries while being contained within them; it is an attachment narrative.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that concepts of fluidity permeate through
Munro’s work, given her fascination with fluidity of narrative perspec-
tive. The concept of drowning, particularly the drowning of children, is
persistent in Munro’s work. This concept is connected to narrative but
also to flux in attachments. Perspective implies a positioning in time and
space; perspective must have a view of something—in the case of children,
Berlant’s “enigmatic and simplifying” something; the perceiver must
have an affective relation to objects, events, and people. Thus, perspec-
tive, like meaning, does not exist as a singularity but rather in attach-
ments between things; as in Massumi’s description of ethics, perspective
is fundamentally uncertain and relational. Its form emerges in a flow
between things: interperspectivity.
As noted previously, in this context of attachments (to perspectives, to
acts, to others), Munro returns repeatedly to a particular agentic assem-
blage that entangles birth; maternity and/or childlessness; flows, includ-
ing female sexual blood, but also tears, milk, and other fluids; and water,
especially in its propensity to form and unform, to flow and fold back
on itself, in waves, in drowning (or in adult narrators reflecting back on
childhood). These concepts of fluidity deftly align with the fluidity of
narrative perspective and with themes of attachment and detachment.
In “Dimensions,” a story in which three children are murdered by their
father, the youngest child, Dimitri, has difficulty breastfeeding, leading
to a nasty scene where the abusive father “[squeezes] one breast after
the other with frantic determination and [succeeds] in getting a couple
drops of miserable-looking milk out.”57 The mother narrator notes that
“whenever Dimitri [is] fretful…the failure to breast-feed [is] recalled.”58

Here we return to the themes in “My Mother’s Dream” of failed breast-
feeding, failed attachment, and harm to children. As in “My Mother’s
Dream,” Doree, the mother in “Dimensions,” is not judged nor made
guilty for that failure of attachment; instead, failed attachment presses
those mothers forward in a search for alternative narrative of attach-
ment and reconciliation. In “Dimensions” the mother cannot rehearse
an attachment drama with her own children but instead finds a power-
ful alternative. The “miserable-looking milk” from her body is contrasted
later in the story with the “trickle of pink foam” that comes from the
head of a boy who has been injured in a car accident, prompting Doree to
disembark from a bus taking her to her husband to instead stay with the
boy in a scene of reconciliation. The matter leaking from his head does
not “look like blood at all, but like the stuff you skim off from straw-
berries when you’re making jam.”59 This haunting and beautiful scene
ends with the boy “breathing on his own”60 as Doree’s “fingers [find] the
pulse again. The horrible pink stuff [has] not continued to flow.”61
During multiple visits to her husband in prison, Doree works “to keep
her mind occupied”62 along the way by thinking of the many poten-
tial words contained in a single word, like enfolded potential narratives
within the story: “There was a certain trick [Doree] had picked up to
keep her mind occupied. She took the letters of whatever words her eyes
lit on, and she tried to see how many new words she could make out of
them. ‘Coffee,’ for instance, would give you ‘fee,’ and then ‘foe,’ and
‘off’ and ‘of,’ and ‘shop’ would provide ‘hop’ and ‘sop’ and ‘so’ and—
wait a minute—‘posh.’”63 Within singularities, such as words, there are
many possibilities pressing on the known present. These felt but pre-
articulate forces are what Massumi might call an “intensity”: “intensity
is incipience, incipient action and expression [author’s italics].”64 In nar-
ratological terms, it must be the narrator who senses and responds to
incipience, and the narrative must be the expression that flows from this.
In contrast to flows, there are also silences and absences in Munro’s
work, often involving children. It is important to recall that Doree is
essentially a child herself (and lost her own mother) when she meets her
husband; she is an immature sixteen. Like other children in Munro’s sto-
ries, she is rendered mute but profoundly expressive in the face of the
terrible harm that is done to her children and to herself. After Doree
finds her children murdered, words are useless:
For some time, Doree kept stuffing whatever she could grab into her
mouth. After the dirt and grass it was sheets or towels or her own cloth-
ing. As if she were trying to stifle not just the howls that rose up but the
scene in her head. She was given a shot of something, regularly, to quiet
her down, and this worked. In fact she became very quiet, though not
catatonic.65
In direct contrast to that grotesquely inverted birth scene, at the end of

the story Doree saves a young man’s life by performing cardiopulmonary
resuscitation. In this case, silence becomes empowering; as when the
baby lies drugged and silent under a couch in “My Mother’s Dream,”
and as when Doree stuffs her mouth with dirt, silence becomes an alter-
native version of inarticulate screams. Ignoring people who try to speak
to her at the accident site, Doree establishes a life-giving attachment to a
child:
She enveloped his mouth. She pressed his warm fresh skin. She breathed
and waited. She breathed and waited again. And a faint moisture seemed
to rise against her face.
…Be quiet, be quiet, she wanted to tell them. It seemed to her that
silence was necessary, that everything outside the boy’s body had to con-
centrate, help it not to lose track of its duty to breathe.
…She spoke dismissively, without raising her head, as if she were the
one whose breath was precious.66
Again, judgment is suspended there. Doree’s breath is precious. Perhaps

she finds momentary redemption from her guilt, her feeling (and her
husband’s assertion) that it is her fault that he had murdered their chil-
dren. Other characters, good and bad, form a collective site on which
Doree negotiates her own sense of right and wrong and her sense of how
“to carry along and get used to” the “acute pain” of lost children in her
uncertain present, just as Pauline does in “The Children Stay.”
Jane Bennett writes, “While the smallest or simplest body…may…
express a vital impetus…an actant never really acts alone,” instead work-
ing in a collective of bodies and forces to form an “agency of assem-
blages.”67 In the context of ethical considerations, attachment cannot be
separated from the affective forces that compel ethical response (through
feelings or actions); in other words, a situation, an act, and an event
may produce an agentic assemblage of reaction, leading to further col-
lective understanding and action. This might best be understood not as
a collection of distinct singularities of action that group together, but

rather as a flow of response and feeling between and among actants—as
in the meeting of Marlene and Charlene’s eyes over Verna’s head.
In Munro’s work, flow aligns with silence that threatens to explode,
like the head of a drowning child bursting from beneath the water to
gasp for air. When that threatening expression is finally, explosively
uttered, a drowning is often the consequence, as if the speech has been
dammed up; in the expressive breech, truth, or a singularity of event,
becomes impossible to contain. For example, the narrator describes her
sister’s drowning in highly contingent terms in “Gravel”:
The dog had fallen into the water and Caro [the sister] was afraid she’d
be drowned.
Blizee. Drownded.
Drowned.
But Blizee wasn’t in the water.
She could be. And Caro could jump into save her.
I believe I still put up some argument, along the lines of she hasn’t, you
haven’t, it could happen but it hasn’t…68
The sisters in “Gravel” have a pregnant and temporarily negligent

mother who carries on a doomed affair in the background of the drown-
ing. When the protagonist finally confronts, as an adult, the boyfriend
who failed to save her sister Caro, she finds in his presence that she
“could not figure out how to speak”69 as she reverts to a childish and
confused memory of her sister’s death. Despite this, there is once again
a kernel of redemption in the enfolding of child into adult narrator, of
present into past, of sister into sister; in that enfolding, Caro’s life and
death are suspended within her living sister: “in my mind, Caro keeps
running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in triumph, and I’m
still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”70
The tense is present, not like the past tense of the rest of the story, and
the reader is reminded that in narrative terms, Caro is silent but always
present in the story; she has left a trace of herself in every potential and
imagined version.
Abandoning narrative singularity, Munro instead situates narrative
perspectives in ethical confusions of being that nevertheless imagine opti-
mistic futures from broken childhoods. Perhaps nothing better drama-
tizes the inevitable failures of attachment than harm to a child; perhaps
nothing better dramatizes the optimistic, infinite immanence of being

than the life of a child. “All attachments are optimistic,” writes Lauren
Berlant in Cruel Optimism, “But optimism might not feel optimistic.”71
Children demand that we carry along and get used to the pain that
attachment brings, because the alternative is simply unthinkable.
Notes
1. Alice Munro, “Miles City Montana,” in The Progress of Love (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1986), 102.
2. Alice Munro, “My Mother’s Dream,” in The Love of a Good Woman
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998), 322.
3. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011),
80.
4. Ibid., 81.
5. Ibid.
6. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
7. Gregory J. Seigworth, and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,”
in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth
8. Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 11.
9. Ibid., 11–12.
10. Lorraine McMullen, “Shameless, Marvellous, Shattering Absurdity: The
Humour of Paradox in Alice Munro,” in Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s
Narrative Acts, ed. Louis MacKendrick (Downsview, ON: ECW Press,
1983), 144.
11. Ibid., 162.
12. Nathalie Foy, “‘Darkness Collecting’: Reading ‘Vandals’ as a Coda to
Open Secrets,” Essays on Canadian Writing 66 (Winter 1998): 167.
13. Alice Munro, “Child’s Play,” Too Much Happiness (Toronto: Penguin,
2009), 189.
14. Ibid., 188.
15. Ibid., 189.
16. Ibid., 195.
17. Ibid., 200.
18. Ibid., 196.
19. Ibid., 222.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 168.
23. Ibid., 166.
24. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 220.
27. Ibid., 211.
28. Ibid., 209.
29. Ibid., 211.
30. Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), 14.
31. Ibid., 15.
32. John Orange, “Changing is the Word I Want,” in Probable Fictions: Alice
Munro’s Narrative Acts, ed. Louis MacKendrick (Downsview, ON: ECW
Press, 1983), 86.
33. Ibid., 86.
34. Beverly Rasporich, Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of
Alice Munro (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990), 36.
Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 25.
36. Alice Munro, “My Mother’s Dream,” The Love of a Good Woman
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998), 322.
37. Ibid., 318.
38. Ibid., 322.
39. Steven D. Brown, and Ian Tucker, “Eff the Ineffable,” in The Affect
Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham:
41. Ibid., 323.
42. Ibid., 319.
43. Ibid., 295.
44. Ibid., 321.
45. Ibid., 314.
46. I have written at length about social constructions of breastfeeding in
“Of Milk and Miracles: Nursing, the Life Drive and Subjectivity,” The
Frontiers Reader, ed. Patricia Hart, Karen Weathermon, and Susan H.
Armitage (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
48. Alice Munro, “The Children Stay,” The Love of a Good Woman (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1998), 206.
49. Ibid., 213.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Peter Gzowski, “Interview with Alice Munro,” Morningside, September

30, 1994, CBC Archives.
53. Brian Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact,” in The Affect
Studies Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham:
54. Peter Gzowski, “Interview with Alice Munro,” Rewind with Michael Enright,
1996, http://www.cbc.ca/radio/popup/audio/listen.html?autoPlay=true&-
clipIds=2471576290&mediaIds=2471569896&contentarea=radio&subsec-
tion1=radio1&subsection2=currentaffairs&subsection3=rewind&content-
type=audio&title=2014/08/14/1.2801197-alice-munro-on-morningside&-
contentid=1.2801197.
55. Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945
(London: Vintage, 1998).
56. Megan Watkins, “Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect,” in The
Affect Studies Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth
57. Alice Munro, “Dimensions,” Too Much Happiness (Toronto: Penguin,
2009), 7.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., 30.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 31. The “jam” in this scene may be opposed to the jelly scene in
“Meneseteung,” where the jelly juice, like Almeda’s menstrual blood,
accumulates, like patterns in the wallpaper, like the river, and like lan-
guage, “ready to move and flow and alter,” until, metaphorically, “this
glowing and swelling begins to suggest words—not specific words but a
flow of words somewhere, just about ready to make themselves known to
her,” 69.
62. Ibid., 3.
63. Ibid.
64. Massumi, Parables, 30.
66. Ibid., 30–31.
67. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham:
Duke, 2010), 21.
68. Alice Munro, “Gravel,” in Dear Life (Toronto: Penguin, 2012), 103.
69. Ibid., 108.
70. Ibid., 109.
71. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1–2.
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———. The Progress of Love. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986.
———. Friend of My Youth. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990.
———. The Love of a Good Woman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998.
———. Too Much Happiness. Toronto: Penguin, 2009.
———. Dear Life. Toronto: Penguin, 2012.
Orange, John. “Changing Is the Word I Want.” In Probable Fictions: Alice
Munro’s Narrative Acts, edited by Louis MacKendrick, 83–98. Downsview,
ON: ECW Press, 1983.
Rasporich, Beverly. Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice
Munro. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990.
Raymond, Katrine. “Deep Deep into the River of Her Mind”: “Meneseteung”
and the Archival Hysteric.” English Studies in Canada 40, no. 1 (2014):
95–122.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth,
Shelley, Mary. “Introduction to 1831 Edition.” 1831. Frankenstein. Romantic
Circles Electronic Editions, May 2009. https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/
frankenstein/1831v1/intro.
Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2007.
Sutherland, Katherine. “Of Milk and Miracles: Nursing, the Life Drive and
Subjectivity.” In The Frontiers Reader, edited by Patricia Hart, Karen
Weathermon, and Susan H. Armitage, 29–47. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2006.
Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. 2005. Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 2011.
Watkins, Megan. “Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect.” In The Affect
Studies Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 269–285.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/rewind/
alice-munro-on-morningside-1.2801197.
CHAPTER 9
Gravel and Grief: Alice Munro’s Vulnerable

Landscapes
Claire Omhovère
The glacial formation of the Great Lakes and the traces it has left in the
area’s geography is one fabulous creation scene to which Munro peri-
odically returns, from Ben Jordan’s description of the retreating icecap
in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” (1968), to the geomorphological atlas
found in “What Do You Want to Know For?” (2006), and the residual
landscape of “Gravel” (2012). If Huron County remains the epicenter
of Munro’s imagination, it is not so much for the sake of its spectacular
sceneries but rather for its lacunary landscapes, the result of glacial ero-
sion and human exploitation, which Munro’s narrators ceaselessly evoke
in connection with the frailty of human bodies, the experience of mor-
tality, and the grief of those who survived. Vulnerability is not, however,
a solely human attribute in Alice Munro’s stories. It is a feature that the
characters also share with the landscape, imbuing the latter with affects
and contributing to the strong ethical resonance of her writing.
The adjective vulnerable, from the Late Latin vulnerābilis meaning
wounding, denotes concern about the other’s weakness. Vulnerability
is indeed both a fact and a liability because some uncertainty lies in
C. Omhovère (*) 
University Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_9
178 C. OMHOVÈRE
the hiatus between the moment of exposure and the inflicting (or the
receiving) of a wound. With the temporal suspension of the action, a
space opens where otherness can be either negated or embraced. In his
own work on the topic of vulnerability, Jean-Michel Ganteau has turned
that critical space into a locus of investigation, relying upon recent devel-
opments in the ethics of alterity and the theory of care to analyze con-
temporary literary expressions of the “wound or trauma culture” we live
in.1 Ganteau’s essay demonstrates that if literature has a unique contri-
bution to make to the ethics of vulnerability, it is not merely because
of its mimetic qualities, but owing to the relational model it puts into
play. In addition to the literary representations of small lives, Ganteau is
concerned with vulnerability “as a literary category and as weak form”2
in which heteronomy predominates over the autonomous ideals of the
Enlightenment. A vulnerable poetics presents subjects as mutually related
and literary works as dependent on generic affiliations, intertextual rela-
tions, and their readers’ contribution to meaning-making. As a result,
Ganteau’s book-length essay considerably broadens the scope of vul-
nerability by envisaging it as a universal condition and an ethical model,
but also as a literary operator performing vulnerability by involving the
reader emotionally and intellectually within the relational economy of
the text. Taking its cue from Ganteau’s work, this chapter discusses the
ethical dimension of Munro’s landscapes in three stories where land-
scape is not subordinated to the instrumental role of objective correl-
ative. Rather, it will be shown that landscape operates poetically as the
site where affective transactions take place between human beings and
the environment, making them mutually, that is relationally, dependent
through the vulnerability they share.3
“Nettles” (from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,
2001), as well as “What Do You Want to Know For?” and “Gravel,” are
set in unspecified locations, although the reader may nevertheless recog-
nize them as identical, owing to the childhood memory associated with
them. All three begin with the act of a farmer selling away the gravel on
the nearby river flats and the transformations that the removing of gravel
wreaks on the landscape:
A glacial landscape such as this is vulnerable. Many of its various contours

are made up of gravel, and gravel is easy to get at, easy to scoop out, and
always in demand. That’s the material that makes these back roads pass-
able—gravel from the chewed-up hills, the plundered terraces, that have
9 GRAVEL AND GRIEF: ALICE MUNRO’S VULNERABLE LANDSCAPES 179
been turned into holes in the land. And it’s a way for farmers to get hold
of some cash. One of my earliest memories is of the summer my father
sold off the gravel on our river flats, and we had the excitement of the
trucks going past all day, as well as the importance of the sign at our gate.
Children Playing. That was us. (“What?” 318)
The pending wound implied in vulnerability summons the question of

the responsibility that behoves local farmers as custodians of the land to
preserve the integrity of the landscape. Moral condemnation oozes from
such qualifiers as “chewed-up” and “plundered,” and the irrevocable
“sell off,” all of which suggest an initial wrongdoing—a depredation det-
rimental to the land in addition to the taking away of something that was
not the farmers’ to give or sell, but through which they inscribed their
own signature on the land. In the other two short stories, the reference
to the gravel pit(s) is arguably more succinct, but each time the narrator
will make a point noting the profit made from the deal (“Gravel” 91 and
“Nettles” 160).
The monetary transaction, the removal of gravel, and its impact on
the landscape are paralleled by another form of giving and taking, as
all three stories revolve around the death of a child and the paradoxi-
cal space taken up by loss. Those short stories posit a link between the
distinctive character of the dwelling place (êthos) and a failing of the
principles (ethos) that govern a good life.4 The reckoning of losses and
gains harks back to medieval morality plays, particularly the bookkeep-
ing imagery used in Everyman to popularize the tenets of the faith at
the time of the Counter-Reformation. In a Canadian context, bookkeep-
ing has also been historically associated with trade, the infrastructures of
colonial exploitation, and the postcolonial revisions necessary to reassess
Canada’s settler-invader past.5 Ethical questioning is central to the short
stories analyzed in this chapter because of the connection their narrators
perceive between the vulnerability of the glacial landscape, the losses
experienced by the characters, their grief, and the responsibility that
besets them. It will last be seen how the stories under scrutiny question
the mercantile simplification that distributes human actions into two sep-
arate columns—assets and liabilities, good and bad deeds. Another ana-
logue lies in Munro’s landscapes that helps problematize the opposition
between gains and losses through the trope of waste which fuses waste-
lands, wasted lives, and wasted love into one poetic image asserting the
poignant beauty of what endures beyond utilitarian needs.
180 C. OMHOVÈRE
The Ethos of Landscape

