Who do you think you are
"Someone who seemed remarkable but who is simply selfish and small"
Foreword
This post begins with an image of an installation by the Franco-American artist Louise Bourgeois. Hanging from a kind of mobile, the dresses, dainty intimates, and stuffed hoisery dangle above the gallery. They look like feminine bodies suddenly evacuated, now posed forever in the shape of ghosts. There is something implied to be missing here, some insinuation of memory that Bourgeois has put on display—the airing of laundry, the spectre of a secret.
I announced this book club about Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are (1978) on July 6, just days before The Toronto Star ran an exclusive essay by Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, detailing childhood sexual abuse at the hand of Munro’s second-husband. Skinner, who was nine at the time, was discouraged from telling her mother until almost 25 years later—at which point, Munro did not embrace her, but felt herself the victim of infidelity and chose to stand by her husband, even after he was formally convicted in 2005. Munro and Skinner had almost no contact or relationship in the years leading up to Munro’s death this spring.
Since Skinner’s brave and heart-wrenching account of the abuse and her mother’s role in silencing it, the literary community has reacted fiercely, with many suggesting that Munro’s books be banned, her Nobel Prize be revoked, that universities commit to removing her from syllabi, and that anyone still reading her books stop immediately and (literally) throw them away. These reactions demonstrate not only the deep pain that is caused by those who protect abusers, but also the deep love that so many of us have held for Munro’s work—indeed, the columnist Marsha Lederman’s headline in Canada’s newspaper of record the following day read: “Alice Munro betrayed us.”
Us. Not Skinner, anymore, but the reading community who trusted her.
I too have been shocked and upset by the news about Munro, an author on whom I am currently writing my first chapter in a dissertation about feminist literature of the 70s and 80s. That this descriptor—”feminist”—now feels deeply complicated and at times inappropriate for describing Munro is something that I take very seriously. And yet I am committed to doing this—taking the contradictions, slippages, shame, and violence seriously—as opposed to turning away from them and imagining that our role here is to protect ourselves, to turn away and go inward, which seems to be the preferred tack of those now campaigning to ban her work. As the novelist Brandon Taylor wrote last month:
I see in their responses a means of slipping out of the discomfort of complicity and into the more comfortable role of victim… What I find remarkable is that what so many of us love in Munro’s fiction is the way she reveals how common and small we all are, how at bottom, we are capable of true ugliness and viciousness, that this is not the province of sneering villains but the woman on the corner or the man in the fast car or the quiet old lady in her house in the woods—what amazes me is that we can acknowledge this and yet be confused when confronted with a real-world example of someone who seemed remarkable but who is simply selfish and small.
At no point does Taylor—who also writes honestly about when he too was abused sexually as a child—try to minimize the pain that Munro has caused or excuse her for it, and nor should we. Skinner and her siblings have likewise written that this chapter must be included in any future study of Munro’s life and work. What they do not suggest is a moratorium on such study: what I am envisioning then is a reading that reckons more fully with ethical complexities and switchbacks, with the ways in which violence does not lend us clear answers but instead plunges us into chaos. It is this, ironically, that Munro’s stories so expertly rendered, and this is why I had chosen her for my research. It may also be why I am still sending this newsletter, though this single post will have to suffice in lieu of the book club—you can find a brief engagement with the text in what follows, and I understand entirely if there are those of you who for the time being need to disengage and protect yourself from this conversation (there is nothing shameful, small, or un-nuanced about looking after yourself: as Zosia Bielski said to The Globe & Mail in a recent roundtable, “I don’t want to be in her mind for a while”). This also means that while I’ve gone ahead with the Book Club in this post, there won’t be any further editions as initially planned. Instead, I will do two posts engaging with other novels by women writers, that have nothing to do with Munro or the abuse.
One final thought: I am thinking again of Louise Bourgeois, who so often worked in textile and thread (her family had a long history in the garment industry). When I saw a retrospective of her work in London in 2022, The Woven Child, I was struck by how Bourgeois mined the dual capacity for wounding and healing that could be embodied by the needle and thread: it pierces, but also sutures. We need this doubled valence in our response to Munro’s work, now, I believe—we might try to work with and know the brutal wounds, while also discovering what their reparation looks like. I intend to attempt this, even if I fumble towards it, well before conceding to retire the ‘sewing kit’ altogether.
