A young narrator, away from home for the first time, is in a unique position to comment on a world that seems new and fresh to her and yet there are many situations which the reader recognizes as familiar and patterns which she, as an older adult, also recognizes.
Random House, 2012
Think of Edie in “How I Met My Husband”, who has gone to work for the Peebles on the Fifth Line.
Consider Alva in “Sunday Afternoon”, who has gone to work for the Gannetts and is looking forward to having a vacation with them in Georgian Bay later that summer.
Girls with a new view of the world make for interesting narrators.
Uncle Jasper and Aunt Dawn have opened their home to their niece because her parents have gone to Africa to work for a year.
Well, that’s how she used to describe it. But, as she comes to understand that her uncle views the situation differently, she begins to describe it differently herself soon, too.
Jasper and Dawn’s life is alien to their young guest in many ways. “My parents gave the kind of parties where people ate chili out of clay pots,” she observes. Jasper and Dawn do not give parties and when people do, at last, come over for an evening, intricate and dainty cakes are served instead.
Other differences are more easily summarized; her parents are Unitarians and do not say grace before meals and espouse beliefs such as socialized health care, whereas Uncle Jasper attends the United Church and insists on various rituals of propriety and opts for hymns over classical music.
Her twinned responses of resistance and admiration are credible, and she affords the reader a space alongside, as she and the reader work through the layers of observation (and unravel the effect that her memory has had on her understanding of the situations she observed so many years before) to uncover the significance of the story and its title.
It might be the home itself. “The house was his, the choice of menus his, the radio and television programs his. Even if he was at his practice next door, or out on a call, things had to be ready for his approval at any moment.”
Certainly Uncle Jasper expected his house to be a haven. And the narrator imagines the advice that Aunt Dawn would have received. ‘A woman’s most important job is making a haven for her man.’
Aunt Dawn would not have said it herself. The narrator observes that she “shied away from statements”, but it might have been in a magazine which the narrator found in the house, and Aunt Dawn did work very hard to make his home something beautiful, remarkable.
And although the narrator seems to object to the fact that this responsibility requires all of Aunt Dawn’s time and energy, it’s clear that the home is beautiful and comfortable when such attention is lavished upon it. (“Haven” is set in the 1970’s; were the focus on another set of characters, the shifting social mores might have been that much more dramatic.)
“The slow realization that came to me was that such a regime could be quite agreeable.”
Not, perhaps, so agreeable for those who are responsible for the work required behind-the-scenes. Aunt Dawn and the maid, Bernice, would certainly have experienced the “regime” rather differently, when inhabiting it not as a guest or a beneficiary, but as its sole contributors.
Where Aunt Dawn and Bernice might find a haven is clearly elsewhere. Some might find it in another’s home. Some might find it playing an instrument. Some might find it in a large city (like Toronto, where a woman can be a professional violinist). Some might find it in a church.
Some might find it in fiction like Alice Munro’s.
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s stories, as I read through her work-to-date. She is one of my MRE authors and, until now, this has been a chronological reading project, but I was unable to resist inserting her most recent collection. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story. This story is the fifth in Dear Life, with next Sunday reserved for “Pride” and the following Wednesday for “Corrie”. Wednesdays and Sundays for Alice Munro, for March and April 2013.
Uncle Jasper represents a kind of person I don’t much like. At our narrator’s first meal in her Uncle Jasper and Aunt Dawn’s home her uncle teases her about saying grace and belittle’s by innuendo her parents who have gone to Ghana to teach. Not a good start in a home one expects to stay in for awhile. Initially the narrator is more resistant but gradually as you have stated above she begins to see some of the merits of Uncle Jasper’s idea of a haven. When she rides an old bicycle and scrapes her knees Uncle Jasper’s doctor personality takes over although Aunt Dawn expresses concern that she went riding alone and assumed that she would stop riding when she had friends and that did turn out to be the case. This rather subtle challenge to making one’s own choices was missed by our narrator but not by the reader. The narrator did not fail to register all the work that Aunt Dawn did to create Jasper’s haven or all the work that Bernice the hired help did. But the nurse in Jasper’s office “did not even treat him with any special deference – she was nothing like Aunt Dawn. Our narrator put this down to the fact that the nurse was over fifty and “women of that age could take on a habit of authority.” Then she learns about Aunt Dawn’s failure to complete her nursing program and the fact that she didn’t have any real friends of her own. Gradually more and more cracks appear in her uncle and aunt’s relationship. It becomes apparent that Jasper’s haven is not a haven for anyone else. What is worse, his haven offers no welcome to neighbours or to other members of his immediate family. The narrator begins to distinguish between some of Jasper’s iron-clad opinions and more mild opinions which do not call for wiping things or people you dislike off the face of the earth. Then when Aunt Dawn and the narrator go to the funeral and Uncle Jasper comes late and causes a disturbance which results in his own embarrassment and Aunt Dawn appears to catch “the shadow of disappointment on Uncle Jasper’s face before he was even aware of it himself. Or perhaps she realized that, for the first time, she didn’t care. For the life of her, couldn’t care.” We seem to have reached a new balance in which the rules will change in Dr. Cassel’s castle. Definitely as you described, a girl with a new view of the world acting as a very interesting narrator.
I absolutely loved this passage (and not only because I never did find a use for algebra):
“There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra – I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it.
But I didn’t go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.”
The whole idea of a haven-for-one-man being a prison for everyone else is fascinating. Not only in this marriage and this household, but given the attention paid to different religious practices/beliefs with three churches discussed: Unitarian, United and Anglican. When Uncle Jasper finds himself in an unfamiliar church, he makes choices that set him apart (physically, recognizably, let alone internally) and is distinctly out of place. It is no haven for him. And certainly there are many doctrines which state that only the blessed will be saved, will avoid being “wiped off the face of the earth”, will find haven in an afterlife. Uncle Jasper has been, in many ways, blessed in his choice of a wife who is willing to create and sustain this for him in his home, and he can continue to believe in his own church as well, but it is only an illusion, one which depends on the servitude of others. This is one of my favourite kinds of Munro stories, one which seems equal parts simple and complicated and gives me the feeling that I haven’t even begun to see what I will see if I continue to reread.
It does seem like there are two very distinct kinds of haven for the main character, and that by going to stay with her aunt and uncle, all her beliefs are challenged and somehow changed. This, I think, will be an interesting story for me to read, and to discover for myself. I know that we had very different ways in my home, and that the homes of my grandparents were quite different, especially my father’s parents. Excellent review on this story. You captured perfectly what it means to inhabit two worlds simultaneously.
Along with the character’s coming-of-age, it was a time of great change socially as well, and the ideas about the clash between different perspectives about the role of women in the home and in the world are altering substantially as well, so it makes for a very interesting tale. That part of the story I found difficult to comment on without quoting excessively, but I think it’s the part that gives the story its heft. I think you’ll enjoy this one, though I suspect you, like Sandra won’t care much for Uncle Jasper (me either)!