“Nettles” revolves around the narrator’s accidental reunion with a man
she once knew when they were respectively nine and eight years old.
As a young boy, Mike McCallum traveled with his father, an itinerant
well driller who plied his skills in the rural area where the girl’s parents
had a fox and mink farm. The children’s summer romance ends with
the gushing-out of clear, cold, water, when having completed his job,
the well driller departs from the farm and takes his son away with him,
without giving the children the time to say goodbye. Reminiscing about
that summer when the narrator first experienced the difference between
unconditional love and sexual desire is premised on a careful reconstruc-
tion of the farm and the river where the children used to play, demon-
strating that “it is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of
experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability”6:
Our farm was small—nine acres. It was small enough for me to have
explored every part of it, and every part had a particular look and charac-
ter, which I could not have put into words. It is easy to see what would be
special about the wire shed with the long, pale horse carcasses hung from
brutal hooks…But there were other things, such as the stones on either
side of the gangway, that had just as much to say to me, though noth-
ing memorable had ever occurred there…Each of the trees on the place
had likewise an attitude and a presence—the elm looked serene and the
oak threatening, the hawthorn old and crabby. Even the pits on the river
flats—where my father had sold off gravel years ago—had their distinct
character, perhaps easiest to spot if you saw them full of water at the reced-
ing of the spring floods. (“Nettles” 159–160, emphasis added)
Landscape builds up as an outward movement that radiates from the

dead center of the meat-house toward the periphery of the river. What
makes the narrator search for an adequate phrasing with double formu-
lations such as “a particular look and character,” “an attitude and a pres-
ence” is less the effort to render what the landscape looked like, than
what its constitutive elements—stones, trees, gravel pits—did to her in
terms of affects. Anthropomorphic notations call attention to the expres-
siveness of that landscape in the eyes of the child as well as her willing-
ness to be receptive to it. Character is therefore an essential aspect in the
narrator’s determination to capture “things” and rescue them from their
indeterminacy. The word character recurs as if to impress its effect on
the implied reader whom the narrator involves through the phatic use
of “you,” a pronoun that conjoins remembering and remembered self
with the narratee into one perceptual tension. More than a mere repe-
tition, the anaphora points, through its insistence, to the rich polysemy
of a word that originally referred to the imprint made by a seal, a dis-
tinctive sign or mark as well as a letter or typeface. In Hellenistic Greek,
χαρακτήρ also designated the instrument for marking or graving, hence
the extension of its meaning to signify “distinctive nature,” or even
“style” (OED). If the landscape has character, that character has left its
indelible mark on the child who received its imprint.
The girl’s sensitivity to landscape, however, is quite at odds with her
companion’s utilitarian perspective. For Mike, stones were for jump-
ing off, trees for climbing, and “the gravel pits were simply for leaping
into” (“Nettles” 160). With the no-nonsense adverb, another point of
view insinuates itself into the narrative for which there is no landscape
but a series of spots where practical purpose prevails over distinctive
character—the very source of impressions that the girl struggles to put
into words, knowing that things and words are hard to match, and that
between them lie the gaps constitutive of the reserve of the unsaid, the
silent fund necessary for writing.7
The distinction between practical purpose and distinctive character
was one that the writer and her peers were encouraged to make at an
early age, as Munro herself recalls in the autobiographical “What Do You
Want to Know For?”:
When I was growing up an appetite for impractical knowledge of any kind

did not get encouragement. It was all right to know which field would suit
certain crops, but not all right to know anything about the glacial geogra-
phy that I have mentioned. It was necessary to learn to read but not in the
least desirable to end up with your nose in a book. If you had to learn his-
tory and foreign languages to pass out of school it was only natural to for-
get that sort of thing as quickly as you could. Otherwise you would stand
out. And that was not a good idea. (337, author’s emphasis)
It is the same anonymous voice that rebuffs the expression of gratuitous

interest in the pat rejoinder “what do you want to know for?” and that
asserts the silencing force of the doxa in the passage above. Impersonal
turns of phrase express the collective pressure of small-town conform-
ism and its distrust of the person whose individual curiosity, should it
182 C. OMHOVÈRE
be indulged, may threaten group cohesion. The story itself grapples with
questions that have no immediate or even usable answers—the passing
of time and intimations of mortality—through the interweaving of two
investigations. In the first instance, the narrator sets out as the agent of
a quest to identify the crypt she once visited in a country cemetery on
a car excursion with her husband, but later found impossible to locate.
The second investigation is of a medical nature after a mammogram
reveals the presence of a cyst in her left breast. During the story, the cou-
ple will again find the crypt and fragments of the local history attached
to it; as for the cyst, the doctor will ultimately decide against a biopsy,
leaving the lump to rest undisturbed in its nest of flesh.
As it circulates between the crypt and the cyst, the storyline erodes
neat oppositions between life and death while the narrative slowly builds
up into an elegy to the glacial landscape that the couple explores on their
drives together, taking their guidance from the maps found in Lyman
Chapman and Donald Putnam’s The Physiography of Southern Ontario:
The purple tails are end moraines, they show where the ice halted on its
long retreat, putting down a ridge of rubble at its edge. The vivid green
strokes are eskers, and they are the easiest of all features to recognize, when
you’re looking through the car window. Miniature mountain ranges, drag-
on’s backs—they show the route of the river that tunnelled under the ice,
at right angles to its front. Torrents loaded with gravel, which they dis-
charged as they went. Usually there will be a little mild-mannered creek,
running beside an esker—a direct descendant of that ancient battering river.
(“What?” 320, emphasis added)
In semiotic terms, deposits such as moraines and eskers are indexes

pointing to their origin in the great glaciation that produced the geogra-
phy characteristic of the Canadian Shield. Like all indexes, traces of gla-
cial erosion exist in a causal relationship with a prior presence. As such,
they are fraught with the three paradoxes that interlock in the dialecti-
cal image resulting from an imprint.8 They materialize both an original
contact with ice and the disappearance of ice, their very presence imply-
ing absence and vice versa. They also partake of a double temporal-
ity because, by making the past present and emptying the present into
the past, their relation to time is essentially of an anachronistic nature.
Finally, the landscape resulting from the carving and shaping effect of
glaciation, like any image generated through direct physical contact,
poses problems in terms of recognition, because semblance through con-

tact does not abide by the mimetic rules of optical resemblance.
Here lies the profound satisfaction found in the map’s legend, for
the stable correspondence between color and terrain gives the reassur-
ance that nothing has disappeared, but that what the eye fails to see
has merely been removed, redistributed, and transformed, sometimes
beyond immediate recognition. All it should take, then, is attention
and a productive effort of the imagination to retrieve, from the map’s
modelization, the genealogy that gave the landscape its present aspect.
The character of landscape therefore lies in its expressiveness captured
through images that conjoin landforms and life forms through their
shared features, which involves the observer within the act of observation
and turns her into a performer in the event of landscape:
The yellow colour shows sand, not along the lakeshore but collected
inland, often bordering a swamp or a long-gone lake. The freckles are
not round but lozenge-shaped, and they appear in the landscape like
partly buried eggs, with the blunt end against the flow of ice. These are
drumlins—thickly packed in some places, sparse in others. Some qualifying
as big smooth hills, some barely breaking through the ground…The gla-
cier in fact did lay them down like eggs, neatly and economically getting rid
of material that it had picked up in its bulldozing advance. (“What?” 320,
emphasis added)
The drumlin-egg analogy points to the anachronistic and genera-

tive properties of the glacial matrix that yielded the landscapes of the
Canadian Shield. The landscape that the narrator restores out of the
imprint left by the glaciers unfolds over two pages where an intricate
web of similes reinforces the sympathy between the inert and the liv-
ing through references to an animal physiognomy, bodily organs, and
their excrescences. In addition to smooth “eggs,” there are less identi-
fiable aggregates—“blobs” found in “lumpy,” “bumpy” glacial terrain
(320–321)—in which the plosives’ little puffs of sound call to mind the
contours of the lump revealed in the mammogram, but also the swelling
ground in the country cemetery: “A large, unnatural mound blanketed
with grass…like a big woolly animal—like some giant wombat, lolling
around in a prehistoric landscape” (316). The crypt may be regarded as
a mirror inversion of glacial erosion because the tumulus contrasts with
the depressions hollowed out by the retreating ice. However, although
184 C. OMHOVÈRE
both inscribe absence on the landscape, it is important to note that they

do not stand in the same relation to loss. The crypt has no counterpart
in the economic(al) logic of the prehistoric landscape whose singular
character contradicts the very idea of disappearance through the ubiqui-
tous traces of erosion, the ablations and deposits of glacial waste.
The crypt does not fit the reproductive model of the glacial matrix.
As a matter of fact, its incongruous comparison with “some giant wom-
bat” parodies the very idea of the womb, and the guidance of geography
will be quite useless when the narrator endeavors to ascertain its exact
location. What initially made the visitors stop on their drive was its unu-
sual appearance—the grass-clad rise in the ground covers a vault with no
marker, no name, or date preparing it for the rituals of mourning, except
for “a skinny cross carved roughly into the keystone of the upper arch,”
which barely indicates its nature (316). The adjective “skinny,” however,
belies the efficacy of the crypt as a funeral monument apportioning sep-
arate times and spaces to the living and the dead, distinguishing between
those who remember and those who are remembered. In this case the
encrypted body remains eerily alive, ghosting the present through a cross
that engraves its fragility in stone forever and asserts the vulnerability of
frail lives much more than the promise of a spiritual afterlife. The name-
less crypt is quite distinct from the ordinary grave on which an inscrip-
tion symbolically returns the deceased to decay in the earthly fund where
all human life has its origin and end.9 There is something about the
silent crypt that connects it to the realm of the gone for good and the
impossibility of the survivor to face this irrevocability (“What?” 336). As
a monument to an impossible mourning, the crypt is a concrete illustra-
tion of the mechanisms of melancholia, its design encapsulating absence
and the failure of the symbolic order in fraying the bond that ties the
survivor to the lost object.10
Encrypting Loss
Where geography would balance the evidence through salience and
depression, the amount of glacial deposits being usually proportionate
to the hollows created by their removal, human architecture says some-
thing else about loss: “the larger crypt…is said to have been built in
1895 to receive the body of a three-year-old boy, a son of the Mannerow
family…One Mannerow husband and wife were put into the smaller
crypt in a corner of the cemetery” (“What” 329, emphasis added).
The discrepancy in the size of the two vaults and the syntax that squeezes
two people into a single spousal unit contradict the utilitarian logic that
the narrator associates with local ways, which gives rise to the disquieting
question: how much space does grief take up?
A similar interrogation permeates “Nettles” where the lacuna assumes
an appearance not so different from that of a crypt, beginning with the
concrete well that Mike’s father once drilled on the fox and mink farm.
When the adult narrator hears from Mike how he accidentally killed
his own son, the opening of the well is conjured up again, first through
a monosyllabic “Oh,” a round-shaped exhalation of surprise (“Nettles”
184). It is only after an awkward pause that she comes up with the ambiv-
alent exclamation, “It isn’t fair.” The lacuna left by the loss of a child
troubles the possibility of an account as well as the accountancy, the rudi-
mentary ethics through which the narrator expresses her outrage against
fate. Her compassion, albeit genuine, is indeed mitigated by her selfish real-
ization that his grief prevents Mike from any other emotional involvement.
But nowhere is the lacuna vaster or hollower than in the abyss of silence
that follows the formulaic filler “well” Mike utters in response to the disap-
pointment that tinges her protest that such blows of fate are not fair:
That was a word that I used to hear fairly often, said in that same tone of
voice, when I was a child. A bridge between one thing and another, or a
conclusion, or a way of saying something that could not be any more fully
said, or thought.
“A well was a hole in the ground.” That was the joking answer.
(“Nettles” 186)
As in Lewis Carroll’s “Mad Tea-Party,” the antanaclasis demonstrates the

productivity of (the) “well” as a paradoxical signifier that fills nothing,
yet draws attention to the vacancy it purports to bridge, and thus ensures
the perilous progress of conversation over the misunderstandings that
are fundamental to human communication. A “well” may indeed be a
hole in the ground, in addition to a conversation initiator, but in either
case it is also a type of grave—a pause and a place in the verbal exchange
where grieving can find an expression through words, no matter how
plain or scant. It is a humble pun that comes from the ground, humus,
heard from the farmers and field hands that the narrator used to know
as a child. It is also a boldly unoriginal pun, a hand-me-down as it were,
especially if one reads it as a nod to Alice’s Adventures underground,
186 C. OMHOVÈRE
and a modest acknowledgment of the indebtedness of all literature to

previous texts. In the end, one has to admit that it is a rather poor pun,
so trite and used-up as a joke that, in a most unobtrusive, humble way,
that weak form serves the expression of an ethics of vulnerability founded
on relationality insofar as it condenses the lacuna which the loss of the
child has left open, the ineffectuality of words in that awkward moment
of admission, but also the brief connection that the characters achieve
when, accepting the other’s secret wound, the woman’s desire trans-
forms itself into compassion when she embraces the man’s grief.
Grief is ubiquitous in “Gravel,” but contrary to the moment of solace
found in “Nettles,” vulnerability in “Gravel” does not lead to an eth-
ical recognition of the other’s wound. A young girl also dies acciden-
tally in “Gravel,” maybe because of her younger sister’s rebelliousness,
maybe because of the irresponsibility of the adults in charge. It is her
surviving sister, now grown old, who is telling the story of Caro’s death
because, despite the help she has received from various sides, she still
cannot decide who should be blamed for her sister’s drowning. What
Héliane Ventura-Daziron calls “the tribunal of fiction”11 is remarkably
inoperative in the stories of Alice Munro, perhaps because her writing is
so deeply ethical, and ethics is less about apportioning blame than mak-
ing adequate choices and living with their consequences, in a practical
Aristotelian rather than in an idealistic Platonic way. As opposed to the
space it respectively occupies in “What Do You Want to Know For?” and
“Nettles,” the grief associated with loss has left no monumental evidence
and no visible lacuna in “Gravel” either, but several traumatic rents in
the very fabric of narrative:
At that time we were living beside a gravel pit. Not a large one, hollowed
out by monster machinery, just a minor pit that a farmer must have made
some money from years before. In fact the pit was shallow enough to lead
you to think that there might have been some other intention for it—
foundations for a house, maybe, that never made it any further. (“Gravel”
91, emphasis added)
There is something deliberately low-key about this opening. The narra-

tor’s voice struggles to assert itself with a denial followed by a concession,
both of which make it difficult to appraise the actual size of the excava-
tion, as opposed to its emotional significance for the story’s participants.
The metalepsis “[h]ollowed out by monster machinery” substitutes cause
for effect, and reads like a disavowal displacing the monstrosity of Caro’s
death onto what did not produce the pit. The oxymoron “minor pit” pro-
poses another collocation fraught with unspeakable affects because the
adjective gestures beyond smallness toward the age of the victim and the
witness, the two girls’ legal status and their limited responsibility.
But just as minor are the lives that Caro’s death affected, mak-
ing the foundation of a home all but impossible. Commenting on the
Heideggerian concept of dwelling, Robert Pogue Harrison explains that
because of the humic bond that links humanity to the ground, humus,
human acts of foundation begin with burying. The grave and its inscrip-
tion (for which the Ancient Greeks used the word sema, meaning both
“grave” and “sign”) serve to designate place in the abstract expanse of
space: “In its pointing to itself, or to its own mark in the ground, the
sema effectively opened up the place of the ‘here,’ giving it that human
foundation without which there would be no places in nature.”12 But
although one word lies embedded in the other, there is no proper grave
in gravel. Gravel belies permanence. The formation of the prehistoric
landscape teaches the observer that glacial waste is always threatened
with scattering, its dispersal indexing the vulnerability of the landscape,
as the narrator laments in “What Do You Want to Know For?” (319).
The word “vulnerable” is not used in “Gravel,” although vulnerability—
particularly that of children subjected to the carelessness of adults—stands
as the story’s most central concern. The omission of the adjective is in
keeping with the avoidance strategies the characters adopt to deal with past
wounds that will not heal.13 The temporal disarray caused by trauma lasts
until the very end of the short story when Neal, the mother’s former lover,
gets in touch with the adult narrator. When they finally meet, the man
acknowledges his own share of responsibility in the child’s drowning, and
he presses one last, lifesaving lesson on the narrator before taking his leave:
“The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You
can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances.
You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy
disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along
easy in the world.
Now, good-bye.” (“Gravel” 108–109)
It is difficult to hear the soothing words Munro put in the man’s mouth
while remaining deaf to the irony that tinges them. The mixing of
188 C. OMHOVÈRE
encouragements with imperatives makes Neal sound like a swimming

instructor, teaching the narrator how to stay on the surface and avoid
the guilt that drags her down. His own recommendation to choose hap-
piness over grief actualizes the disavowal implicit in his name, in which
the central vowel sounds like an elongation of “nihil” for nothing.
Carelessness finally prevails over the initial reaction of compassion, or
even contrition, which the sonorities of his name, as in the homophone
verb “to kneel,” also evoke. Like her former lover, the narrator’s mother
is only too human. She has moved on and has seemingly turned her back
on the memories associated with a death she did nothing to prevent:
My mother cannot be made to recall any of those times, and I don’t

bother her with them. I know that she has driven down the lane we lived
on, and found it quite changed, with the sort of trendy houses you see
now, put up on unproductive land. She mentioned this with the slight
scorn that such houses evoke in her. I went down the lane myself but did
not tell anyone. All the eviscerating that is done in families these days strikes
me as a mistake.
Even where the gravel pit was a house now stands, the ground beneath
it levelled. (“Gravel” 106, emphasis added)
Leveling the ground, repairing the surface, but also repairing to the pres-
ent time are shown as preferable to the excavation that the examination
of the past requires as a preliminary to working through loss and mourn-
ing. The development of a residential area in lieu of the gravel pit forces
the reader to reconsider the story’s first paragraph in the light of what ulti-
mately happened to the landscape. Past wrongs are no obstacles to fresh
foundations, even if this requires a covering-up that propagates grief and
guilt into the contemporary present. The hollowing-out of the landscape
is internalized into what the narrator calls an “eviscerating,” resorting to a
gerund that distinguishes the process from an evisceration limited in time,
although not in intensity. “Gravel” thus ends without ending: “But in my
mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in
triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for
the splash” (“Gravel” 109). The effect of the onomatopoeia is rather like
that of an aposiopesis,14 the ear straining through silence to be hit by the
confirmation of sound. There is something highly disturbing in those last
words, which goes beyond their mimetic effect (Munro’s skillful rendering
of the debilitating effect of trauma), but also beyond the aesthetic efficacy
of a text that performs vulnerability self-consciously through a terminal

irresolution. The final sentence leaves several ethical questions in abey-
ance, from the most apparent—who should take responsibility for Caro’s
death?—to the more fundamental—what makes the world an inhabitable
place for all?
Reckoning with Waste
Engaging with the above questions makes it necessary to detach one’s
attention from the traumatic past embedded in “Gravel” to address the
superficial yet nagging sense of wrongness that endures in the short sto-
ry’s immediate present:
What did he think of all this? Neal. His philosophy, as he put it later, was
to welcome whatever happened. Everything is a gift. We give and we take.
I am suspicious of people who talk like this, but I can’t say that I have a
right to be. (“Gravel” 94)
It is difficult not to sympathize with the narrator’s distrust of Neal’s

bookkeeper’s logic. His vision of a clear conscience is expressed in the
same terms as a clean balance sheet, a puritanical dourness surreptitiously
showing through his happy-go-lucky pseudo-philosophy.15 The sym-
metry of his syntax eludes the question of waste, just like “the trendy
houses…put up on unproductive land” (“Gravel” 106) have come to
obliterate the existence of those who used to live in the trailer by the
gravel pit. Related to the Spanish and the Portuguese gasto “expense,”
the Italian guasto “ravage,” “damage,” “injury,” the word “waste” is
given in the Oxford English Dictionary as a possible synonym for “wild,
unproductive land,” something quite obnoxious to the Protestant work
ethic.16 Not only does the etymology relate the word to the idea of the
wound, but it also points to the vulnerability of autonomous, self-suffi-
cient organisms—including whole economies—to what comes in excess,
either as a surplus or as a failure in the production system. In the stories
analyzed in this chapter, waste is one of the most inconspicuous forms
taken by vulnerability. Just like the impractical, that is unproductive
knowledge the narrator values in “What Do You Want to Know For?,”
waste is held dear, particularly so when it is encountered as one of the
manifestations of “a landscape that’s usually disregarded, or dismissed as
190 C. OMHOVÈRE
drab agricultural counterpane. It’s the fact you cherish” (321). Taking
waste into (the) account is something the stories do, or rather perform,
by including within their limited scope what may seem superfluous in
terms of plot or characterization, but which nevertheless matters, as with
the checkered fields of Sullivan County, “unchanged because there is no
profit to be gained in opening them up” (327).
In a masterful critique of the utilitarian principle, Georges Bataille
contends that waste is akin to the unproductive expense found in art and
in mourning rituals, two of the symbolic activities that elevate uncon-
ditional loss into the sacred.17 That is the mystery the couple touches
upon in “What Do You Want to Know For?” when they discover the
oil lamp set on a table inside the vault so its small light may illuminate
the darkness ahead with the loving care of the living for the departed
dead. Unsurprisingly, there is no sparkling in the dark in “Gravel,”
where all losses and hollows have been covered up, turning the survi-
vor’s life into one wasteful expense of time, suspended as it is between a
past that does not pass and a present that remains out of reach.18 Waste
reasserts itself as a structuring trope in “Nettles,” where the adult narra-
tor remembers her fascination for the well Mike’s father drilled: “There
was a tin mug hanging on the pump, and when I drank from it on a
burning day, I thought of black rocks where the water ran sparkling like
diamonds” (158). The same image is reactivated with the resurgence
of the narrator’s feelings for Mike, in a sentence that begins again with
“Well,” launching the pun like a bridge over absence: “Well. It would
be the same old thing, if we ever met again. Or if we didn’t. Love that
was not usable, that knew its place…staying alive as a sweet trickle, an
underground resource” (187). The story is saved from sentimentalism
by an afterthought as it reaches the end, when the narrator mentally
returns to the thick grass and bright flowers she and Mike had to rush
through to seek refuge from a freak storm, in an ironic literalization of
the formulaic thunderbolt of romance. Back to the safety of their friends’
house, the characters discover that their forearms and ankles are covered
in nettle-rash:
Those plants with the big pinkish-purple flowers are not nettles…The
stinging nettles that we must have got into are more insignificant plants,
with a paler purple flower, and stalks wickedly outfitted with fine, fierce,
skin-piercing and inflaming spines. Those would be present too, unno-
ticed, in all the flourishing of the waste meadow. (188)
The crucial word “unnoticed” is nevertheless made quite noticeable