Summary
In Who Do You Think You Are, our protagonist Rose comes from Hanratty, a rural town in Western Ontario (no great surprise here—this is Munro’s preferred landscape). Her mother has died long ago and she lives with her ill father, stepmother, and half-brother Brian. Rose comes from the side of town that she will later learn to identify as “working class,” though its inhabitants don’t see it that way, and so in dreaming of a glamorous career and worldly adventure, she finds herself at odds with both her immediate surroundings and those middle class children for whom such dreams are perhaps taken for granted. Eventually, Rose attends college on a scholarship and wiggles in and out of an engagement to a wealthy graduate student from British Columbia, Patrick, with whom she is soon married. Living in Vancouver among a conservative, traditional set does not suit Rose however, who still images passion for herself and conducts affairs with artistic men, eventually divorcing Patrick and beginning a career as an actress for radio and television. The remaining stories in the cycle show us Rose living sometimes on her own and sometimes with her daughter Anna, chasing jobs and more often, love. This culminates with the chapter “Who Do You Think You Are,” where we see Rose return to Hanratty to put her stepmother in a longterm care home.
This titular question—who do you think you are—lassos together much of the novel’s subtext about class and gender, where Rose is always seeking more from life than what her social position affords her, and so there is a feeling of consistent expectation for something perennially delayed, delivered only in disappointing or meagre slivers. It might also cue us to think about Rose’s peripatetic life, her unsettled sense of both place, self, family, and class—who she thinks she is is perhaps a more operative question than who she is, or rather, the ability to imagine and pursue the former is more impactful than any kind of mystical, authentic essence, and likewise, is always subject to change. Rose is also conscious of being watched—whether as a child emulating older girls on the schoolyard, or looking for a place to meet her lover in the mountains—and so much of the book engages the difficulties of appearance, or concealing versus revealing, and social performances of identity that do not so much reflect as install a sense of self. More on this below. (Tip: I always tell my undergraduate students in tutorials to remember to “treat the title,” especially when they are stuck. This can be a very rich resource for thinking through the tensions, interventions, and primary questions of a text.)
Passages of note
From “Royal Beatings”: Continuing to think with performativity, then, let’s look at the scene in the first story where Rose recounts being beaten by her father. Though the word “performative” is today often taken to mean ‘fake’ or ‘for show,’ it was originally used in speech act theory to describe an act or vocalisation that did the very thing it was describing (the classic example is the judge pronouncing “I find you guilty,” or in gender theory, Judith Butler’s argument that gendered styles of dress, gesture, style, or speech do not embody a preexisting, internal gender but are themselves the impression of one). Munro’s account of Rose’s beating (page 19 in my edition) has a richly theatrical character, moving between present perfect and conditional grammars as if following a well-memorised script (so and so would do this, I would do that). As they sidle up to the beating, her father is described as “beginning to warm up” before he grasps the belt “at the necessary point” wherein his studied behaviour makes him appear “like a bad actor, who turns a part grotesque. As if he must savor and insist on just what is shameful and terrible about this. That is not to say he is pretending, that he is acting, and does not mean it. He is acting, and he means it” (19). The performance of familial violence here is not just a matter of punishing Rose for her insolence, but of the patriarch performatively becoming patriarch, installing himself insistently in his role as the lawman, as the one with the legitimate right to violence. This is a law-making act. That Munro highlights the staged quality of the scenario allows readers to see both the ways in which this is a rote, unnatural arrangement of things, without suggesting it is not deeply meaningful to the ‘performers’ themselves (albeit complexly so). The story as a whole is one of children, parents, and step-parents negotiating their relationships of power, meting out punishments and humiliations large and small, yet not so much through how they rebel against their roles, but in how they dig in their heels and inhabit them to the nth degree.