by the commas that detach its interpolation from the smooth syntactic
flow and set off the oxymoronic flourishing of waste. Those lines take
the reader’s attention back to the landscape, and entice us to look twice
at what is waiting to be reappraised. The meadow on the other side of
the golf course has none of the features associated with the spectacular
sites that the heritage industry and environmental pressure groups seek
to preserve from developers. Neither does it enjoy any of the amenities
that draw visitors to the neighboring golf course. But, like the other vul-
nerable landscapes discussed in this chapter, its special value resides in
the fact that it is not supposed to be contemplated, but experienced. As
such, “Nettles” participates in the relational dynamic of the vulnerable
landscape, inflicting its small wounds on those indifferent to minor lives,
or simply careless of the consequences of their big, destructive moves.
In ancient Greece, the word ethos first meant dwelling place before it
came to designate the moral prescriptions that guide human beings in
the living of a good life.19 Remembering the original spatial sense of eth-
ics should lead one to consider the choices that turn the world into an
inhabitable place.20 In this chapter, I have endeavored to approach land-
scape writing in Alice Munro’s short fiction from an ethical and phenom-
enological perspective, namely one that envisions landscape as a milieu
rather than as a set of pictorial or poetic conventions concurring in the
aestheticizing of space. Because they are neither decorative sceneries nor
functional settings, these landscapes do not produce the objectification
and distancing that the beholder expects of a view. Munro’s landscapes
are not meant to be viewed, but rather felt and responded to. They are
events that occur and permanently transform those who have witnessed
their advent. They originate in the singular coincidence of a voice with
the environment, but also in the interactions that bind human lives to
the geography they inhabit, no matter how precariously.
In memoriam Gabriel Brézard (1931–2016) and Nicolas Brézard
(1966–2016).
Notes
1. See Jean-Michel Ganteau, The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in
Contemporary British Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2015),
112.
192 C. OMHOVÈRE
2. Ganteau, Vulnerability, 166. Of particular interest are the pages devoted

to interdependence and the ethical relational model that can be evolved
from the works of Carol Gilligan, Judith Butler, and Athena Athanasiou
(9–11, 140–141, 170–171).
3. For Ganteau, the thematization or representation of vulnerability has lit-
tle ethical value per se. It is by performing vulnerability, namely by fore-
grounding the very conditions of their reception that “weak forms”
welcome the other, turning their vulnerability to the failures of interpre-
tation into the very condition of their elaboration.
4. Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables. A Philosophical Lexicon
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014 [2004]), 695–
696: The dialectical interaction in Aristotle’s philosophy between êthos
(character, way of being, dwelling-place) and ethos (use, habit, or custom)
prepared for an evolution in the conception of ethics from one grounded
on the respect of usage (and rules) to one resting upon individual choices
engaging the subject’s responsibility.
5. Kroetsch’s “Ledger” (1972) is an early instance of a postcolonial revision
with a strong ethical dimension.
6. Edward Casey, Remembering (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana
7. Corinne Bigot, Alice Munro. Les Silences de la nouvelle (Rennes: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 133.
8. Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact. Archéologie,
anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Minuit, 2008), 18.
9. Robert Pogue Harrison, “Hic Jacet,” in Landscape and Power,
ed. W. T. J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 353.
10. Julia Kristeva, Soleil noir, dépression et mélancolie (Paris: Gallimard, 1987),
64–65.
11. Héliane Ventura-Daziron, “From Accident to Murder: The Ethics of
Responsibility in Alice Munro’s ‘The Time of Death’ and ‘Child Play’,”
in The Inside of a Shell. Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades,
ed. Vanessa Guignery (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2015), 161.
12. Harrison, “Hic Jacet,” 351.
13. Christine Berthin, “Of Wounds and Cracks and Pits: A Reading of Dear
Life,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 37, no. 2 (2015): 84.
14. Not only does aposiopesis inscribe vulnerability mimetically into the very
fabric of trauma narratives by puncturing holes in the syntax, leaving
the sentence forever incomplete, but the trope also performs vulnerabil-
ity, making the narrative vulnerable in terms of its reception, by defer-
ring its completion and jeopardizing making-meaning. See Ganteau,
Vulnerability, 70 and 91.
15. Neal’s “we give and we take” evokes the litany of contrastive pairs in
Ecclesiastes 3, a passage often read at funeral services.
16. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Talcott Parsons (Mineola, NY: Dover Publication, 2003 [1905]), 157.
17. Georges Bataille, “La notion de dépense,” Oeuvres complètes 1 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1970), 306.
18. About “the temporal disarray” characteristic of ghost texts, Ganteau
noted that “it problematizes linearity and chronology, privileging the
linked, open time of trauma over the closed time of history and narrative
memory,” Vulnerability, 128.
19. Michael J. Hyde, ed. The Ethos of Rhetoric (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2004), vii.
20. Jean-Marc Besse, Voir la terre, six essais sur le paysage et la géographie
(Arles: Actes Sud, 2000), 144.
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges. “La notion de dépense.” Oeuvres complètes 1. Présentation de
Michel Foucault, 302–320. Paris: Gallimard, 1970.
Berthin, Christine. “Of Wounds and Cracks and Pits: A Reading of Dear Life.”
Alice Munro: Writing for Dear Life. Special Issue of Commonwealth Essays and
Studies 37, no. 2 (2015): 79–87.
Besse, Jean-Marc. Voir la terre, six essais sur le paysage et la géographie. Arles:
Actes Sud, 2000.
Bigot, Corinne. Alice Munro: Les Silences de la nouvelle. Rennes: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes, 2014.
Carroll, Lewis. “A Mad Tea Party.” In Alice in Wonderland, edited by Donald J.
Gray, 54–61, A Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1992.
Casey, Edward. Remembering. Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987.
Cassin, Barbara, ed. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon.
Translated by Steven Rendall, et al. and edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra,
and Michael Wood. 2004. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2014.
Cawley, A.C., ed. Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays. London: J.M. Dent,
1993.
Chapman, Lyman, and Donald Putnam. The Physiography of Southern Ontario.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984 [1951].
Didi-Huberman, Georges. La Ressemblance par contact. Archéologie, anachro-
nisme et modernité de l’empreinte. Paris: Minuit, collection “Paradoxe,” 2008.
Ganteau, Jean-Michel. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary
British Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
194 C. OMHOVÈRE
Harrison, Robert Pogue. “Hic Jacet.” In Landscape and Power, edited by W. T.

J. Mitchell, 349–364, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Hyde, Michael J., ed. The Ethos of Rhetoric. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2004.
Kristeva, Julia. Soleil noir, dépression et mélancolie. Paris: Gallimard, 1987.
Kroetsch, Robert. “The Ledger.” Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of
Robert Kroetsch, 11–31. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989.
Munro, Alice. “Walker Brothers Cowboy.” Dance of the Happy Shades, 1–18.
1968. London: Vintage, 2000.
———. “Nettles.” Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 157–188.
———. “Gravel.” Dear Life, 91–109. New York: Vintage, 2012.
———. “What Do You Want to Know For.” In The View from Castle Rock, 316–
340. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Ventura-Daziron, Héliane. “From Accident to Murder: The Ethics of
Responsibility in Alice Munro’s ‘The Time of Death’ and ‘Child Play’.” In
The Inside of a Shell: Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades,” edited by
Vanessa Guignery, 156–168. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2015.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by
Talcott Parsons. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.
CHAPTER 10
“A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro’s

Reluctant Career
Lorraine York
1976 is a watershed moment of sorts in the history of Canadian

literary celebrity. That was the year that Margaret Atwood took the
unprecedented step for a Canadian writer of incorporating the busi-
ness activities of her career as O. W. Toad Limited (an anagram of
“Atwood”). The move, probably undertaken for practical and pri-
vate financial reasons, was little commented upon at the time, but
I have argued that it signals a turning point in the history of Canadian
writers’ public visibility and professional organization.1 Atwood’s
early recognition of the extent of her literary success signaled
a nascent recognition of literary celebrity as an industry. Although
there is plenty of evidence that Canadian writers considered their work
as a business before this—for example, the founding of the Canadian
Authors’ Association in 1921—Atwood’s incorporation renders explicit
This content originally appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature’s 40th

Anniversary issue: 40, no. 1 (2016). Thanks to editor Cynthia Sugars for
granting permission to reprint it in this volume.
L. York (*) 
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_10
196 L. YORK
the collaborative labour that supports literary celebrity. The very fact
that Atwood’s move was not widely discussed, or even recognized as a
sign of something larger taking shape in Canadian literary circles sheds
light on these intervening 40 years, and the way in which the growing
industrialization of literary celebrity has come up against the persis-
tent image of the Canadian writer as solely concerned with aesthetics
and humble, restricted fields of small-scale production. As Kit Dobson
observes, interviews with Canadian writers “rarely engage writers in
conversations about what it means for them to create artistic works in
a market that is necessarily concerned with its economic bottom line.”2
In so saying, he echoes Robert Lecker’s claim, almost 20 years earlier,
that “Critics too often forget that publishing is a business in which selec-
tion and dissemination become functions of cost.”3 This clash—between
market reality and aesthetics—produces a range of potential compen-
satory public affects on the part of successful writers, one of which is
reluctance. Reluctant literary celebrity, I suggest, legitimizes personal
success in an increasingly global literary marketplace without endanger-
ing the writer’s model humble Canadian citizenship, but potentially and
paradoxically it can also express resistance to the global commodification
of literature.
In the growing, interrelated fields of literary celebrity and literary
prize studies, citizenship is a pivotal concept; I have argued that the
way in which literary celebrities perform their celebrity may not have a
nationally specific distilled essence,4 but these performances are directly
affected by nationally specific conditions of production and hegemonic
notions of citizenship and social legitimacy. Whereas Smaro Kamboureli
sees a clear correlation between celebrity and hegemonic ideals of citi-
zenship, arguing in “The Culture of Celebrity and National Pedagogy”
that “the culture of celebrity is the avatar of national pedagogy,”5 I view
celebrity as more fractured and ideologically multivalent. It may as soon
register resistance to national pedagogy as acquiescence; indeed, it may
register both simultaneously—as reluctance, for example.
The example of reluctant Canadian literary celebrity that I will explore
at length in this chapter takes us back, once again, to 1976. It was
the year another major Canadian writer made a career-changing move
that was associated, like Atwood’s incorporation of O. W. Toad, with
questions of markets, affects, and artistic self-determination. That sum-
mer, after having corresponded with her for several months, Alice Munro
met the literary agent Virginia Barber and they began their long, fruitful
10 “A SORT OF REFUSAL”: ALICE MUNRO’S RELUCTANT CAREER 197
professional relationship. By that time, Munro had already received a

Governor General’s Award for her inaugural collection of stories, Dance
of the Happy Shades (1968), and a Canadian Booksellers’ Award for Lives
of Girls and Women (1971), which critics variously label a short story
cycle, interconnected short stories, and a novel. But at this very moment,
as we know from accounts by her publisher Douglas Gibson and biogra-
pher Robert Thacker, she was at a crossroads, caught between market-
ability and artistic inclination. She had always seen herself as a writer of
short stories, and had conceived the stories in Lives more as stories than
as chapters in a novel. By 1976, as she was reshaping discrete stories that
featured various protagonists to form another interconnected cycle, Who
Do You Think You Are? there was increasing pressure on Munro to make
that next volume a novel; as Douglas Gibson recalls, “Alice felt that she
was under such terrible pressure to write a novel that it was blocking her
creative output. I remember I said: ‘If you want to go on writing short
stories like this, and nothing but short stories, to the end of your writing
life, that’s all right with me’.”6 Gibson, for his part, was not convinced
by the market argument for writing a novel because he believed that at a
time when more and more people claimed to have less and less time for
reading, short stories had the capacity to increase rather than lose their
marketability, particularly in Canada where “the short story has been so
consistently and so strangely prominent,” as Alexander MacLeod points
out.7 He also firmly believed that if Munro kept writing her brilliant sto-
ries “the world is going to catch up to her.”8 It certainly did, and “the
world” bestowed its support, most recently in 2013, when Munro was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In what follows I will consider how celebrity reluctance operates in
the Canadian literary field, using Munro’s career, reception, consecra-
tion, and fiction as an example of how reluctance as a very public feeling
negotiates the literary marketplace, how it works in the national imagi-
nary to legitimize model Canadian subjects, and how it operates glob-
ally as an implicit critique of a neoliberal economic order that places a
premium on moving forward, leaning in. In so doing, I remain mind-
ful that, as James English argues in The Economy of Prestige, after 1970
“As the pace of economic and cultural globalization…accelerated…the
national fields of cultural production have seen their significance seri-
ously diminished,” and a “‘local hero,’ the artist celebrated at the sub-
national level of indigenous community, can now be fed directly into a
global market…without any reference to a national standard of value.”9
198 L. YORK
In the case of Canada, however, given the government support (how-

ever declining) for national culture, Gillian Roberts is right to suggest
that “The celebration of Canadian culture presents particular issues in
the process of capital intraconversion because of the role that the state
plays in supporting national culture”10—unlike in Britain and the United
States, the focal points of English’s study. In examining the celebrity of
Alice Munro, I remain attentive to the way in which her reluctant conse-
cration on the global stage, most clearly figured in her Nobel Prize win,
functions on both national and international registers, as an example of
what Laura Moss has called “transnational-nationalism”11: the produc-
tion of Canadian culture for a global audience and, concomitantly, a
reflection of that global stardom back onto specifically Canadian debates
about national culture, character, and prestige.
In referring to reluctance as a “very public feeling” that is played out
both nationally and globally, I am inspired by theorists of negative affect
like Heather Love, Sara Ahmed, Ann Cvetkovich, Jack Halberstam, and
Lauren Berlant who have argued most persuasively for the considera-
tion of negative affects—like shame, envy, anger—as markers of politi-
cal engagement with the priorities and exclusions of the broader social
world. As Ann Cvetkovich, a member of the Public Feelings research
project, explains, her book Depression: A Public Feeling, is “about how
to live a better life by embracing rather than glossing over bad feelings…
It asks how it might be possible to tarry with the negative as part of daily
practice, cultural production, and political activism.”12 Most of these
theorists tarry with “bad”—that is, negative—feelings, although they
share the theoretical assumption that feelings cannot and should not be
so easily parsed into the “good” and “bad.” Although she calls her book
Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai views the feelings in question—envy, anxiety,
paranoia, irritation, animatedness, and “stuplimity” (a combination of
shock and boredom)—as less “dramatic”13 than the ones that more typ-
ically attract affect theorists’ attention, such as shame or hatred. Still, for
the most part they occupy the “ugly” end of the scale.
I push Ngai’s project further, attending to an emotion that is less
“dramatic” still—reluctance. While Ngai discerns the latent but “deeply
equivocal status of the ugly feelings” and sees them as “fundamentally
ambivalent ‘sentiments of disenchantment’,”14 I examine a feeling that
is patently all about ambivalence, equivocation, and the art of facing-
both-ways. If we explore its etymology, the word “reluctance” started off
bearing a much more negative, ugly vibe; in a now obsolete usage from
the seventeenth century, reluctance meant not disinclination, but instead

“struggle or striving; resistance; opposition.” A rare usage that retains
some of that sense of opposition, also originating in the seventeenth cen-
tury, is “the action of recoiling from something.” But the third meaning
of “reluctance” to emerge from the same historical period, and the one
that would form its current usage, is “unwillingness, disinclination.”15
This brief etymological excursion shows us, in effect, “reluctance” as a
name for a feeling becoming gradually less ugly and more ambivalent—
more reluctant.
In considering reluctance as a possible response to celebrity, it is
important to retain the sense of ambivalence that the word “reluctance”
steadily accrued, for reluctance does not signal an act of rejection whose
trajectory is an oppositional recoil; it is the multidirectional affect that
attends the condition of doing one thing while wishing to do some-
thing else or to do nothing at all. It is an affect that is entirely built
on a feeling about an action, in relation to other possible actions not
taken. In that sense, reluctance is not a thwarter of action as Ngai sug-
gests of her ambivalent ugly feelings, which she sees as “diagnostically
concerned with states of inaction in particular”16 and “less than ideally
suited for setting and realizing clearly defined goals.”17 Responding to
Ngai, Heather Love has argued that it is not only the resolutely positive
affects (notably “pride”) that are suitable for inspiring queer activism:
“it would in fact be impossible to imagine transformative politics with-
out these feelings” of “grief, regret and despair.”18 Therefore, while the
reluctance that I discern in the career and writings of Alice Munro and in
Canadian literary culture has nothing to do with the crucial transforma-
tional queer politics of which Love writes, I am indebted to her, as well
as to Cvetkovich and Ahmed, for breaching the common-sense connec-
tion between wholeheartedly positive affects and effective action, for in
the case of Alice Munro, reluctance is not an opting out of action or an
inability to act, but a thoughtful querying of the imperative to move for-
ward—emotionally, culturally, globally.
When one grafts an affective study of reluctance onto the field of
celebrity culture as I propose to do, other common-sense notions—about
celebrity—come under scrutiny. Many theorists see the phenomenon
of celebrity as premised on the wholehearted desire for public visibility;
Graeme Turner, for example, identifies the celebrity’s objective as the
gaining and maintaining of visibility: “From the celebrity’s point of view,
their personal objective is most likely to be the construction of a viable
200 L. YORK
career through the astute distribution and regulation of the sales of their
celebrity-commodity.”19 And when celebrity theorists register a departure
from that desire, they most often focus on extreme negative reactions to
fame—the recoil of rejection—like Chris Rojek’s study of celebrities’ fear
of “engulfment” by the “public face,” their sense of personal “extinc-
tion” that he claims leads to a greater-than-average incidence of “neuro-
sis and mental illness.”20 Less melodramatically, in his earlier, influential
study Heavenly Bodies, Richard Dyer demonstrates how Marilyn Monroe,
Paul Robeson, and Judy Garland “all in some measure revolted against
the lack of control they felt they had” in their careers, and because Dyer
believes that “Stars are examples of the way people read their relation to
production in capitalist society,” he interprets those instances of revolt
as protests against “the ways the individual is felt to be placed in rela-
tion to business and industry in contemporary society.”21 Although Dyer
articulates those less-than-enthusiastic relations of celebrity individuals
to capitalist forms of labor in negative terms of protest, antagonism, and
alienation, certain instances of his three stars’ negotiations of their celeb-
rity arguably qualify as reluctance: doing one thing while wishing to be
either doing something else, or wishing to be doing that one thing dif-
ferently. No matter what the intensity or complexity of the affects under
discussion, Dyer’s valuable insight that non-compliant affective responses
to celebrity “articulate a dominant experience of work itself under
capitalism,”22 retains the power to explain the implications of celebrity
reluctance—like Munro’s—on a global level.
Such analyses raise the inevitable question of reluctance as con-
scious strategy, as bad faith performance, but that is not how I perceive
Munro’s reluctance because it has not been publicly performed as a mea
culpa in the way that scandal-ridden celebrities or disgraced bankers
carry out their shrewd public apologies. For that matter, I am less inter-
ested in whether Munro’s reluctance is authentic than I am in the avid
discernment and consumption of that reluctance by her audiences, and
a good part of my analysis pertains to the way in which her reluctance
has been folded into celebrations of the model humble Canadian citizen.
However, to read all instances of reluctance as calculation is to assume,
as celebrity studies often do, that any occasion of celebrity agency is an
instance of hegemonic manufacture. Instead, drawing upon the insights
of the affect theorists I have invoked, I consider the “emotion work”
in Munro’s career and writings to be messier amalgamations of audi-
ence desire, writerly response, and national dreamwork: public feelings
that do not need the evacuation of the celebrity’s agency to make them
legible. Like Dyer in his readings of Monroe, Robeson, and Garland,
I want to clear a place for ambivalent affects to be ambivalent, rather than
automatically scooping them into the category of canny manipulation.
In tracing the reluctant career of Alice Munro as a constellation of tex-
tual representations, I consider Munro’s biography alongside her fictional
representations of reluctance. In the context of celebrity theory, Richard
Dyer has reminded us that a celebrity’s “star image” is a multilayered
composition that “consists of everything that is publicly available” about
that star; it is an “extensive, multimedia, intertextual” layered accretion.23
One layer is the evidence of Munro’s private performances of reluctance
that has been rendered public by the testimony of observers, in the form
of memoir and biography. For instance, in her 2001 memoir Lives of
Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro, Munro’s daughter
Sheila portrays Munro as a woman who undertook the conventional roles
and duties of a middle-class 1950s–1960s daughter, wife, and mother
unquestioningly in some ways, but in a surreptitiously reluctant manner
in others. In Sheila Munro’s biographical account, that reluctance found
its origin in Munro’s loss of her mother to Parkinson’s disease, and the
way in which she dealt with that traumatic experience by holding herself
back emotionally: “…young Alice shut herself off emotionally from her
mother’s illness, with its particularly isolating and grotesque symptoms,
because she feared that she would not be able to bear the waves of pity
and grief that would engulf her…To this day she is deeply affected by the
isolation and suffering of her mother’s life, and tormented by the way she
closed herself off from her.”24 Although she doesn’t explicitly make the
connection, Sheila Munro describes a similar holding-back in Munro’s
relationship with her children:
My mother has spoken of her need to hold back so she could give what
she needed to give to her writing…she told me once that she did not hold
or touch me much unless she was dressing me or changing me, and she
couldn’t believe that my father wanted to play with me all day long on his
days off. The family life she lived with us was not her real, true life. That
was the solitary life she led at her writing desk.25
The expected emotional labor of the daughter, wife, and mother was one
that, in this account, Munro was perceived to have performed reluctantly
because of a fear of becoming engulfed in a surfeit of emotion, whether
grief or maternal devotion.
202 L. YORK
The labor of professional self-promotion was another site of expec-

tation that Munro met with reluctance, and although the extent of her
reluctance was only fully made public with the publication of Douglas
Gibson’s memoir Stories about Storytellers and Robert Thacker’s exten-
sive biography, some of that reluctance became gradually known as her
fame increased. As Thacker recounts, when Friend of My Youth was
published in 1990, “Munro finally renounced book tours for good.”26
Sort of. Douglas Gibson wrote to his then colleagues at McClelland and
Stewart to tell them that Munro “‘sturdily repeats her refusal to tour to
promote this book,’ but she had agreed to do four or five engagements
‘that will be of greatest benefit to the book.’ He reminded them that
‘despite being a reluctant promoter, [Munro] is a very good interviewee,
and an excellent reader’.”27 Munro’s compromise makes Gibson’s term
“reluctant” entirely accurate; this was less a renunciation and refusal
than a classic instance of reluctance: agreeing to do something (or, in
this case, a bit of something), while profoundly wishing not to be doing
it at all. Gibson recalled in a 2006 interview that his role over the years
morphed because previously, Munro was “less reluctant to do publicity
events, less reluctant to do tours. But now she is.” By then, Gibson had
become a self-described “buffer” for the many requests for engagements
and appearances Munro would receive; he would acknowledge those
requests, warn the requesters that Munro would probably say no, and
then forward them to Munro, who would feel much more comfortable
saying no to him than to the requesters.28
All authors who find themselves famous need to say no, of course, to
all kinds of invitations and requests to protect their writing time, and the
kind of protection that Munro and Gibson put in place does not in itself
a reluctant author make. But the very way in which Munro describes
her career is deeply reluctant, because she fantasizes about a moment at
which the pressures of futurity created by markets and readers will no
longer push her forward. As she explained to Eleanor Wachtel in an
interview in 2004, the high expectations that readers and critics hold for
every new book of hers “hinders” the writing, and makes her wish that
if one day she fails to meet those expectations, she might be too old to
care, “Or I will have reached a kind of wonderful plateau where I’ll feel
that I don’t have to write anymore, where I will just be sort of happy all
the time… . Isn’t that an ideal state: to be only feeling the present, not
to be thinking about or feeling anything else?”29 That plateau is a proto
typically reluctant place to be: a place of immanent stasis that resists the
imperative to move forward, even as it paradoxically figures, by contrast,

as an imagined place one might move forward to, where one’s writing
might not be “hinder[ed].” As a dream of happiness, it is, as Sara Ahmed
says of all “ordinary attachments to the very idea of the good life,” a
site “of ambivalence, involving the confusion rather than the separation
of good and bad feelings.”30 It is also a dream with political-economic
implications, an imagined escape of the literary celebrity from the neo-
liberal ideal of the steady progressive march of markets onward and
upward, in a condition of eternal growth. However, publication, placing
a book into the world, inescapably marks participation in that economy.
Robert McGill recognizes this irony in Munro’s reticence, which
he correctly understands not as reclusiveness but as reluctance (“being
reluctant to give interviews or public readings”): “even as Munro
explains her dissatisfaction with maintaining a public persona, ineluc-
tably she is engaged in the performance of one.”31 Like the silence of
which Susan Sontag eloquently wrote, reluctance is not the absence of
engagement: “A genuine emptiness, a pure silence, are not feasible…
the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something
dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent
silence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech…”32 Because
reluctant celebrity is, in similar fashion, an engagement with and not an
escape from celebrity, it resonates, as Sontag would say, most powerfully
with audiences. McGill tells the story of his own affective connection to
Munro’s reluctance; he treasures a letter he received from Munro declin-
ing an interview because it made him feel both disappointed not to have
the opportunity to speak with her and also “relieved that I would not
risk having to sacrifice my notion of her as shy, dedicated to her art, and
almost otherworldly.”33 Munro could remain for him, at least in part, on
that inviolate plateau of reluctance. I see this affective response to reluc-
tance operating beyond the melancholic psychoanalytic dynamics of the
archive and its biographical scholars that specifically concern McGill; I
see reluctance operating nationally and globally as what Sontag calls “a
highly social gesture,” as consumers of Munro’s reluctant star text set
about “imputing speech to it.”34
In the months following Munro’s Nobel Prize win, Canadian audi-
ences “imputed speech” to Munro’s reluctance by incorporating it into
their celebration of the Canadian personality as modest and unassuming.
As Patricia Cormack and James F. Cosgrave demonstrate in their study
of Desiring Canada: CBC Contests, Hockey Violence, and Other Stately
204 L. YORK
Pleasures, modesty or humility has long been a collectively celebrated

affect in Canadian popular culture, despite plentiful evidence of hubris
in our nation’s history. The CBC’s Seven Wonders of Canada show, they
point out, came to an end with judges and hosts alike falling “back on
the cliché of the humble Canadian”35—a theme thatCormack and
Cosgrove note is “found in much of the CBC’s content” and that “ren-
ders Canadians moral agents when set against the mythically overbear-
ing, ever-present Americans.”36 As a mechanism for determining valued
modes of national being, reluctance could be thought of as “a mode of
internal management,”37 to use Daniel Coleman’s description of civility.
And as a politically managed affect, like civility, it serves to police the
boundaries between the model Canadian citizen and its others.
The Nobel Prize for Literature tops a long series of prizes that
Munro has received for her writing: The Man Booker Prize (2009),
two Scotiabank Gillers (1998, 2004), three Governor General’s Awards
(1968, 1978, 1986), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2005), the
Marian Engel Award (1986), and the American National Book Critics
Circle Award (1998), to name only some of the most prominent. Her
response to winning those awards has been consistently, graciously hum-
ble. I focus on the Nobel Prize win however, because even more so than
the Man Booker Prize, it awards international recognition and has no
linguistic or national eligibility rules, whereas the Man Booker Prize rec-
ognizes the best novel written in English and published in the UK each
year. Therefore, I contend that it is the optimal site at which to discern
the workings of Munro’s “transnational-national” positioning as a reluc-
tant Canadian celebrity.
In the days following Munro’s Nobel Prize win, it was clear that
she was being positioned as exactly the kind of model, reluctant citizen
whose reluctance confirms both her artistic excellence and her national
character. The narrative that most clearly confirmed this consecration
was the story of how Munro received the news of her win. The Swedish
Academy had some difficulty locating her to give her the news; @
Nobel_Prize.org even tweeted, in quasi-parental tones of concern, “The
Swedish Academy has not been able to get a hold of Alice Munro, left a
phone message.” Mainly because of failing health, Munro had moved to
the West Coast to be with one of her daughters for the winter, and had
forgotten about the timing of the announcement—forgotten about the
award entirely, in fact. She was woken by her daughter with the news.
While all that was going on, and people in Oslo were frantically trying
to locate her, Twitter exploded with a series of affectionate jokes about
Munro’s humble insouciance: “Alice Munro: Call your office!”; “What’s

this? An early-morning Swedish telemarketer? REJECT CALL.” But the
tweet that attracted the most attention that day was the one issued by
Margaret Atwood at 8:16 a.m., and it perfectly encapsulated Munro’s
reluctance: “OK, everyone’s calling Me to get me to write about Alice!
(Alice, come out from behind the tool shed and pick up the phone.)
#AliceMunro.” The implied reference is to “Chaddeleys and Flemings 2:
The Stone in the Field,” from her 1982 collection The Moons of Jupiter.
In the story, a young girl is taken by her mother and father to visit the
father’s sisters, and as they drive up to the Huron County farmhouse,
“One figure got up and ran around the side of the house. ‘That’ll be
Susan,’ my father said. ‘She can’t face company’.”38
I draw attention to the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature Twitterstorm
because it forms a mass celebration of Munro’s reluctance, and as the
joke spread, Munro’s insouciance about the Nobel Prize announce-
ment became folded into a narrative about her typically Canadian reluc-
tant response to fame. The subtitle of Sandra Martin’s lead article for
The Globe and Mail read: “Canada’s master of the short story shuns
the limelight, preferring to let her penetrating work speak for itself.”39
Author Shaena Lambert observed that Munro “herself, with her lack of
pomposity and bombast, has a talismanic force to her—standing for true
modesty in the face of pursuing a complex craft.”40 Like Robert McGill
needing, in some measure, for his interview invitation to be rejected by
Munro, here was the broader national community’s need for Munro to
be reluctant—and therefore admirably Canadian—at the high-water-
mark moment of her literary celebrity.
And so it is as with other dimensions of the star text of Alice Munro,
for alongside the national consecrations of her idealized humility that we
find in biographical, scholarly, print, radio/televisual, and social media
texts, there lies a further layer of representation: her own fictional texts.
And those texts powerfully amplify the reluctance that is a staple of her
public image, making the star text of reluctant Alice Munro even more
robust and resilient. Her stories abound with the fundamental condition
of reluctance—the act of proceeding with misgivings—and they show
it operating very much as the affect theorists that I have mentioned see
their more clearly “ugly feelings” at work: marking affective management
and policing, particularly at pivotal moments of social visibility. But it
parts company with those theorists’ ugly feelings in that it is less obvi-
ously nonconformist, more treacherously compounded of acquiescence
and resistance.
206 L. YORK
Notably, reluctance, as a feeling and as an affective response in

Munro’s stories, is not equivalent to opposition, though it is often rel-
egated to that category. In “Baptizing” from Lives of Girls and Women,
Del realizes not only that she must suddenly oppose Garnet French’s
affective-sexual dominion over her, but that her compliance in the rela-
tionship has been shot through with reluctance from the start:
it seemed to me impossible that he should not understand that all the

powers I granted him were in play, that he himself was—in play…I saw
that he knew it all already; this is what he knew, that I had somehow met
his good offerings with my deceitful offerings, whether I knew it or not,
matching my complexity and play-acting to his true intent.41
To view Del’s refusal to be baptized by Garnet in the Wawanash River as

a sudden moment of pure opposition, therefore, is to see it as the obso-
lete seventeenth-century version of “reluctance,” as “struggle or striv-
ing; resistance; opposition,” when it is clearly an instance of reluctance
as it is currently understood, in all of its discordant simultaneity. Despite
the dramatic culminating act of Del freeing herself from Garnet’s violent
attempts to “baptize” her in the river, what both Del and Garnet know
at that moment is that Del has been unwilling and disinclined, from the
very first, even as she has been carried along by the tidal flow of their
sexual passion. To view Del’s state of mind as only ever oppositional is
to identify it as closer to what Sara Ahmed calls “willfulness”: “To be
identified as willful is to become a problem”42 in the eyes of others; it is
“the word used to describe the perverse potential of will and to contain
that perversity in a figure”43 by ascribing it to noncompliant subjects.
Reluctance is much more difficult of capture; it is willfulness that is not
as readily rendered socially visible; only in the act of fighting back against
Garnet’s baptizing does Del transform her reluctance into willfulness.
Neither should reluctance be confused with a simple retreat fueled by
unwillingness that involves no forward motion, no participation at all—
reclusiveness. In media coverage of Munro, her reluctance often appears
under the misleading sign of reclusiveness; to cite only one example
among many, the Globe and Mail’s lead article about Munro’s Nobel
Prize win opens: “Alice Munro, the first Canadian to win the Nobel
Prize for literature, has always been reclusive.”44 But the illustrative pho-
tograph that appears alongside the written text, showing Munro pos-
ing for a New York Times photographer in Huron County the summer
before, directly contradicts that opening claim; truly reclusive writ-

ers—the Salingers, the Pynchons—do not agree, however reluctantly, to
photo shoots with major newspapers. However, in the wake of the Nobel
Prize win, reclusiveness, reluctance’s uglier and more dramatic cousin,
becomes the preferred affective discursive mode.
So too in Munro’s fiction; her characters’ reluctance is frequently,
carefully distinguished from a reclusive shunning of the social world. In
Lives of Girls and Women, Del, as a young girl visiting her aunts, hears
about her cousin Ruth McQueen who wins a scholarship but does not
go to college: “She preferred not,”45 the aunts smugly observe. So too,
the aunts inform her, their local-historian brother Uncle Craig was clever
enough to be an MP, but “he never ran. He wouldn’t let his name stand.
He preferred not.”46 Del’s reluctance will never be of this retiring nature
but will, instead, take her out into an engagement, however complex and
“deceitful,” with the world. “There it was,” she marvels, “the mysteri-
ous and to me novel suggestion that choosing not to do things showed,
in the end, more wisdom and self-respect than choosing to do them.”47
Instead, like Sontag’s silence, Del’s reluctance will be “a highly social
gesture,” like Cvetkovich’s vision of tarrying with the negative as a daily
practice.
Because reluctance signals social engagement, no matter how fraught,
moments in Munro’s stories in which a character’s positioning in a social
hierarchy is being solidified or externalized—like the moment when
Munro herself was canonized as a Nobel laureate—are the most likely
to trigger reluctance. This may involve a young woman committing her-
self to marriage, a writer committing words to paper, or any performance
that brings the humble subject into social visibility. In “Powers” from
Runaway, Nancy accepts Wilf’s marriage proposal with a “nice polite”
‘yes’—“but not too eagerly”—that she hopes will carry both of them
past the awkwardness of the moment into a more “relaxed” “normal”
state, but as with Del Jordan, discordance is always already present: “…
the fact was that I had never been exactly relaxed and normal with Wilf
… I hope I am not saying that I’d said yes I’d marry him to get over
the embarrassment.”48 In the engagement episode of Who Do You Think
You Are? Rose experiences a similar steady undercurrent of disinclina-
tion; buoyed along by her fiancé Patrick’s adoration, she only retrospec-
tively recognizes her reluctant state: “It was what she had dreamed of; it
was not what she wanted.”49 But dreams, those compounds of powerful
affect, can sweep disinclination along in their propulsive current; when
208 L. YORK
Rose, having broken with Patrick, sees him studying in the library, she
is overtaken by the temptation to run to him and reconcile: “This was
a violent temptation for her; it was barely resistible. She had an impulse
to hurl herself. Whether it was off a cliff or into a warm bed of welcom-
ing grass and flowers, she really could not tell.”50 Both inclinations—
to do, to not do—unite in that supremely reluctant moment that leads
Rose into a marriage that allows her to escape Hanratty and her precari-
ous social standing into a “warm bed” of social privilege. In a classically
reluctant move, Rose sinks into that warm bed while, emotionally speak-
ing, suspecting that she is about to plunge into a precipice. At the end
of “The Shining Houses” from Dance of the Happy Shades when Mary
thinks of the way her smug young neighbors use an out-dated municipal
ordinance to force an old woman out of her decrepit house and down
the social ladder, her final reflection could serve as the summation of the
reluctant frame of mind of many Munro characters at moments of crisis
in social hierarchy: “There is nothing you can do at present but put your
hands in your pockets and keep a disaffected heart.”51 Keep swimming,
that is, but mind the undertow.
For Munro, writing is another such trigger for reluctance, as the
rich contradictoriness of experience is calcified into visibility and final-
ity. In the opening story “Advantages” from The View From Castle
Rock, Munro recalls that her ancestor Margaret Laidlaw Hogg, mother
of the Scottish writer James Hogg, regretted having recited old ballads
for her son’s friend, Sir Walter Scott. When she saw them reproduced
in Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–1803), she vowed
never to sing them more. “She had known what she was doing,” Munro
surmised, “but could not help regretting what she had done.”52 Munro
speculates about how her ancestors’ suspicion of all this writing down of
stories, or songs has been carried forward into her own family and com-
munity. “Calling attention to yourself” through “Self dramatization got
short shrift in our family,” she recalls. She points out that the opposite
tendency was “not exactly modesty but a strenuous dignity and control,
a sort of refusal”53—the kind of Bartleby-the-Scrivener-like retirement
that Munro has dramatized in Uncle Craig and Ruth McQueen in Lives
of Girls and Women and elsewhere. But her very qualification of her fam-
ily and community’s restraint as “strenuous” discloses the simultaneous
presence of the competing impulse that turns this refusal into a “sort of
refusal”: reluctance.
In Munro’s stories that self-consciously examine writing, reluctance

is a constant companion, because in Munro’s view, writing demands the
“tarrying” with difficult emotions that theorists like Sara Ahmed, Sianne
Ngai, and Ann Cvetkovich endorse. In one of her first stories about writ-
ing, “The Office,” Munro’s protagonist is reluctant to even assume the
title of writer: “But here comes the disclosure which is not easy for me:
I am a writer.”54 As other Munrovian writer-characters know, writing is
all about difficult disclosures, and often their reluctance stems from the
besetting ethical question of whether one has the right to disclose. In
“Winter Wind” from Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, the writ-
er-protagonist reflects that in using her family members as material, “I
am only doing in a large and public way what has always been done,
what my mother did, and other people did, who mentioned to me my
grandmother’s story,” but like Munro’s ancestor Margaret Hogg, she
still has her doubts: “… I am being as careful as I can, but I stop and
wonder, I feel compunction.”55 Nevertheless, we have her story placed
before us, published evidence that reluctance and action have formed
their uneasy alliance once again.
In other stories, writerly shame attaches itself specifically to the pro-
motional activities that are the focus of many of the media narratives
about Alice Munro’s reluctant celebrity. Rose, from Who Do You Think
You Are? finds herself touring as an actor with small theatre companies,
and “part of her job” is “to go on local television chatting about those
productions, trying to drum up interest, telling amusing stories about
things that had happened during the tour.” And although, like the writ-
er-protagonist of “Winter Wind,” she feels that “There was nothing
shameful about any of this,” “Rose was deeply, unaccountably ashamed.”
However, she proceeds with her anecdotes anyway, and “did not let her
confusion show.”56 In carrying out the promotional activities that pro-
duce and maintain celebrity, the Munrovian storyteller discovers that
celebrity is itself a condition of reluctance. “Fame must be striven for,
then apologized for,” reflects Janet in “The Moons of Jupiter”; “Getting
it or not getting it, you will be to blame.”57 The Munrovian storyteller,
faced with celebrity and promotional culture, opts for reluctance; she
puts her hands in her pockets and keeps a “disaffected heart.”58
Tarrying with disaffection in that way (as writers do) always runs the
risk of immolation in one’s “ugly feelings,” and so the semblance of a
relentless forward march is protective for many of Munro’s storytellers,
210 L. YORK
as Sheila Munro speculates it was for her mother. In “Postcard” from