From“The Beggar Maid”: While Patrick is courting Rose, she thinks often of her desire for love and how he ostensibly fills it, and yet does not. This comes through the gulf between imagined passion and the rituals of courtship, dating, marriage. “She would look at herself in the glass and think: wife, sweetheart. Those mild lovely words. How could they apply to her? It was a miracle; it was a mistake. It was what she had dreamed of; it was not what she wanted” (83). The semi-colon yokes together and divides contradictory ideas—indeed, mining contradiction or exposing unwanted feelings are some of Munro’s greatest skills. I am fascinated with the idea that what one dreams of does not have to be commensurate with what one, in reality, wants. Perhaps the fantasy of the thing is what sustains us more than actually getting it (psychoanalytic folks, feel free to chime in here! Or, if this idea compels you, you might check out Mari Ruti’s Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings and Lauren Berlant’s intro to Cruel Optimism).
From “Mischief”: As an adult, Rose quarrels with Patrick over the trappings of class, disliking his ostentatious, suburban style and preferring the look of things that are more bohemian—for instance, not chandeliers, because “people she admired would not have chandeliers in their dining rooms” but maybe a spare-looking sconce or “heavy candles in wine bottles, loaded with drippings of coloured wax.” Rose finds that “the people she admired were inevitably poorer than she was. It seemed a bad joke on her, after being poor all her life in a place where poverty was never anything to be proud of, that now she had to feel apologetic and embarrassed about the opposite condition” (123). Who Do You Think You Are contains some of Munro’s most observant commentary on the vicissitudes of class, particularly Rose’s negotiation of social belonging by either playing up or camouflaging her economic status. Patrick, for one, initially savors Rose’s poverty: in it, he might confirm his own chivalry, his rescue of (as he calls her) “the beggar maid.” Yet in wealth, Rose finds little taste—it is another kind of austerity that balks at anything too artistic, modern, or strong in feeling. This is an inversion of her prior confusion since when she is young, Rose is perceived as haughty for her artistic and academic inclinations, whereas among the wealthy set in Vancouver, such interests make her gauche. Class creates a set of rules that constrain her at every stage, and that prohibit honesty or enjoyment, but always protect those at the top.
Connections and further reading
Taylor again: “It is a kind of thinking common to the rural poor and the working poor, among whom and by whom I was raised. I have struggled for a long time in trying to explain it. It is a world without history. Not a world without a past. But a world without a history, which is a story we tell ourselves about the past. Among my people, the rural and working poor, to make a history out of the past is taboo. To speak of a thing done is to make too much of it. To be fishing for sympathy, and for what, when there’s nothing to be done about it anyway.” For me, this has echoes in Munro’s rendering of traumatic violence, where other people’s tragedies are the stuff of gossip, but one’s own are to be kept secret—even, sometimes, to oneself. When Rose is touched by the minister on the train to Toronto, she can barely bring herself to look at what is happening, instead questioning the whole scene and insisting to herself that what she knows to be happening is not.
From Reading Alice Munro with Jacques Lacan: Literary scholar Jennifer Murray turns to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan for her treatment of “Royal Beatings,” drawing attention to the way in which this opening story has certain qualities of the fantasy or fairytale—the (near) orphaned heroine with an outsized imagination, the punishing wicked stepmother, a recourse to rhymes and wordplay, and an opulent sense of royalty, of feasting, and scary stories about sinister Others. The fantasy structure allows Rose to retroactively organise and make order out of her childhood, a sensibility that tracks with her romantic vision of life as well as her compulsion to remember the past, particularly in the final chapter, when she idealizes her ineffable bond with Ralph Gillespie.
Questions for further reflection
What mark does Hanratty leave on Rose—psychologically speaking, how does she imagine her place in the world and the possibilities of it? How is this gendered, particularly in reflecting on the structures of her family home?
Much of Rose’s life past her early twenties is fraught with disappointment: divorce, itinerant career opportunities, and numerous fruitless love affairs. Do you consider this a pessimistic book? Why or why not? What is the function of pessimism or disappointment—what might it say, in refusing to offer a traditional happy ending?
So many elements of Munro’s writing, including elements of this text, are autobiographically inflected. What is your position on how to negotiate the fictional text with knowledge of Munro’s life, particularly given what has recently come to light about her relationship to her daughter and second husband?