Dance of the Happy Shades, Helen is advised by the local police officer to
stop howling her pain and disaffection in front of her fickle lover’s house,
and to march forward, “be a good girl and go along like the rest of us
and pretty soon we’ll see spring.”59 His warning is all about the dan-
gers of getting stuck in one’s emotions; he tells Helen a cautionary tale
about a man and a married woman from the local choir being “stuck” in
a car together—where they “had no business being”60—in the mud of
the nearby swamp. The language irresistibly calls to mind Sara Ahmed’s
definition of affects as “what sticks, or what sustains or preserves, the
connection between ideas, values and objects.”61 The burden of the
police officer’s homily is clear: tarrying, getting “stuck” in the emotions
is frowned upon by the community, but this is exactly where Munro’s
characters find themselves stranded, as lovers and as writers, pursing the
affective “connection between ideas, values and objects” despite social
disapprobation.
In Alice Munro’s short stories, as in the work of the affect theorists I
have invoked in this chapter, tarrying with the negative, getting “stuck”
in it, is regarded by the community as failing to move forward through
cultural space at the pace that is thought proper. Sara Ahmed reflects
that “Going along with happiness scripts is how we get along,”62 but
only “some bodies” are enabled “to flow into space” unimpeded.63 Still,
she speculates that “Perhaps the experiences of not following, of being
stressed, of not being extended by the spaces in which we reside, can
teach us more about happiness.”64 Heather Love, writing of queer his-
tories, draws upon the same metaphors of moving forward and holding
back; she sees evidence that “advances” like gay marriage urge queer
subjects to join a mainstream process that is associated with moving for-
ward, rather than identifying with closeted pasts that are now associated
with “backward feelings”65; “Contemporary queers,” she concludes,
“find ourselves in the odd situation of ‘looking forward’ while we are
‘feeling backward’.”66 Like Cvetkovich, Love advocates a mindful tarry-
ing with those “backward” affects.
Lauren Berlant’s concept of the impasse is another way of reconfig-
uring affective movement, but it gives rise to a crucial difference with
reluctance as I have been defining it, as a simultaneous movement for-
ward and backward. Cvetkovich observes of Berlant’s concept that “a
(productive) impasse…slows us down, preventing an easy recourse to
critique or prescription for action.”67 But whereas the impasse “suggests
that things will not move forward due to circumstance—not that they
can’t, but that the world is not designed to make it happen, or there has
been a failure of imagination,”68 reluctance operates differently. Things
do move forward—that is the point—but we experience a feeling of
regret that they do so.
In Alice Munro’s fiction, reluctance is consistently represented as phys-
ical, spatial movements that contain within them the seeds of their own
counter-movements. When the narrator of “The Spanish Lady” from
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, witnesses the sudden death of
an old man sitting in the railway station, she has a vision of people as
moving spinning tops, “As if we were all wound up a long time ago and
were spinning out of control, whirring, making noises, but at a touch
could stop, and see each other for the first time, harmless and still.”69
The repetitive path of the top is a perfect metaphor for the destructive
loop of her failing marriage, for like Rose in Who Do You Think You Are?
she is likely to keep repeating the mistake of hurling herself back into the
relationship: “That could happen again; it could happen again and again.
And it would always be the same mistake.”70 The death of the unknown
man becomes the equivalent of the physical reluctance of a spinning top,
caused by the canceling out of the centrifugal and centripetal forces at
work until the workings of gravity bring the top down.
Like the spinning of a top, a character’s determined walking from
point A to point B, in Munro, can suggest a seemingly forward, pro-
pulsive movement through cultural space that, upon closer inspection,
discloses its refractory, reluctant forces. In “Child’s Play” from Too Much
Happiness, Marlene determinedly walks to the hospital to see Charlene, a
figure from her past who reminds Marlene of her shameful treatment of
a mentally challenged girl in their class at school. Indeed, she consciously
chooses walking over phoning; “Perhaps,” she suggests, “I wanted to
think I’d made as much effort as possible.”71 But Marlene’s disinclina-
tion to acknowledge the past is so strong that she walks briskly along
almost hoping, with a “backward feeling,” that Charlene is dead so that
her forward action would have no frictional psychic forces that would
slow her progress toward repression.
In “Gravel,” one of the stories in Dear Life, which is very likely to be
Munro’s last published volume, drowning once more suggests immola-
tion in the ugly feelings of the past. The protagonist’s sister Caro sets up
a ruse to draw their mother away from her lover to pay some attention
to the children by pretending that the dog is drowning and she is going
212 L. YORK
to save it, but she drowns. Years later, the mother’s now former lover
advises the protagonist to keep going, “Accept everything and then trag-
edy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going
along easy in the world.”72 And even though she sees the attractions of
that carefree forward movement, she opts instead for reluctance, diffi-
culty, and memory: “But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water
and throwing herself in…and I’m still caught…waiting for the splash.”73
In essence, the celebrity of Alice Munro manifests reluctance on sev-
eral overlapping, intertextual levels. It has been welcomed as a prized
national affect that qualifies her as a model modest Canadian citizen. It
dovetails with Munro’s own theory of writing as a tarrying with difficult
affects and knowledges. And it offers an alternative way of being a lit-
erary celebrity in an increasingly globalized market that is premised on
ever-expanding production, promotion, and consumption. In navigat-
ing her career, its detours and expressways, reversals and accelerations,
Munro has creatively left herself open to circuitous shifts. For instance,
when she published The View from Castle Rock, she told many people,
including Douglas Gibson, that it would be her last book; happily, three
years later, Too Much Happiness came along, and then in 2012, with a
greater sense of finality, Dear Life. As Gibson has said over the years that
he has worked with Munro, she has never set out on the forward motion
of planning a book of stories, but
every so often she says to interviewers that she’s not going to write any
more books and I don’t comment on this. And then she writes more sto-
ries for The New Yorker. And then I say: “It seems to me you have just
enough short stories for a collection.” And she grudgingly admits that this
is probably true. …She might even use the expression “I guess there’s no
getting out of it!”74
Neither did Gibson require Munro to sign contracts for books, for to
do so would have been to enforce the ineluctably forward-driving move-
ment of the market that caused Munro so much professional anguish in
her earlier years. Furthermore, the contract he has long held with Munro
specifies that she would not be expected to promote her books on radio
or television.75 Instead, she and Gibson have between them devised a
backtracking career, one that suggests those local slow roads in “Miles
City, Montana”: a reluctant alternative to the demands of a globalized
and highly concentrated capitalism for more and more product.
In the four stories that bring Dear Life to an end, “Finale,” which,
Munro comments, “are the first and last—and the closest—things I have
had to say about my own life,”76 Munro stages her own reluctance to
walk away from her (writing) life without a backward glance. The con-
clusion of her final story, “Dear Life,” returns once more to the spec-
tre of the ill, dying mother whose disintegrating body and spirit form
the epicenter of negative affect in Munro’s stories. The speaker offers an
abundance of excuses for not going to her mother’s funeral—she had
two small children; she couldn’t afford the trip; her husband scorned
“formal behaviour”—but she interrupts her own flow of exculpatory
pleading, and refuses to locate the motivations of reluctance in exter-
nal circumstance or another person: “why blame it on him? I felt the
same.”77 Instead, Munro gently assumes ownership of reluctance, seeing
it as she has done throughout her work and in the conduct of her literary
celebrity, as a daily practice of tarrying with our ugliest emotions: “We
say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never for-
give ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.”78
Notes
1. Lorraine York, Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity
2. Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli, Producing Canadian Literature:
Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier
3. Robert Lecker, Making It Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian
Literature (Concord: Anansi, 1995), 116.
4. Lorraine York, Literary Celebrity in Canada (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2007), 5.
5. Smaro Kamboureli, “The Culture of Celebrity and National Pedagogy,”
in Home Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature,
Reappraisals, Canadian Writers 28, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2004), 35–55.
6. Christine Evain, ed., Douglas Gibson Unedited: On Editing Robertson
Davies, Alice Munro, W.O. Mitchell, Mavis Gallant, Jack Hodgins, Alistair
MacLeod, Etc. (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007), 27.
7. Alexander MacLeod, “The Canadian Short Story in English: Aesthetic
Agency, Social Change, and the Shifting Canon,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Canadian Literature, ed. Cynthia Sugars (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2016), 428.
214 L. YORK
8. Evain, Douglas Gibson Unedited, 28.

9. James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the
Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2005), 271–272.
10. Gillian Roberts, Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of
National Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 19–20.
11. Laura Moss, “Margaret Atwood: Branding an Icon Abroad,” in Margaret
Atwood: The Open Eye, ed. John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2006), 22.
12. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2012), 3.
13. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 7.
14. Ibid., 5.
15. OED.
16. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 22.
17. Ibid., 26.
18. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 163.
19. Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2014), 37.
20. Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001), 19–20.
21. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1986), 6.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 2–3.
24. Sheila Munro, Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice
Munro (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), 160–161.
25. Ibid., 60–61.
26. Robert Thacker, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography (Toronto:
27. Douglas Gibson, Stories About Storytellers: Publishing Alice Munro,
Robertson Davies, Alistair MacLeod, and Others (Toronto: ECW Press,
2011), 436.
28. Evain, Douglas Gibson Unedited, 29–30.
29. Eleanor Wachtel, “Alice Munro: A Life in Writing, A Conversation with
Eleanor Wachtel,” Queen’s Quarterly 112, no. 2 (2005): 280.
30. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 6.
31. Robert McGill, “Biographical Desire and the Archives of Living Authors,”
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 24, no. 1 (2009): 132.
32. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” https://www.opasquet.fr/dl/
texts/Sontag_Aesthetics_of_Silence_2006.pdf.
33. McGill, “Biographical Desire,” 141.
34. Sontag.
35. Patricia Cormack and James F. Cosgrave, Desiring Canada: CBC Contests,

Hockey Violence, and Other Stately Pleasures (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2013), 40.
36. Ibid., 53.
37. Daniel Coleman, White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada
38. Alice Munro, The Moons of Jupiter (Toronto: Macmillan, 1982), 25.
39. Sandra Martin, “Alice Munro: Nobel Laureate,” The Globe and Mail,
October 11, 2013, A1.
40. “For the Love of Alice,” Toronto Star, October 13, 2013, E11.
41. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (Scarborough: Signet-New
American Library, 1974), 197–198.
42. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3.
43. Ibid., 12.
44. Martin, “Alice Munro: Nobel Laureate,” A1.
45. Munro, Lives, 32.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Alice Munro, Runaway (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2004), 278.
49. Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are? (Toronto: Penguin, 1996), 96.
50. Ibid., 116.
51. Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson,
1968), 29.
52. Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock: Stories (Toronto: McClelland
53. Ibid., 20.
54. Munro, Dance, 59.
55. Alice Munro, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories
(Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974), 200.
57. Munro, Moons, 219.
58. Munro, Dance, 29.
59. Ibid., 146.
60. Ibid.
61. Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Studies Reader, ed. Melissa
2010), 30.
62. Ahmed, Promise, 59.
63. Ibid., 12.
64. Ibid.
65. Love, Feeling, 10.
66. Ibid., 27.
216 L. YORK
67. Cvetkovich, Depression, 20.

68. Ibid., 20–21.
69. Munro, Something, 190–191.
2009), 212.
72. Alice Munro, Dear Life: Stories (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2012),
108–109.
73. Ibid., 109.
74. Evain, Douglas Gibson Unedited, 33.
75. Ibid., 30.
76. Munro, Dear, 255.
77. Ibid., 319.
78. Ibid.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Cormack, Patricia, and James F. Cosgrave. Desiring Canada: CBC Contests,
Hockey Violence, and Other Stately Pleasures. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2013.
Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press,
2012.
Dobson, Kit, and Smaro Kamboureli. Producing Canadian Literature: Authors
Speak on the Literary Marketplace. Waterloo: Waterloo University Press, 2013.
Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1986. Print.
English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of
Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Evain, Christine, ed., Douglas Gibson Unedited: On Editing Robertson Davies,
Alice Munro, W.O. Mitchell, Mavis Gallant, Jack Hodgins, Alistair MacLeod,
Etc. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007.
“For the Love of Alice.” Toronto Star, October 13, 2013, E1, E11.
Gibson, Douglas. Stories About Storytellers: Publishing Alice Munro, Robertson
Davies, Alistair MacLeod, and Others. Toronto: ECW Press, 2011.
Kamboureli, Smaro. “The Culture of Celebrity and National Pedagogy.”
In Home Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature,
Reappraisals, Canadian Writers 28, edited by Cynthia Sugars, 35–55. Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2004.
Lecker, Robert. Making It Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian

Literature. Concord: Anansi, 1995.
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
MacLeod, Alexander. “The Canadian Short Story in English: Aesthetic Agency,
Social Change, and the Shifting Canon.” In The Oxford Handbook of
Canadian Literature, edited by Cynthia Sugars, 426–447. New York: Oxford
Martin, Sandra. “Alice Munro: Nobel Laureate.” The Globe and Mail, October
11, 2013, A1, A9.
McGill, Robert. “Biographical Desire and the Archives of Living Authors.” a/b:
Auto/Biography Studies 24, no. 1 (2009): 129–145.
Moss, Laura. “Margaret Atwood: Branding an Icon Abroad.” In Margaret
Atwood: The Open Eye, edited by John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich, 19–33.
Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006.
Munro, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1968.
———. Dear Life: Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2012.
———. Lives of Girls and Women. Scarborough: Signet-New American Library,
1974 [1971].
———. Runaway. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2004.
———. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories. Toronto:
McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974.
———. The Moons of Jupiter. Toronto: Macmillan, 1982.
———. The View from Castle Rock: Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 2006.
———. Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Penguin, 1996 [1978].
Munro, Sheila. Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion, 2001.
Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence.” Accessed April 10, 2015. https://
www.opasquet.fr/dl/texts/Sontag_Aesthetics_of_Silence_2006.pdf.
Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography. Toronto:
Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity, 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2014 [2004].
Wachtel, Eleanor. “Alice Munro: A Life in Writing, a Conversation with Eleanor
Wachtel.” Queen’s Quarterly 112, no. 2 (2005): 266–281.
York, Lorraine. Literary Celebrity in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2007.
———. Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity. Toronto:
Universitty of Toronto Press, 2013.
CHAPTER 11
Life After Life: Survival in the (Late) Fiction

of Alice Munro
Naomi Morgenstern
There is a moment in reading Alice Munro’s “My Mother’s

Dream” when one comes to suspect that the story is being narrated
by a dead baby. This inkling describes a mode of participating in the
story, becoming part of its affective world by joining the range of char-
acters who, at various points within the narrative, worry that the baby,
our unnamed narrator, is dead. And while this will not turn out to be
the case in any simple sense—the narrator survives to tell the tale—the
reader is initially suspicious for quite good reasons: the narrator will
indeed have survived an insistent, if in some senses passive, or uncon-
scious, attempt at infanticide. Read carefully, “My Mother’s Dream” sug-
gests that the baby (who is herself a defiant and murderous adversary)
survives her mother’s attempt on her life several times over, even if much
of this (maternal) violence is disavowed; only the tiniest sprinkle of the
sedative pill was involved; the pulling up of the blanket over the baby’s
head was a gesture of care, of course! Survival, or going-on-being in rela-
tion, for both mother and infant, would seem to be bound up with such
N. Morgenstern (*) 
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_11
220 N. MORGENSTERN
psychical and strategic revisions. Munro, in an incisive rewriting of the

psychoanalytic literature, genders such survival feminine:
I know that the matter was decided long before I was born and was plain
to everybody else since the beginning of my life [says the narrator], but I
believe that it was only at the moment when I decided to come back, when
I gave up the fight against my mother (which must have been a fight for
something like her total surrender) and when in fact I chose survival over
victory (death would have been victory), that I took on my female nature.
And to some extent Jill took on hers.1
In the aftermath of these events, a certain spectrality adheres to the nar-

rator/subject both in her very function as a narrator, able to inhabit vari-
ous ghostly and impossible spaces of narration, and according to her own
self description in the story’s conclusion. The story ends with an account
of the narrator’s six- or seven-year-old self spying on the teenaged girls
next door: “I would have liked for one of them to see my pale pajamas
moving in the dark, and to scream out in earnest, thinking that I was a
ghost.”2 If death, associated as it is with omnipotence, is coded mascu-
line, to live on, “My Mother’s Dream” suggests, is to be a “feminine”
relational subject and also a kind of spectral presence: survival, in this
story, is an affirmation of irreducibly relational being.
In what follows, I would like to suggest that the treatment of sur-
vival as kind of originary posthumousness is more generally character-
istic of the ethical, political, and aesthetic concerns of Munro’s fiction.
One might think, for example, of Lauren in “Trespasses” who attends
her own funeral or, to be more precise, attends the belated funeral of
a baby named “Lauren,” whom her parents adopted shortly before her
own birth (this is where the narrative begins and we circle back).3 Or
of Stella, in “Lichen,” who survives her ex-husband’s hysterical gender-
ing of mortality as he pairs off with successively younger women: “But
she held on. She said, ‘Lichen.’ And now, look, her words have come
true…The black has turned to gray, to the soft, dry color of a plant
mysteriously nourished on the rocks.”4 Here, “Lichen,” in its many
significations (as that which one might liken to the female body, as the
composite organism, as merely a signifier—“She said, ‘Lichen’”—and
“Lichen” itself as narrative structure, with a dying and surviving male
body at its center) reads as a semiotically complex registration of a mas-
culine-coded disavowal of mortality. In Munro’s work, survival takes
11 LIFE AFTER LIFE: SURVIVAL IN THE (LATE) FICTION OF ALICE MUNRO 221
on a range of forms and may suggest a constitutive abandonment and

subsequent endurance (repeatedly living through a kind of death or
break), or a clinging to the “wrong” object or life story in something
like the way that Lauren Berlant describes the structure or experience
of “cruel optimism.”5 In Munro’s psychologically nuanced prose, “sur-
vival” can also describe a form of escape, however minimal or compro-
mised, or it may indicate the life that is left over, the life that remains
after familiar narrative and ideological forms have been exhausted or out-
lived, the life of a Munrovian “other” story.6
While recognizing survival as an enduring concern for Munro, this
essay will focus on the motif of survival in two pairings of late stories.
The first pairing privileges women who are abandoned by their children
and, in this quite specific sense, must and do survive their loss (“Deep-
Holes” and “Silence”); the second pairing concerns women who sur-
vive murderously violent and psychotic men (“Runaway” and “Free
Radicals”).7 I want to consider the possibility that the surviving mothers
and quasi-gothic heroines that preoccupy a great deal of Munro’s late
fiction do not merely happen to be women; rather, these fundamentally
gendered figures work to destabilize any comfortable sense of ontology
as prior to the social. In both sets of stories, I suggest, Munro offers a
philosophical account of living on that bears comparison with and sheds
light on a Derridean account of life as survival: “the meaning of which is
not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on,
life is survival [la vie est survie].”8 Munro’s portraits of survival suggest
a kind of life after life that disrupts conventional humanist accounts of
the decisive function of death in the teleology of the subject. Her stories
often end with a temporal jolt as we are reminded of the life that lingers
at some affective remove from the events in which we have been so inti-
mately immersed. Rather than identifying the proprietorial self-presence
of an individual life with the death that is ours alone (in a Heideggerian,
but also a classically metaphysical, sense), Munro’s stories work toward
communicating a profound understanding of life as originally and per-
sistently posthumous. What Munro adds, however (and that Jacques
Derrida only gestures toward in, for example, The Gift of Death), is both
an engagement with the distinct significance of this survival for girls and
women and an insistence that “gender” is fundamentally bound up with
the experience of living, dying, and relation, even as “gender” may be a
condensed and historically specific shorthand for an array of interrelated
and ever-shifting nodes of materialized signification. Peggy Kamuf writes
222 N. MORGENSTERN
that “Sexual difference is not only the difference between generic sexes but
first of all the difference made by being-sexual, by the finiteness and spec-
ificity of sexual being with others. It differentiates every mortal ‘who’ or
‘what’ as a himself, herself, itself.”9 Revisiting the figure of the sacrificed
and self-sacrificing mother, and of the woman as sacrificial victim, Munro’s
late fiction, I shall argue, helps us to describe the gendered contours of a
posthumanist ontology.
I
“Deep-Holes” presents us with an Oedipal familial configuration and
an accident. Sally packs a picnic lunch for an outing with her husband
and three children. The picnic is supposed to honor Alex’s impor-
tant professional accomplishment (“[h]is first solo article in Zeitschrift
für Geomorphology. They were going to Osler Bluff because it figured
largely in the article, and because Sally and the children had never been
there”10). While on the picnic, the oldest son, nine-year-old Kent, falls
into a hole and is rescued by his parents, although not before suffering
a severe injury (one leg cleanly broken, the other shattered). Without
too much pressure, the realist scene of the child’s accident gives way to
the allegorical representation of a (re)birth—Sally imagines that she can
magically summon up a rope, the equivalent to an umbilical cord, and
her husband “delivers” Kent onto her chest:
Should she run to the car and see if there was a rope? Tie the rope around
a tree trunk. Maybe tie it around Kent’s body so she could lift him when
Alex raised him up to her? There wouldn’t be a rope. Why would there be
a rope?…with the whole power of her shoulders and chest and with Alex
supporting and shoving Kent’s body from behind they heaved him over.
Sally fell back with him in her arms and saw his eyes open, roll back in his
head as he fainted again.11
This rebirth is then followed by a prolonged period of recovery that

coincides with an intense mother-son preoedipal intimacy. This relation-
ship of shared secrets and untranslatable knowledge takes the form, most
notably, of the fantasy (of the reality) of another world:
Now Sally told him something she had not told to another soul. She told
him how she was attracted to remote islands…to small or obscure islands
nobody talked about and which were seldom if ever visited…She and Kent
began to collect every scrap of information they could find about these
places, not allowing themselves to make anything up. And never telling
Alex what they were doing.12
In some enigmatic way, Kent’s survival and rebirth and the intimate rela-
tionship he develops with his mother will result, in adulthood, in a rad-
ical defiance of social interpellation. He moves away and sends a couple
of letters home; his mother will try to pursue him; but he will essentially
disappear. The adult Kent increasingly refuses to answer to the author-
itative address of the other and ultimately and impersonally resists rela-
tion as such. For Sally, the separation of mother and child cannot be
made to conform with a legible script that would allow for the manage-
ment of loss, but effects another order of abandonment that she must
survive (she will fantasize that Kent has escaped to one of their secret
islands). While Kent appears to revolt against Alex and all that his father
represents, he is also, in his very grandiosity, his father all over again. It
is only following Alex’s death that Kent allows himself to be re-found,
and he dictates the terms of a reunion with his mother. Horrified by
the squalor in which she encounters her son, his narcissism, his aggres-
sion, his impersonal demands for money, Sally “gets lost, then finds her
way [home]” alone, to the cat, a single serving of lasagna, and a glass of
wine.13
But Sally can’t quite give up on the relationship with Kent, despite
her anger at the prospect of only being of use to a son who would use
her up without a compensatory return. This giving up would be “dis-
aster.”14 Instead, the odd form of closure that the story proposes is the
consolation that Sally provides for herself through a gesture of “originary
mourning” or self-loss: “And it was possible, too, that age could be her
ally, turning her into somebody she didn’t know yet. She has seen the
look on the faces of certain old people—marooned on islands of their
own choosing, clear sighted, content.”15 It is in this moment, when Sally
imagines a self as stranger to itself, a self beyond the very set of relations
that constitute it as such, that her (posthumous) survival might be said
to begin.
The woman who remains at the end of “Deep-Holes” sur-
vives the loss of both her son and her husband, but we are left with a
sense that what needs to be said, the story that needs to be told—
although maybe it’s not, precisely, a story—is what ultimately evades
224 N. MORGENSTERN
narrative capture. This lingering feeling recalls Judith Butler’s suggestion

that “we might reread ‘being’ as precisely the potentiality that remains
unexhausted by any particular interpellation.”16 In fact, “Deep-Holes”
suggests that there is an odd comfort to be found in the prising apart
of “life” and “story,” and this dislocation is poignantly anticipated in
one of the story’s memorable details. The function that Sally serves for
Alex after their children have departed and the graduate students are no
longer of any “use” (Alex has moved on from making “use” of grad-
uate students to making “use” of his wife) is to serve as a scale model
in his geological photographs (“So she became the small figure in black
or bright clothing contrasting with the ribbons of Silurian or Devonian
rock. Or with the gneiss formed by intense compression, folded and
deformed by clashes of the American and Pacific plates to make the pres-
ent continent”17). Sally is useful precisely because she does not dissolve
into the background, and yet she very nearly disappears, even in Munro’s
prose description. This is a complex image that might at first seem to
represent the epitome of Sally’s reduction to a function within someone
else’s narrative and frame (a reduction which she, it should be noted,
doesn’t appear to resent). But it also resonates because the rocky forma-
tions that her husband documents and strives to know (“Alex did such
things the honour of knowing about them, the very best he could”18)
gesture, like the story itself, beyond human narratives and social struc-
tures.19 Feminine survival, insofar as it exceeds the story, suggests an
(ecological?) mode of living-on that we have yet to know.
“Silence” is the third of three stories that are focalized through
Juliet, and it tells the story of a woman who both survives the loss of
her child, as in “Deep-Holes,” and remains in the scene of that loss, in a
kind of suspended present. “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” (from the
2004 collection, Runaway) suggest that “life” itself is a kind of narra-
tive problem and that the problem is more evident to certain kinds of
people, both those of an intellectual predisposition and those who fail
to “fit in” (or to be seamlessly interpellated as normative subjects). Juliet
is a classics scholar who has taken time off from working on her PhD
thesis to teach Latin at a girls’ private school in Vancouver in 1965, and
in “Chance” we learn that she was familiar with these “problems” from
an early age: “The problem was that she was a girl…In the town where
she grew up her sort of intelligence was often put in the same category
as a limp or an extra thumb, and people had been quick to point out the
expected accompanying drawbacks…What would become of her, was the
question.”20 From the very beginning of her writing career, Munro has
been interested in female lives that fail to fit the frame. Yet part of what
seduces us and keeps us reading, isn’t so much recognition (yes, that’s
a woman’s life!) but rather the exposure of form and ideology as they
fracture. In this way Munro could be said to use fiction, and specifically
narrative fiction, to write a theoretical account that would otherwise be
inaccessible.
On her train trip out West, Juliet contemplates two ways of imag-
ining a life. She first pictures herself as “a young woman in a Russian
novel” going out to “meet her fate,” before turning to the landscape she
is crossing: “What drew her in—enchanted her, actually—was the very
indifference, the repetition, the carelessness and contempt for harmony,
to be found on the scrambled surface of the Precambrian shield.”21 Juliet
is not drawn toward Nature as an alternative to narrative construction,
but rather toward something more akin to the Real.22 This image antici-
pates the human figure used as a scale model in the geographical images
in “Deep-Holes” and, once again, invokes the distortion and contin-
gency of all stories: “the confusion of the materiality of the signifier with
the materiality of what it signifies…may seem obvious enough on the
level of light and sound,” Paul De Man wrote, “but it is less so with
regard to the more general phenomenality of space, time or especially
the self.”23 In this and other stories, Munro prompts us to think about
women’s lives and narratives as ideologically coded structures that both
capture and make living-on possible.24 At the same time, the geological
references in these stories function as the Real, as that which won’t be
incorporated in any narrative but insists and disrupts (survives?). Juliet
finds this “enchanting.” She and the narrator are both narrative theo-
rists and philosophers of sorts, observing, interpreting, arranging events
in sequence. In other words, Munro’s stories might be said to expose the
gap, as Paul de Man would have it, between “the pattern of one’s past
and future existence as in accordance with temporal and spatial schemes
that belong to fictional narratives” and “the world”: “This does not
mean that fictional narratives are not part of the world and of reality,”
De Man adds; “their impact upon the world may well be all too strong
for comfort.”25
Central to the first story of the triptych (“Chance”) is a “chance”
encounter with an unnamed stranger, a rather sad man who asks some-
thing of Juliet (“People interrupt women…Easier than men…They think
women are bound to be nicer”26); but she does not reciprocate, or let
226 N. MORGENSTERN
herself be used. Instead, she goes off to read her book elsewhere, and
shortly thereafter the man throws himself from the train. Here, as else-
where in this set of stories, the narrative poses the question of a female
subject’s responsibility for the death of another: is such thinking a form
of “magical thinking,” even as it might also be the only kind of “think-
ing” we have? Later, Eric, Juliet’s partner-to-be, whom she also happens
to meet on the same trip, will suggest that Juliet’s guilt is a version of
grandiosity and overreading: “I think that this is minor. Things will hap-
pen in your life—things will probably happen in your life—that will make
this seem minor. Other things you’ll be able to feel guilty about.”27 It’s
not that Juliet has no responsibility for the event, according to Eric, so
much as that time and life and narrative construction will, inevitably,
alter its significance.
In “Soon,” Juliet goes home with her infant daughter (described
at the beginning of the story as “the baby who would turn out to be
Penelope”) to visit her parents. Not only is Juliet unmarried, but in a
conversation with a local minister who has come to visit her ailing
mother, she will assert that she and Eric plan to bring up their daughter
without religion. The minister, accusing her of perhaps the worst crime a
mother could commit, will compare this to “denying her nourishment.”
A furious Juliet will later refuse to offer “protection” to her own mother
who confesses that her “faith isn’t strictly religious but is rather the belief
that ‘when it gets so bad…Soon. Soon I’ll see Juliet’…”28 Prefiguring her
own later abandonment (in “Silence”) by her daughter, Penelope, Juliet
“found no reply.” She later berates herself, “Could it not have been man-
aged? Why should it have been so difficult?”29
“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” are carefully patterned narratives,
but this patterning is thrown into relief, and thereby questioned and
exposed, by metafictional moments within the stories (as, for example,
with the repetition of the phrase “This is what happens” at the end of
“Chance”). And these moments also give us a sense of survival—and
specifically, I would argue, of “feminine survival,”—as that which either
escapes from or endures beyond fiction, ideology, and misreading.
Magical thinking (and narrative, I would suggest, is a privileged name for
magical thinking) allows for “survival”; but survival is also that which we
glimpse precisely when such thinking gives way.30
Like “Deep-Holes,” “Silence” is the story of a woman who outlives
her role as wife and mother, even as these attachments are not to be so
easily relinquished. Both stories unfold in what I would argue (drawing
on Melanie Klein’s terminology) is a depressive as opposed to a paranoid

mode (I will discuss the “paranoid” mode in relationship to survival in
the last part of this chapter). Indeed, the “depressive” might be thought
of as the distinctive mode of survival as it allows for damage and loss,
as well as for feelings of responsibility and forms of reparation. In her
account and repurposing of Melanie Klein, Eve Sedgwick writes:
It’s probably more usual for discussions of the depressive position in Klein
to emphasize that that position inaugurates ethical possibility—in the
form of a guilty, empathetic view of the other as at once good, damaged,
integral, and requiring and eliciting love and care. Such ethical possibil-
ity, however, is founded on and coextensive with the subject’s movement
toward what Foucault calls “care of the self,” the often very fragile concern
to provide the self with pleasure and nourishment in an environment that
is perceived as not particularly offering them.31
Munro is psychologically canny and nuanced enough (how could one

ever hope to attend to all the nuance in that complex structure that is
a Munro story?) that these modes—the depressive and the paranoid—
are not presented as entirely distinct; and this gesture corresponds with
Klein’s own emphasis on oscillation.32 “There are thus two sets of fears,
feelings and defences,” Klein writes, “which, however varied in them-
selves and however intimately linked together, can in my view, for pur-
poses of theoretical clearness, be isolated from each other.”33
“Silence” begins with Juliet’s trip on a ferry to a spiritual retreat
where she anticipates, quite passionately, being reunited with her adult
daughter (“one day without some contact with her daughter is hard
to bear, let alone six months”34). Juliet is now a successful profes-
sional woman in her forties, an “interviewer” and “expert on reassuring
responses” (responding repeatedly to the mother to whom she failed to
respond while also always missing precisely that opportunity). Among
the different figurative possibilities offered up to us by Juliet herself is
Juliet as Demeter. She has just received a message from Penelope: “Hope
to see you Sunday afternoon. It’s time.” Juliet thinks: “when her message
came I was like an old patch of cracked earth getting a full drink of rain”
(p. 104). But when Juliet arrives at the retreat, she learns that Penelope
is not there: “The woman says those words—Penelope is not here—as
lightly as possible. You would think that Penelope’s absence could be
turned into a matter for amused contemplation, even for their mutual
228 N. MORGENSTERN
delight. Juliet has to take a deep breath. For a moment she cannot
speak” (p. 106). In a scene that repeats the encounter with the minis-
ter in “Soon,” Joan, who greets Juliet at the retreat and seems to func-
tion as a kind of spiritual advisor, tells Juliet that “Penelope is not very
concerned right now about her possessions,” that instead she suffers from
a “great hunger. Hunger for the things that were not available to her
in her home.”35 For the next five years Juliet will receive an unsigned
and blank generic birthday card on Penelope’s birthday addressed in
Penelope’s handwriting, a detail that surely testifies to the “narcissistic”
quality of this object attachment that confuses mother and child, on
the part of both mother and child. Whose birthday is it? Juliet’s friend
Christa will attempt to reassure her on that first year when no card
arrives: “It doesn’t mean anything…All they were for was to tell you
she’s alive somewhere. Now she figures you’ve got the message.”36
“Silence,” like many of Munro’s stories, depicts a subject disrupted by
the loss of a narcissistically indispensable other; however, to complicate
matters further, that indispensable other already functioned as a type of
constitutive disruption for the self: “the disruption of the Other at the
heart of the self is the very condition of that self’s possibility.”37 How
does one begin to describe such loss? “Death” is only one of the names
we use to limit the enigmatic quality of an experience that borders on the
impossible. Hence, Peggy Kamuf’s critical engagement with Derrida’s
The Gift of Death rephrases one of Derrida’s “concentrated” questions:
“Can we ever know, simply and without remainder, who or what dies
when a mortal being—man, woman, or other finitude—ceases to be
present among the living, as we say?”38
“Silence” is structured so that the story of her partner Eric’s death
and pagan funeral is embedded in the story of Juliet’s loss of their
daughter, Penelope. In fact, Juliet suggests that Penelope provides her
with a kind of “absolution” when she first feels Eric’s absence: “At the
supper table she began to shake, but could not loosen her fingers to drop
the knife and fork. Penelope came around the table and pried her hands
open. She said, ‘It’s Dad, isn’t it?’ Juliet afterwards told a few people…
that these seemed the most utterly absolving, the most tender words,
that anybody had ever said to her.”39 But Juliet’s loss of Penelope will go
on without any such resolution. She literalizes compartmentalization, as
one does, assigning loss a place. First Penelope’s things are “banished”
to her old bedroom and the door is shut “and in time could be passed
without disturbance.”40 Later, Penelope’s things are stored in garbage
bags that follow Juliet as she moves from dwelling to dwelling, ultimately
to be consigned to the basement of a friend’s house. Mourning will also
take on a kind of symbolic or allegorical form as Juliet’s recommenced
doctoral studies morph into a fascination (“The word studies does not
seem to describe very well what she does—investigations would be bet-
ter”41) with late Greek literature and specifically “a romance written by
Heliodorus and called the Aethiopica.” This is the story of a woman who
must give up her daughter to another’s care but who never ceases to
long for a reunion. Juliet will “secretly…devi[se] a different ending,” to
the story, one that involves a “reconciliation” of the girl “with the erring,
repentant, essentially great-hearted queen”42).
“Silence,” then, isn’t the story of Penelope’s “death,” whatever that
would mean, but something odder and in a certain sense more difficult
(as in “Deep-Holes”). It’s the story of Juliet’s living on. Juliet contem-
plates a relationship with a man who knows nothing of Penelope (“If
Juliet lived with him the fact of Penelope would never surface, Penelope
would not exist. Nor did Penelope exist. The Penelope Juliet sought was
gone…changed in face and body…[she] was nobody Juliet knew. Does
Juliet believe this?”43), and her life gradually takes her to the place where
address and relation come undone–mother and child no longer mutu-
ally constitute one another through forms of recognition and significa-
tion. Some time after she stops receiving cards from Penelope, Juliet has
a chance encounter with Heather, an old friend of Penelope’s, on the
streets of Vancouver. And this encounter provides Juliet with new traces
to be read into meaning (“Nothing. Don’t make it mean anything,” she
says to herself 44). She knows now about Penelope’s general wherea-
bouts (up North in Whitehorse or Yellowknife) as well as about the sur-
prising general shape of her daughter’s life (married with five children, at
least two of them sons, who attend private school). She also knows that
Penelope has referred to her in conversation with Heather (“But she had
told Heather that Juliet was living in Vancouver. Did she say Juliet? Or
Mother. My mother”45). But the story concludes with a modulation into
the present tense and a portrait of Juliet’s ongoing life with some friends,
her absorption with “the old Greeks,” and part-time employment at a
coffee shop: “She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in
any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for unde-
served blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.”46 With
these final sentences, neither simply mournful nor melancholic, Munro’s
depressive ethic constructs a shape for survival. For Juliet to hope “as
people who know better hope for undeserved blessings” is to hope
230 N. MORGENSTERN
without ground and this constitutes a kind of opening to the future, even
as one cannot entirely dismiss magical thinking or the traces of omnipo-
tent thought. Munro thus imagines a (feminine) self constitutively dis-
rupted by an other, or otherness (“blessings…remissions, things of that
sort”), as the “sur” of “survival” registers itself as in excess of life and
mere reason.
II
“It turned out to be the husband,” is Sylvia Jamieson’s quasi-reliable
assessment of Carla’s predicament in “Runaway.”47 This is a complex
story with two focalizers (Carla and Sylvia): Sylvia is an older woman
and a botany teacher, married to a poet who has just died (Sylvia runs
away to Greece, but is particularly motivated to return to Carla); Carla
lives nearby with her husband Clark, with whom she ran away (“So, nat-
urally, Carla had to run away with Clark. The way her parents behaved,
they were practically guaranteeing it”48). Carla and Clark board horses
and run a riding school. To earn extra money, Carla also does household
work for Sylvia, particularly helping out when her husband was dying. At
the beginning of the story, the menacing and struggling Clark demands
that Carla aid him in his attempt to blackmail the reasonably well-to-do
Sylvia. Even more problematically for Carla, the blackmail scheme turns
on a story that she made up for Clark’s benefit (“And in one part of
her mind it was true”49), a story about the dying Mr. Jamieson’s sex-
ual advances: “Now and then came an image that she had to hammer
down, lest it spoil everything. She would think of the real dim and
sheeted body, drugged and shrinking every day in its rented hospital bed,
glimpsed only a few times when Mrs. Jamieson, or the visiting nurse had
neglected to close the door. She herself never actually coming closer to
him than that.”50 Carla’s perverse offering to Clark might be said to ena-
ble her survival in more than one sense as she compensates herself for
the disturbing proximity to death and fascinates and seduces her husband
through the lure of this triangulated structure. “Runaway” also includes
a goat, Flora, “a half-grown kid”-yet another “runaway” and Carla’s
double (“At first she had been Clark’s pet entirely following him every-
where…her resemblance to a guileless girl in love had made them both
laugh. But as she grew older she seemed to attach herself to Carla”51).
Flora flaunts herself as an overdetermined narrative device (a scapegoat,
a deus ex machina, a memento mori, and an allegorical feminine subject),
and her eventual disappearance prompts Carla and Clark to offer differ-
ent narrative accounts of what might have happened to her.
When Carla (involved in the mess with Clark) is with Sylvia, she dis-
solves in tears and howls and Sylvia responds, “It’s not about your goat,
is it?”52 With Sylvia’s encouragement, a plan is devised to allow Carla
to “get away”; dressed in Sylvia’s clothes she will take a bus to Toronto
and live with a friend of Sylvia’s until she can find work at a stable. A
note written by Carla is to be left later by Sylvia for Clark: “I HAVE
GONE AWAY. I will be all write.”53 Carla’s intoxicated slip of the pen
(Sylvia thinks, “She was sure Carla knew right from write” if not right
from wrong) recalls Carla’s own fiction writing (the perverse story she
tells Clark) but also the way in which her life (“all write,” all writing)
captures and is captured by various ideological constructions in turn.
Carla flees her inauthentic bourgeois mother and stepfather, to be with
the “authentic” Clark (“She saw him as the architect of the life ahead of
them, herself as captive, her submission both proper and exquisite”),54
and then, under Sylvia’s tutelage, she writes another “adapt[ation] to
live up to what, as far as she could see, were Mrs. Jamieson’s—Sylvia’s—
expectations”).55 But on the bus to Toronto, Carla cannot imagine
herself surviving the departure: “The strange and terrible thing com-
ing clear to her about that world of the future, as she now pictured it,
was that she would not exist there…While she was running away from
him—now—Clark still kept his place in her life. But when she was fin-
ished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his
place? What else—who else—could ever be so vivid a challenge?…And
she would be lost. She would be lost…In peril of her life, Carla pulled
her large body, her iron limbs, forward. She stumbled, she cried out,
‘Let me off’.”56 Carla’s inability to imagine her own survival without this
cruel attachment to Clark suggests that Munro is not primarily interested
in an infinitely plastic account of the subject capable of writing as rein-
vention. Attachments in this story are not rational or liberating but are
rather unconscious sites of erotic subversion. In fact, Carla might be said
to be attached to the very site of her unviability, even as she is bound
to the very conditions of her survival and repeated reemergence. Carla
might even be said to play a certain fort-da game with herself, and, in
this sense, she too is a posthumous subject. In other words, there isn’t
always a decided difference between the survival that Munro’s fiction
repeatedly gestures toward and Berlantian “cruel optimism.”
232 N. MORGENSTERN
Having retrieved his wife without Sylvia’s knowledge, Clark heads for
Sylvia’s home at night. She awakens to find him pressed against the glass
of the unlocked patio doors, holding the clothes that she loaned Carla in
a paper bag. Clark both terrifies Sylvia and shames her in her very fear:
“What did you think? Did you think I’d murdered her [Carla]?” “I was
surprised,” replies a terrified Sylvia in her attempt to pacify Clark. “I bet
you were,” responds Clark, “After you were such a big help to her run-
ning away.”57 This dangerous encounter is interrupted by a mesmeriz-
ing “apparition” in the night fog (“‘Jesus Christ,’ Clark said softly and
devoutly”) that will turn out, after an initial period of wonder and con-
fusion, to be none other than Flora the goat. Having grabbed Sylvia’s
shoulder, Clark lets go. The aggression Clark feels toward Sylvia dissi-
pates in this moment that unites them, and Clark departs. Carla will only
learn of this encounter much later via a letter from Sylvia, a letter that
leads her to imagine that Clark has killed (murdered? sacrificed?) the lit-
tle goat. But Carla also decides to survive her belief, “a murderous nee-
dle somewhere in her lungs,” by barely breathing and not knowing: “She
had only to raise her eyes, she had only to look in one direction, to know
where she might go. An evening walk, once her chores for the day were
finished. To the edge of the woods, and the bare tree where the vul-
tures had held their party.”58 Even as she vividly imagines it (“The skull
with perhaps some shreds of bloodied skin clinging to it. A skull that she
could hold like a teacup in one hand. Knowledge in one hand”), Carla
will evade this memento mori, because, after all, “Other things could have
happened [to Flora]…She might be free.”59
While in some sense a realistic narrative about a threatening and con-
trolling husband and a woman who would return to him—and here it
is worth recalling that stories of battered women who return to their
batterers are also stories of “survival” (“all attachments are optimistic,”
says Lauren Berlant), clearly something also exceeds this level of nar-
ration. Carla disavows death in her perverse fantasy offering to Clark:
she will not see the figure of the dying Mr. Jamieson and again she will
not see the sacrifice of Flora (her own double). This is what allows Carla
to go on living (with Clark). Sylvia’s “other story,” of attachment to
Carla, might seem to offer a “healthier” alternative, but there is some-
thing facile about this kind of assessment: one can hardly choose freely
which narrative to inhabit. Crucially, both women survive these encoun-
ters with Clark (survival is necessarily a temporary reprieve) and thereby
survive an encounter with a particular instantiation of a paranoid
dimension—a violent threat to life—that emerges in more than one

place in Munro’s late fiction. If Melanie Klein insists that the para-
noid/schizoid and the depressive/reparative are “positions” in a com-
plexly interdependent and oscillatory relationship—rather than simply
developmental “stages,” and Eve Sedgwick explores the paranoid and
the reparative as modes of critical practice, Munro, I assert, activates
affective dimensions in her stories: spaces that contain and manage psy-
cho-ethical work. Paranoia, in a risky way, accesses both the real and the
excessive and/or fantastic threat that certain male subjects represent in
Munro’s world(s). Paranoia also announces its return in Munro’s late
fiction insofar as it is bound up, counterintuitively as it might seem at
first, with mourning.60
In “Free Radicals,” Nita, at sixty-two, is suffering from an advanced
form of cancer that is “at present” in remission (“whatever that really
meant. It did not mean ‘in retreat’”) when Rich, her older husband,
suddenly dies.61 “How was I to know he’d steal my thunder,” says the
unsentimental Nita; “she had always believed quite unreasonably, in
his surviving her. Then in the last year this had become not a foolish
belief at all, but in both their minds, as she thought, a certainty.”62 “One
morning,” Nita is at home alone and a “young man” appears at the door
to check her fuse box. She lets him in, despite her cautious nature. When
Rich was alive, Nita had a habit of coming up from the cellar and bolting
the door from the kitchen side: “Rich used to laugh about that habit
of hers, asking what she thought could get in, through the stone walls
and elf-sized windows, to menace them.”63 But it will turn out that the
“young man” is not so young and, what is more, he is not there to fix
the fuse box. Instead, he is a peculiarly polite psychopath who has just
murdered his parents and his disabled sister. He shows Nita before and
after pictures to document his gruesome crime; he also wants to tell her
all about it: “I guess you like listening to stories,” he says to her, “Want
me to tell you a story?”64
In response to the mortal threat posed by the psychopath, Nita will
take a “big chance” and fabricate her own lurid tale, a story in which she
too is a murderer: she has poisoned a younger woman who was having
an affair with her husband, with the offering of a rhubarb tart. She offers
that story in exchange for the compromising information shared with her
by her captor and as an attempt to save her life (the very life which, in
her mourning, she was tempted to give up on). She hopes that he will be
taken in by the identification and the exchange (“I know what it’s like.
234 N. MORGENSTERN
I know what it’s like to get rid of somebody who has injured you…I
have done the same thing you did”65). He is indeed ensnared and takes
Rich’s car and leaves Nita alive. The police come to her door the next
day and tell her that Rich’s stolen car has been recovered from the scene
of a bad accident, and that the driver who was wanted for a triple murder
is dead: “There followed a kindly stern lecture. Leaving keys in the car.
Woman living alone. These days you never know. Never know.”66
More obviously and simply than “Runaway,” “Free Radicals” is a
mourning narrative that is taken over by a different order of “paranoid”
violence (the disparate narrative elements of “Runaway,” that is to say,
have been distilled in this later story). Nita is given over to the strenu-
ous work of encountering Rich’s devastating absence, and the resistance
to such labor would seem to inhere in objects themselves: “She could
barely throw out a twisted paper clip of a fridge magnet…let alone the
dish of Irish coins that she and Rich had brought home from a trip fif-
teen years ago. Everything seemed to have acquired its own peculiar heft
and strangeness.”67 Munro also signals the invasion of the psychopath
as decidedly allegorical with the fairy tale diction and details of Nita’s
story (both her life story, with, for example, “elf-sized windows”, and
the story within the story with its poisoned tarts).68 Another way to put
this would be to suggest that “Free Radicals” allegorizes a decision to
survive (to survive the death of the other), which is also a decision to
live with one’s own dying. Faced with the disturbed and disturbing man,
Nita remembers that she is already dying and is strangely relieved: “Then
for the first time since he entered the house she thought of her cancer.
She thought of how it freed her, put her out of danger.”69 But with the
embedded reference to the story’s title, a signifier dangerous and free,
unhinged from its signified, Nita’s anxiety—and her chance to live on—
resurface. When the perverse intruder demands, or actually politely
requests, a drink, Nita finds the red wine she and Rich drank “every day
in reasonable quantities because it was supposed to be good for your
heart. Or bad for something that was not good for your heart.”70 She
is frightened and confused and can’t recall the term for this molecular
structure. But this fright and confusion lead her to conclude with a new
certainty that “the fact of her cancer was not going to be any help to her
at the present moment, none at all. The fact that she was going to die
within a year refused to cancel out the fact that she might die now.”71
Nita recalls the term she has been searching for, “free radicals,” a term
which is markedly undecidable—are free radicals “bad” or “good”?—she
can’t remember—and then concocts the tale that enables her to defeat
her adversary and prolong her life. In some sense, “free radicals” is
merely a meaningless material signifier that Nita will cling to (like a life
raft) to survive; but of course the very undecidability of the memory,
and of the phenomenon itself, signals the ungrounded nature of Nita’s
decision to go on being.72 It remains undecidable whether that kind of
survival constitutes (or will have constituted) a “cruel optimism” or the
basis for a future, a life. Survival, in Munro’s oeuvre, repeatedly figures
an undecidability that “cruel optimism” threatens to foreclose.
What is more, Nita’s fairy tale of adultery and poisoned tarts uses her
own life as material, but in a distorted form worthy of The Interpretation
of Dreams.73 In telling the story, she takes up the position of Bett, Rich’s
first wife, and plots against herself: “She should write to Bett. Dear Bett,
Rich is dead and I have saved my life by becoming you. What does Bett
care that her life was saved? There’s only one person really worth tell-
ing,” and that person is Rich.74 Looking back on her life, Nita is sur-
prised by the ease with which she took up her role of “the younger
woman, the happy home wrecker,” in someone else’s story.75 And Nita’s
tangled fiction within the fiction is indeed a doubled knot of gratifica-
tion and punishment and gratifying punishment. It both appears to
make a reparative/depressive gesture by offering symbolic compensation
to Bett in the form of Nita’s own life, and it takes the form of a para-
noid self-attack reading (implicitly) Nita’s illness, her husband’s death,
and the invasion of the killer as events for which she is responsible and
thus must suffer. In a story that concerns a woman’s doubled survival—
of cancer and of her husband’s sudden traumatic death, for which she
is certainly psychologically unprepared—the story of a violent intruder
serves an oddly therapeutic function. In other words, Nita could be said
to experience a traumatic encounter with her own survival. And this hap-
pens twice: first with the shock of Rich’s death and second (in a moment
that allegorizes the first), with her encounter with the intruder and her
accompanying realization that “her cancer was not going to be of any
help to her at the present moment, none at all.” By taking her life in her
own fiction, Nita joins Munro in envisaging a type of posthumous being.
Survival, for Munro, isn’t at home in familiar social narratives or
structures, and, as such, it articulates a spectral feminist critique of ide-
ological and formal constraint, while also exposing the ungrounded
assertion of (gendered) being in forms of living on, persistent attach-
ment, self-difference, magical thinking, and fiction writing. In “Dear
236 N. MORGENSTERN
Life: A Childhood Visitation,” published as “Personal History” in the

September 19, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, Munro describes her own
dying mother who escaped from the hospital and wandered wraith-
like about the town at night, “until someone who didn’t know her at
all spotted her and took her in.” Munro adds, “If this were fiction…
it would be too much, but it is true.” Oddly, those last two sentences,
set apart as a final paragraph, are omitted from the version published in
book form in 2012. Perhaps the ghostly figure of Munro’s mother was
judged to be “too much,” conjuring a kind of surplus, unseemly and
uncanny in her excess.76 Is Munro’s mother left to wander? Is she not
taken up or taken into Munro’s hybrid form (“The final four works in
this book [including ‘Dear Life’] are not quite stories. They form a sepa-
rate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes,
entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—
things I have to say about my own life”)? Or is this erasure instead a
form of protection: the mother will not be left exposed, here at the very
end, on the threshold of fiction, in her radical vulnerability? Hardly
excluded, Munro’s mother survives elsewhere for every reader of her fic-
tion. While at this moment what might be read as a haunting signature, a
disappearing act, turns Munro’s mother, and her own privileged fictional
subject and source, into the ghost of a ghost and the trace of a trace.
Notes
1. Alice Munro, “My Mother’s Dream,” in The Love of a Good Woman
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998), 337. For more on Munro’s
rewriting of the psychoanalytic account, see Morgenstern, “The baby
or the violin? Ethics and femininity in the fiction of Alice Munro,” LIT
Literature Interpretation Theory 14, no. 2 (2003): 69–97.
2. Ibid., 338.
3. Munro’s intuitions are related to Derrida’s remarks in numerous places
regarding the relationship between “survival” and the name: “death
reveals the power of the name to the very extent that the name continues
to name or to call what we call the bearer of the name…And since the
possibility of this situation is revealed at death, we can infer that it does
not wait for death, or that in it death does not wait for death. In calling
or naming someone while he is alive, we know that his name can survive
him and already survives him…” See Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul
de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 49.
4. Alice Munro, “Lichen,” The Progress of Love (New York: Vintage, 1985),
55.
5. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa
2010), 93–117. Berlant wrote, “[A]ll attachments are optimistic. That
does not mean that they feel optimistic…But the surrender to the return
to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation
of optimism as an affective form…whatever the content of the attachment
is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continu-
ity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to
look forward to being in the world” (pp. 93, 94). See also Judith Butler,
Giving An Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press,
2005). Butler contends that survival is bound up with problematic forms
of attachment, or, more accurately, with “attachment” as that which
predates moral assessment: “the infant will be disposed to love any and
every thing which emerges as an ‘object’ (rather than not love at all, fail
to attach, and jeopardize its survival). This is a scandal, of course, since
it shows us that love from the outset, is without judgment, and that, to
a certain extent, it remains without judgment or, at least without good
judgment for the rest of its career” (p. 78).
6. While his concerns are primarily formal, Ajay Heble could be said to per-
suasively use the distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic dis-
course to account for that dimension of Munro’s writing with its doubled
relationship to realist convention: “[p]aradigmatic discourse…operates by
referring to a series of meanings which signify through their absence…
what a closer examination of her writing reveals is that Munro continually
invests her realism with displaced possibilities from various paradigmatic
chains” (p. 5). See Ajay Heble, The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s
Discourse of Absence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). See
also Magdalene Redekop, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice
Munro (New York: Routledge, 1992). Redekop offers a feminist account
of what is, or has been, excluded from realist narrative and thereby con-
joins aesthetic and political/ethical concerns: “The signs in Munro’s sto-
ries do not pretend to be natural…The subtlety of her method, however,
suggests that you cannot understand the full power of the old traps if you
see yourself as standing on some moral high ground, free of old habits.
Munro herself is positioned along with her reader, inside the old patterns,
breaking them up from within” (p. 7).
7. See also “Dimensions,” in Too Much Happiness (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 2009), 1–31.
8. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House
238 N. MORGENSTERN
Publishing, 2007), 51. Derrida continues: “already from the beginning,

and well before the experiences of surviving [survivance] that are at the
moment mine, I maintained that survival is an originary concept that
constitutes the very structure of what we call existence, Dasein, if you
will. We are structurally survivors, marked by this structure of the trace
and of the testament” (p. 51). See also Aporias, The Work of Mourning,
and Politics of Friendship.
9. Peggy Kamuf, “The Sacrifice of Sarah,” in Book of Addresses (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005), 110–111.
10. Alice Munro, “Deep-Holes,” in Too Much Happiness (Toronto:
11. Ibid., 98. See also Kent’s later appeal to his accident as a “rebirth”
(“Perhaps in those moments I was reborn” [102]) and his father’s impa-
tience with this interpretation. The father’s grounding gesture could be
seen as an oblique rebuke to the reader’s interpretive pretensions (don’t
be ridiculous and grandiose—who do you think you are?) as it keeps
Munro’s fiction semi-secured in realist space even as the ground feels like
it is giving way. That might even be one way to think of the hyphen that
is preserved in the story’s title: the hyphen indicates that “Deep-Holes”
refers to the sign in the story that reads “CAUTION: DEEP-HOLES”
and not (merely) to a figure available for abstraction.
12. Ibid., 99.
13. Ibid., 115. Something of the uncanniness of Sally’s survival, as it operates
in excess of his own grandiosity, is registered by Kent: “He seemed a little
surprised or bewildered to find her still there” (113). That simple sen-
tence also functions as one of Munro’s distinctive metafictional moments
and as a condensed philosophical commentary on gendered ontology.
14. The word “disaster” picks up on its use in “My Mother’s Dream”:
“Sobered and grateful, not even able to risk thinking what she’d just
escaped, she took on loving me, because the alternative to loving was dis-
aster” (pp. 337–338).
15. Munro, “Deep-Holes,” 115. The term “originary mourning” is Derrida’s.
See Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993): “One can also…take into consideration a
sort of originary mourning, something that it seems to me neither
Heidegger,Freud, nor Levinas does” (p. 39).
16. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 131. See also Timothy Morton, on
the “withdrawnness” of the object: “And as an object-oriented ontolo-
gist I hold that all entities (including ‘myself’) are shy, retiring octopuses
that squirt out a dissembling ink as they withdraw into the ontological
shadows.” Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 3–4.
17. Ibid., 203.
18. Ibid.
19. These geological references can be found elsewhere in Munro’s writing
and are themselves a form of autobiographical trace—even as it feels
ridiculous to point out an autobiographical “trace” in this simultane-
ously entirely autobiographical and never “autobiographical” oeuvre. It
is instead in Munro’s relationship to the short story as a repeated and
changing structure that one “reads” her autobiography. For Munro’s
relationship to geography see “What Do You Want to Know for” in The
View From Castle Rock. Intriguingly, this is also the account of Munro’s
“survival” of breast cancer.
20. Alice Munro, “Chance,” in Runaway (Toronto: Penguin, 2004), 42.
21. Ibid., 43.
22. Zizek wrote, “Homologous to the Lacanian proposition ‘Woman does
not exist,’ we should perhaps assert that Nature does not exist: it does
not exist as a periodic, balanced circuit, thrown off its track by man’s
inadvertence. The very notion of man as an ‘excess’ with respect to
nature’s balanced circuit has finally to be abandoned.” Looking Awry: An
Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1991), 38.
23. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986), 11.
24. By naming her characters so obviously for feminine figures of particular
dramatic, narrative, and ideological import (“Juliet,” “Penelope”) and
by taking up the very form of the Odyssey (for both of these characters,
although we only get to read Juliet’s story), Munro provides a formal
corollary for this point. In other words, Munro both signals the way that
certain cultural narratives impose themselves on women and the way in
which such forms and narratives can be rewritten.
25. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, 11.
26. Munro, “Chance,” 53.
27. Ibid., 54.
28. Alice Munro, “Soon,” in Runaway (Toronto: Penguin, 2004), 100.
Further references will be included in the text.
29. Ibid., 101.
30. I understand Heble to be making a similar point when he reminds us
that “Any attempt at representation, whether it be by fictionalizing or
through acting, is inevitably part of a larger endeavour to master the
world, to reduce life to a rational set of codes or systems” (6). There are
numerous overt references to magical thinking in Munro’s fiction. See,
for example, the end of “Tricks”: “Robin has patients who believe that
combs and toothbrushes must lie in the right order, shoes must face in
240 N. MORGENSTERN
the right direction, steps must be counted, or some sort of punishment

will follow.” Alice Munro, Runaway (Toronto, Penguin), 220.
31. Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re
So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching
Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003), 137.
32. See Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You” and “Melanie
Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106,
no. 3 (2007): 625–642. See also Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its
Relation to Manic-Depressive States” and “Notes on Some Schizoid
Mechanisms,” in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New
York: The Free Press, 1986), 146–174, 175–200.
33. “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” in The Selected
Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: The Free Press, 1986),
146–174, 151.
34. Alice Munro, “Silence,” in Runaway (Toronto: Penguin, 2004), 104.
35. Ibid., 107.
36. Ibid., 121.
37. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Lesbian and
Gay Studies Reader, ed. Abelove, et al. (New York: Routledge), 317.
38. Peggy Kamuf, “The Sacrifice of Sarah,” 111. For Derrida’s original ques-
tion, see The Gift of Death: “The question becomes concentrated in this
‘oneself,’ in the identity (la même) or oneself (le soi-même) of the mortal
or dying self. ‘Who,’ or ‘what’ gives itself death or takes it upon them-
selves or itself?” (p. 45).
39. Munro, “Silence,” 120.
40. Ibid., 111.
41. Ibid., 129.
42. Ibid., 124.
43. Ibid., 128–129.
44. Ibid., 128.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 129.
47. Alice Munro, “Runaway,” in Runaway (Toronto: Penguin, 2004), 17.
48. Ibid., 22.
49. Ibid., 10.
50. Ibid., 11.
51. Ibid., 6.
52. Ibid., 17.
53. Ibid., 21.
54. Ibid., 25.
55. Ibid., 24. This structure would take us all the way back to Rose who is
caught between the forceful offer of different (social) roles and their
accompanying scripts. Munro invites us to think about interpellation and
constitutive misrecognition. See “The Beggar Maid” for Rose’s seduction
by and resistance to both Patrick and Dr. Henshawe: “And sometimes
Dr. Henshawe would say, ‘Well, you are a scholar, you are not interested
in that…’ And usually she was right. Rose was not interested. But she
was not eager to admit it. She did not seek or relish that definition of
herself” (p. 85). Alice Munro, “The Beggar Maid,” in Who Do You Think
You Are? (Toronto: Penguin, 1978), 80–120.
56. Ibid., 26, 27.
57. Ibid., 29.
58. Ibid., 37.
59. Ibid., 37. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is the story of an unfaith-
ful man (the story is focalized through Grant) whose wife, Fiona, suffers
from dementia and goes to live in a home where she falls in love with
Aubrey, another resident. And, in a certain sense, the “joke”—jokes both
with and without anybody to play them are of specific importance in
“Bear”—is on Grant. But this story can also be read as the story of a
husband who is dangerous to his wife and a wife who “plots” an escape.
In this respect, “Bear” anticipates “Runaway.” One might also say, in
this context, that the only truly malevolent presence is dying and death,
but dying—as Munro reminds us—is also surviving, even as it is coming
undone. See both “Deep-Holes” and “Free Radicals.”
60. In her account of mourning, Klein looks to reactivated paranoid anxie-
ties and defenses. She argues essentially that the subject is only ever capa-
ble of entering into mourning because she has already worked through
the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. It is this developmental
process that establishes the very capacity for mourning, and yet traumatic
loss is also always in danger of breaking the subject in such a way that she
will not survive. Such a break is signaled by a return to paranoid anxieties
even as such anxieties are also inevitably part of the mourning process.
We see precisely this complexity allegorized in Munro’s “Free Radicals.”
61. Alice Munro, “Free Radicals,” in Too Much Happiness (Toronto:
62. Ibid., 117.
63. Ibid., 121.
64. Ibid., 127. One of the ways that the “other story” operates in Munro’s
fiction is through intertextuality. Whenever one encounters a marked
intertextual moment, one can, of course, begin to spin out an alterna-
tive or supplementary narrative that displaces or reframes the narrative
one has been reading. Elaborating on any of these references is beyond
242 N. MORGENSTERN
the scope of this chapter, even as it has been hard to resist: King Lear
in “Deep-Holes,” The Odyssey and Romeo and Juliet (most obviously!)
in “Silence,” Mrs. Dalloway in “Runaway,” and here, in “Free Radicals,”
both Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Joyce
Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” both of
which stories feature allegorical encounters with psychopaths. See also
Lorrie Moore’s short story, “Real Estate,” about a house intruder, adul-
tery, and a woman with cancer.
65. Ibid., 132.
66. Ibid., 137.
67. Ibid., 121.
68. Nita is first and foremost a reader and re-reader of fiction. With her illness
and her husband’s death she has stopped reading, which also signals her
more literal entry into fictional space.
69. Ibid., 127.
70. Ibid., 131.
71. Ibid.
72. This moment is very much like Stella’s grabbing ahold of the signifier
“Lichen.” See also the significance of the photo in both of these stories.
In each case, the photograph could be said to generate a fiction by the
female protagonist that is bound up with her survival.
73. See the dream of the abandoned supper party and Freud’s discussion
of identification and hysteria in Chapter Four of The Interpretation of
Dreams, vols. iv and v. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works, tran. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 134–162.
74. Munro, “Free Radicals,” 136, 137. The quotation continues: “Rich. Rich.
Now she knows what it is to really miss him. Like the air sucked out of
the sky” (p. 137). The lost other as first and foremost absent addressee
is an overwhelming concept in Munro’s late work. The comparison with
Bett is clearly an identification with the loss of the loved object. The com-
plex psychic structure of “Free Radicals” ties together loss, jealousy, iden-
tification and narcissistic wounding in a way that merits further analysis.
See Kamuf’s “Afterword: On Leaving No Address”: “Jealousy is actually
a kind of cake made from all the ingredients that constitute addressing.
This, at least, is how Freud determined the phenomenon of jealousy…So
jealousy is mourning for the loss of the ‘deficit-surplus’ that the I places
in the object of love so as to appropriate itself, and the pain caused by the
thought of losing the loved object is the pain caused by the thought of
losing this surplus, which enables this I to see itself from an ‘ideal’ posi-
tion…” (p. 293).
75. Ibid., 119.
76.
Munro’s mother, in “Dear Life,” doubles the narrative’s “Mrs.
Netterfield,” herself the subject of a story told repeatedly by Anne Clarke
Laidlaw (Munro’s mother). In what Munro presents as her last work of
fiction, a paranoid figure from her mother’s story (the hatchet-wielding,
baby-snatching Mrs. Netterfield) is reworked and revealed to become a
depressive one.
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Index
A B
abuse. See sexual violence; violence Barber, Virginia, 196
affect, 2–4, 6, 8–10, 16, 25, 35, Bataille, Georges, 190
37–41, 43, 44, 46–49, 53, 59–62, Bennett, Jane, 170
65, 68, 71, 73, 80, 110, 117, Berlant, Lauren, 38, 53, 118, 154,
120, 140, 142, 145, 154, 155, 159–161, 168, 172, 198, 210,
163, 167, 198–200, 204, 205, 221, 232, 237
207, 210, 212, 213 Bérubé, Michael, 111, 112
aging, 2, 3 Bouson, J. Brooks, 62
Agosta, Lou, 117 breastfeeding, 6, 14–28, 165, 168,
Ahmed, Sara, 36, 38, 39, 47, 49, 62, 169, 173
117, 198, 199, 203, 206, 209, Brown, Steven D., 163
210 Burggraeve, Roger, 129
anger/rage, 25, 26, 40, 47, 62, 84, Butler, Judith, 7, 8, 128–130, 224, 237
99, 163, 198, 223
animals/animality, 81, 87, 91, 93,
112, 114, 115 C
anomaly/anomalous bodies, 88, 94 Canada, 15, 27, 72, 113, 121, 179,
Aristophanes, 86, 87, 96 197, 198, 203–205
Attridge, Derek, 13 care, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 26, 27, 40,
Atwood, Margaret, 5, 195, 205 41, 53, 60, 66–68, 71, 73, 110,
Auden, W.H., 130 120, 139, 153, 158, 163, 178,
autonomy, 6, 37, 39, 41, 113 190, 219, 227, 229
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 245

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7
246 Index
Carlson, Licia, 113–115 Duffy, Dennis, 137

Carroll, Lewis, 185 Dyer, Richard, 200, 201
Carter, Pam, 18
Cavell, Stanley, 141
celebrity, 195–197, 199–201, 203– E
205, 209, 212, 213 embodiment, 2, 4, 6, 7, 43, 51, 111
Cesare-Shotzko, Nikki, 82 emotions, 2–5, 7, 9, 16, 25, 38, 39, 44,
Coleman, Daniel, 72, 204 60–62, 71, 117, 209, 210, 213
Cormack, Patricia, 203, 204 empathy, 35, 50, 58, 60, 61, 64, 71,
Cosgrave, James F., 203 110, 116–118, 120, 159
Cvetkovich, Ann, 198, 199, 207, 209, English, James, 197
210 Eskin, Michael, 59
ethics; responsibility, 60, 65, 71
Everyman, 179
D
Darroch, Heidi Tiedemann, 6
Davis, Colin, 128 F
death, 3, 8, 40, 45–47, 50, 73, 83, Faircloth, Charlotte, 16, 25
88, 89, 95, 100, 110, 113, 114, family, 2, 17, 23, 27, 38, 40, 42,
119, 120, 135, 137–139, 143, 44–48, 50, 62, 63, 86, 88, 91,
144, 150, 158, 171, 179, 182, 96, 98, 99, 103, 118–120, 127,
186–189, 211, 220, 221, 223, 130, 184, 201, 208, 209
226, 228–230, 232, 234–236, Feder Kittay, Eva, 114, 115
240–242 feminism, 18
DeFalco, Amelia, 6, 17, 73, 100, 119, Foy, Nathalie, 156
121, 123, 163 Fraile Marcos, Ana, 8
Deleuze, Gilles, 161, 162 Freud, Sigmund, 81, 100, 242
De Man, Paul, 225 Frye, Northrop, 58, 59
de Papp Carrington, Ildiko, 82,
100, 103, 104, 106, 117,
148 G
Derrida, Jacques, 221, 236–238 Ganteau, Jean-Michel, 178
disability, 2, 3, 70, 73, 82–85, 87–89, Garland-Thomson, Rosemary, 116
92–96, 100, 102, 110–114, 116, Garner, Lee, 88, 89, 103
118, 120, 122 gender, 2, 4, 5, 7, 37, 66, 88, 89, 95,
disgust, 2, 5, 36, 37, 40, 42, 49, 62, 148, 173, 221, 240
93, 95, 110, 116, 117, 120, 121, femininity, 1, 2, 13, 14, 17, 82, 163
137, 142 masculinity, 2, 4, 5, 220
Djwa, Sandra, 148 Gibson, Douglas, 197, 202, 212
Dobson, Kit, 196 Goldman, Marlene, 6–8, 57–59, 72
Dolezal, Luna, 80, 81, 90 gossip, 37, 42, 44, 45, 50
Index 247
Gregg, Melissa, 140, 154 K

Guattari, Felix, 161, 162 Kamboureli, Smaro, 72, 101, 196
Guenther, Lisa, 131, 132 Kamuf, Peggy, 221, 228, 242
guilt, 3, 5, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 50, 63, Kaufman, Gershen, 80, 81, 89, 90, 98
65–68, 85, 141, 146, 158–161, killjoy, 47
165, 170, 188, 226 Kim, Sue J., 117
Gzowski, Peter, 167 Klein, Melanie, 227, 233, 241
Kristeva, Julia, 59
Kroetsch, Robert, 192
H Kukla, Rebecca, 16, 20, 21, 27
Halberstam, Jack, 83, 198
Hammond, Meghan Marie, 117
health, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23–28, 60, 71, L
204 La Leche League, 17
Heble, Ajay, 1, 101, 237, 239 landscape, 7, 8, 177–184, 187–189,
Hogg, James, 208 191, 225
Hogg, Margaret Laidlaw, 208, 209 Laurence, Margaret, 162
Hooper, Brad, 134 Lavoie, Chantel, 15, 23
Howells, Coral Ann, 1, 61, 101 Lecker, Robert, 196
humiliation, 8, 62, 68–70, 73, 100, Levinas, Emmanuel, 14, 127–129,
103, 110, 117, 118, 121, 137, 131, 132, 143, 146
140 Lorre-Johnston, Christine, 65, 66
humor, 36, 48, 68, 70, 163. See also Love, Heather, 198, 199, 210
jokes; tricks
M
I MacLeod, Alexander, 197
illness, 2, 4, 39, 50, 87, 88, 95, 100, Maksimowicz, Christine, 89, 101, 105
104, 122, 200, 201, 235, 242 Martin, Sandra, 205
imitation/mimicry, 37, 44, 50, 58, 86, Massumi, Brian, 2, 154, 155, 167–169
88, 90, 97 Masters, Robert, 61
impairment. See disability McAffee, Noelle, 59
Ingold, Tim, 86, 91 McClung, Nellie, 113
McCombs, Judith, 149
McGill, Robert, 37, 53, 203, 205
J McMahan, Jeff, 113, 115, 122
Jamieson, Sara, 6, 73 McMullen, Lorraine, 156
jokes, 36, 64, 163, 186, 204, 205, medicine, 19, 27
241. See also humor; tricks Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7
Jung, Courtney, 21 mimicry. See imitation
248 Index
money, 63, 186, 223, 230 “Lying Under the Apple Tree”, 44
monstrosity, 15, 94, 95, 187 “Material”, 38, 42, 46, 54
Morgenstern, Naomi, 1, 7, 8, 13, 22, “Meneseteung”, 174
30, 163 “Miles City, Montana”, 153
Morrissey, Belinda, 129, 130 “Mischief”, 25
Morton, Timothy, 238 The Moons of Jupiter, 205, 209
Moss, Laura, 198 “My Mother’s Dream”, 13, 19,
motherhood/maternity, 2, 13–15, 17, 163, 219
18, 20, 22, 25–28, 69, 168 “Nettles”, 36
mourning, 184, 188, 190, 223, 229, “The Office”, 209
233, 234, 238, 241, 242 “The Ottawa Valley”, 50
Munro, Alice “An Ounce of Cure”, 79
“Advantages”, 208 “The Peace of Utrecht”, 39, 41
“Baptizing”, 206 “Postcard”, 210
“The Bear Came Over the “Powers”, 207
Mountain”, 60, 62 “Privilege”, 92
“Chaddeleys and Flemings 2; The Runaway, 207, 221, 224
Stone in the Field”, 205 “Save the Reaper”, 27
“Chance”, 224–226 “The Shining Houses”, 208
“The Children Stay”, 27, 36 “Silence”, 27, 221, 224, 226–228,
“Child’s Play”, 36, 156 242
Dance of the Happy Shades, 79, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell
111, 197 You, 211
Dear Life, 212 “Some Women”, 36
“Deep-Holes”, 13, 23, 25–27, “Soon”, 41, 224, 226
221–224, 242 “The Spanish Lady”, 211
“Dimensions”, 13, 17, 36, 127, “Spelling”, 98
140, 145 Too Much Happiness, 212
“Family Furnishings”, 36, 38 “Trespasses”, 220
“Fathers”, 40, 43, 44, 102 The View from Castle Rock, 13, 212
“Fits”, 127 “Walker Brothers Cowboy”, 177
“Free Radicals”, 221, 234 “What Do You Want to Know
Friend of My Youth, 202 For?”, 177, 186
“Gravel”, 177, 186 “What is Remembered”, 2, 5
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Who Do You Think You Are?, 110,
Loveship, Marriage, 42, 178 197, 209, 211
“Heirs of the Living Body”, 41 “Winter Wind”, 209
“The Idyllic Summer”, 110 Munro, Sheila, 110, 201, 210
“Jakarta”, 13 murder, 6, 8, 20, 41, 42, 53, 85,
“Lichen”, 220 115, 127–137, 139, 140,
Lives of Girls and Women, 109, 197 142–145, 147, 150, 158, 162,
“The Love of a Good Woman”, 36, 165, 234
127 Murray, Jennifer, 85, 88, 101, 103
Index 249
N sex, 69, 81, 95

Narduzzi, Dilia, 41, 104, 117, 142, sexual violence, 41, 134
144 Shakespeare, Tom, 112
Ngai, Sianne, 198, 199, 209 shame, 2–9, 16, 36, 37, 39, 42,
Nobel Prize for Literature, 197, 43, 49, 50, 60–71, 73, 80–93,
204–206 95–100, 102, 104, 110, 117,
Nussbaum, Martha, 58, 93, 114 118, 120, 121, 131–133, 136,
137, 139–142, 145–147, 161,
198, 209
O Shaw, Joshua James, 129
Oatley, Keith, 58 Shaw, Rhonda, 23
Oedipus the King, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, Shelley, Percy, 58
89, 95 Siemerling, Winfried, 8, 59, 61, 64, 65
Omhovère, Claire, 5, 7, 8 Singer, Peter, 112, 114
Orange, John, 162 skin, 3, 43, 92, 115, 116, 137, 157,
166–168, 170, 190, 232
Sontag, Susan, 203, 207
P Sophocles, 79, 83–86, 89–92, 94, 95,
performativity, 8 102, 103
Probyn, Elspeth, 35, 48, 117, 145, Stewart, Kathleen, 9, 202
147 Stiker, Henri-Jacques, 84
Pruitt, Virginia, 133
Psychoanalysis, 161
T
Thacker, Robert, 100, 197, 202
R Titchkosky, Tanya, 122
rape. See sexual violence Tomkins, Silvan, 4, 8, 61, 66
Rasporich, Beverly, 162 tricks, 36, 42, 239. See also humor;
Rawls, John, 114 jokes
reading, 35–37, 43, 48, 50, 51, 54, Tucker, Ian, 163
61, 82, 83, 197, 242 Tudor, Steven, 145
Redekop, Magdalene, 1, 15, 82, 237 Turner, Graeme, 199
Roberts, Gillian, 198
Rojek, Chris, 200
Roy, Wendy, 121 V
Ventura-Daziron, Héliane, 186
Viñar, Marcelo, 81
S violence, 9, 18, 41, 43, 81–84, 86–89,
Scior, Katrina, 112 91, 93–99, 102, 103, 109, 110,
Scott, Sir Walter, 208 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 127,
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 84, 227, 233 130–133, 144, 146, 148, 159,
Seigworth, Gregory J., 140, 154 160, 163, 203, 219, 234
250 Index
vulnerability, 1, 4, 36–39, 41, 48, 70, 197, 206–208, 220, 221, 225,
89, 95, 113, 114, 117–121, 128, 232, 239
129, 134, 145–147, 177–179, work, 2, 5, 21, 22, 25, 28, 36, 37, 49,
184, 186, 187, 189, 192, 236 129, 189, 195, 200, 230
Writers’ Union of Canada, 195
writing, 8, 35–37, 42, 48–52, 82, 181,
W 191, 197, 201–203, 208–210,
Wachtel, Eleanor, 202 212–214, 213, 231, 235
Wall, Glenda, 15, 31 Wyile, Herb, 58
Warwick, Susan, 6, 8
waste, 7, 130, 179, 184, 187,
189–191 Y
Watkins, Megan, 167 York, Lorraine, 7, 106
Wolf, Joan, 16, 26
women, 6, 8, 10, 14–18, 20–25, 27,
28, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45, 48, Z
62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 89, 91, 95, Žižek, Slavoj, 239
99, 109, 111, 113, 114, 119,

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Ethics and Affects in The Fiction of Alice Munro

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ETHICS AND AFFECTS

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN AFFECT THEORY

More information about this series at

Ethics and Affects

Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940744

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: Vizerskaya/Getty

1 Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice Munro’s Fiction

2 Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s Stories 13

3 The Shame of Affect: Sensation and Susceptibility

4 Embodied Shame and the Resilient Ethics of

5 Alice Munro’s Dramatic Fictions: Challenging (Dis)

6 “Chunks of Language Caught in Her Throat”: The

7 Alice Munro and the Shame of Murder 127

8 Child’s Play: Ethical Uncertainty and Narrative Play in

9 Gravel and Grief: Alice Munro’s Vulnerable Landscapes 177

10 “A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career 195

11 Life After Life: Survival in the (Late) Fiction of Alice

Heidi Tiedemann Darroch has taught at several universities and col-

the English Canadian Imaginary (Routledge, 2014). She is currently the

Claire Omhovère is a Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature

Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice

Amelia DeFalco and Lorraine York

We can pinpoint the origins of this collection with unusual preci-

© The Author(s) 2018 1

pursues “some economical sort of emotional management” that carefully

body, is such a rarity that it becomes a kind of inverse trauma, a haunting

Human encounters often form the tacitly assumed ground zero of

Affective performativity in (and by) Munro, like performativity in

that exceed conventional narrative containers. As Jane Austen’s Anne

3. Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 11.

Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s

In her discussion of ethics and femininity in Alice Munro’s fiction,

© The Author(s) 2018 13

perspective, breastfeeding has often been taken for granted as “such an

The image of the nursing man provides an illuminating point of entry

of breastfeeding for babies have been represented as so profound and

that is family life.”20 It is precisely through their attention to context

The story further explores the very complicated relationship between

“would have known…which leaves to mash to make a soothing poultice”

relationship between medical authority and early motherhood. The

from breastfeeding as a unique form of physical and emotional interaction

formula as “instruments of interruption” that intervene between the

which the promotion of breast milk as a guarantor of infant health turns

breastfeeding to a wider range of affective response than maternal

pains to deny. It is again important to notice the domestic context in

name of producing healthier children who will not grow up to place an

———. “Dimensions.” In Too Much Happiness, 1–31. Toronto: McClelland and

The Shame of Affect: Sensation

My body is cramped and irritated as I write this. Indeed, the act of

© The Author(s) 2018 35

pleasure. In Munro’s work, I discover other people’s tragedies: mur-

Robert McGill seeks to distinguish between writing and storytelling in

vulnerability, the metafictional self-awareness of narrators who deride

interactions and collisions with the world. Consequently, affect chal-

Other People’s Feelings

vulnerable bodies—Dotty in “Material,” Mary Agnes in “Heirs of the

and her friend, Charlene, collaborate in her murder, a seemingly unpre-

stories activate identification and voyeurism in equal measure. Indeed,

In my early teens I had become the entertainer around home. I don’t

The ambivalence of the storyteller, whose innocence or malice in using

Sticky Affects and Greasy Excitement

3. Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 11.

Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s

The Shame of Affect: Sensation

Sticky Affects and Greasy Excitement

10. Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman, 3–78.

Embodied Shame and the Resilient Ethics

From Shame to Knowledge to Ethics

Shame as Psychosocial Emotion of Exposure

The Intrusion of the Semiotic into the Symbolic:

17. Shame is rendered as an embodied affect in stories such as “Royal

Coming to Terms with Oedipal Violence

Deconstructing Disability and Shame Through

15. Ildikó Papp Carrington, Controlling the Uncontrollable: the Fiction of

33. In interviews, Munro is extremely candid about the autobiographical

114. For information on Munro’s thoughts about connections among sto-

“Chunks of Language Caught in Her

12. Katrina Scior, “Public Awareness, Attitudes and Beliefs Regarding

27. Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson, “Chapter 1: Introduction: Rethinking

50. Munro, “Privilege,” 32.

Alice Munro and the Shame of Murder