Shifting past the halfway mark in this collection, I find myself as interested in drawing lines between stories as I am in following the lines drawn within the stories.
And perhaps it’s partly because I have recently pulled my copy of The Lives of Girls and Women off my shelves that I am particularly caught by the fact that it seems the same title could have been used for The Dance of the Happy Shades, and most especially for this group of three stories: “Postcard”, “Red Dress-1946” and “Sunday Afternoon”.
Even the one story in this collection that’s been told from a male perspective is actually, in this reader’s opinion, more about Lois than it is about him. The overarching preoccupation of the collection seems to be: what does it mean to be a girl, and how does that influence the ways in which we become women?
Take the last story, “Boys and Girls”, and its definition:
“The word ‘girl’ had formerly seemed to me innocent and unburdened, like the word child; now it appeared that it was no such thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment.”
Do you need to read that again? I did. A few times. Even though it seems to be a simple question: what does it mean to become a girl? What does it mean to be female? What does it mean to speak out when it’s expected that you remain silent?
“We began to pull away, George settling down on the back seat to sleep. And then we heard the female voice calling after us, the loud, crude, female voice, abusive and forlorn: “Thanks for the ride!” (“Thanks for the Ride”)
What is it about Lois’ voice that makes it loud and crude, abusive and forlorn? Is it simply that her voice is female? Is it that she raised her voice when she should have kept still? Should she have remained the “angel in the house”?
“So a house is not the same for a woman. She is not someone who walks into the house, to make use of it, and will walk out again. She is the house; there is no separation possible.” (“The Office”)
The way that women (and girls) experience the world, the way in which the world views them: it’s at the heart of every story here, isn’t it? But back to “Boys and Girls”, wherein it’s most clear.
Take when the narrator’s father jokingly introduces his young daughter, who is helping him with chores, to a salesman, as his new hired man, and the salesman says “Could of fooled me…I thought it was only a girl.”
Only a girl.
But the young girl is proud in that moment, believing herself to be indispensable and capable. You can feel her heart swell on the page.
Yet, only a few pages later, her father uses the salesman’s words against her. “He spoke with resignation, even good humour, the words which absolved and dismissed me for good.” That scene is sharp, like a slap.
And all of this is snarled up with this week’s three stories.
In “Postcard”, Helen’s mother is chiding her grown daughter, telling her that she ought to be ashamed. Of what? She doesn’t say, exactly. But it’s clear to Helen, and to readers who are well acquainted with the double standard. Here it is: you’ll recognize it, between the lines.
“But once a man loses his respect for a girl, he is apt to get tired of her.”
“What do you mean by that, Momma?”
“If you don’t know am I supposed to tell you?”
Of course it’s not only Helen’s mother who is holding her daughter to another standard; even Buddy Shields tells the story from a different slant, referring to another couple entirely, but expressing the same principle.
“You would know both of them if I said their names and you’d know they had no business being in that car together. One is a married lady. And worst is, by this time her husband is wondering why she don’t come home from choir practice … and he has reported her missing.”
Yup, it’s the married lady whose transgression is “the worst”, that which is worthy of discussing in greater detail. And before she was a married lady, she was “just a girl”.
A girl like the narrator in “Red Dress-1946”, unsure whether to opt out of the attentions of the boys at the dance, or to pursue them, or to accept them complacently when they are offered.
A girl like Alva, in “Sunday Afternoon”, who is kissed and both fears and desires the complications that will ensue.
A girl like May, in “A Trip to the Coast” (but I know, I’m getting ahead of myself, as that’s one of next week’s stories), who is told that she can’t go swimming in the usual place anymore because “that’s where all the boys go. I told you before. You’re getting too big for that.”
Where the world divides for boys and the girls: it’s the stuff of Alice Munro’s stories. What stood out for you in this group of stories?
Walker Brothers Cowboy; The Shining Houses; Images JAN19
Thanks for the ride; The Office; An Ounce of Cure (above) JAN26
The Time of Death; Day of the Butterfly; Boys and Girls FEB 16
Postcard; Red Dress – 1946; Sunday Afternoon (above)
A Trip to the Coast; The Peace of Utrecht; Dance of the Happy Shades MAR2
Adding a comment after rereading Sheila Munro’s Lives of Mothers & Daughters (2001): “Although she wrote only two stories during the Cook Street years, she was happier with her writing than she had been in West Vancouver, especially with the way she could now use personal material from her childhood. She surprised herself by sitting down at her typewriter one day and beginning ‘Red ress – 1946’, which she finished in about three weeks.”
Runaway is one of my favourites, too, Dorothy. But I might be adding to that list as this reading goes along…
Thanks for reading along, Sandra: it’s interesting to consider different interpretations of these stories.
I took Helen’s comment in “Postcards”, for instance, as meaning that if she’d paid more attention to what Clare was like, that she might not have given over to him. Whether or not her mother was being fair in holding Helen responsible for having given away the milk for free, I think Helen regretted having done so.
The ending of “Red Dress-1946” felt perfect to me. How ironic that the narrator is thinking that her mother will never know how close she is to unhappiness, when it seems clear that her mother is every bit as close to it — inhabiting it, actually — and hasn’t admitted it to her daughter either, perhaps also out of an obligation to pretend that things are other than they are for her.
With my reading of that story’s ending, it felt very circular to me. Whereas the ending of “Sunday Afternoon” felt like a small explosion with no resolution at all. We’re left to wonder what will happen during those three weeks. To imagine the kinds of humiliation that Alva will experience at the Gannett’s cottage.
It looks like we’ve noted a lot of the same passages in these stories. I’m glad you’re still enjoying them.
I have only read one Munro collection, Runaway, and I enjoyed it very much. i have The Lives of Girls and Women waiting for me on my shelves. I admire her very much. I wonder if most of her work could be called “The Lives of Girls and Women”? Which is fine — I like it that she tends to do one thing very, very well.
What stood out for me in Postcard mainly was Helen’s feeling of ambivalence towards Clare which was contrasted so sharply with the fuss she made in front of the MacQuarrie house after he had come home married from his trip to Florida. After Clare comes out and tells Helen to go home she thinks if she had paid attention to what Clare MacQuarrie was like earlier in their relationship she “would have started out a lot differently with him and maybe felt differently too”. I concluded that this was Munro’s comment on one of the tougher lessons to be learned in becoming a girl:that relationships take some work on both sides. Perhaps Helen’s pain can be linked back to the statement she made early in the story: “A lot of my conversations with Momma are replays.” Perhaps she tuned Clare out as she did her mother and missed something important in the bigger picture?
A tension similar to the tension between Helen and her mother also occurs in Red Dress-1946 as does the attitude towards the mother’s past:”All the stories of my mother’s life which had once interested me had begun to seem melodramatic, irrelevant, and tiresome.” It is interesting to contemplate how much of the negativity towards her mother arises from “the tension and excitement of sexual competition” and the fear of going to the dance. The conclusion appears to support this possibility when we see her mother waiting to hear all about the dance and learn that Helen “understood what a serious and oppressive obligation” she “had to be happy, and how” she “had almost failed it, and would be likely to fail it, every time”. In some ways there is a similar tension in Sunday Afternoon. Alva, however, is a little more independent than Helen(out from under the parental roof) and just a little further along the continuum of finding out about how to beome a girl/woman. She learns a new version of the “only a girl” theme and hers is based in the class system and her employment by the Gannetts. “Nothing could make any difference to Mrs. Gannett; a maid was a maid.” Then when Mr. Gannett’s cousin comes into the kitchen and “took hold of her lightly, as in a familiar game,and spent some time kissing her mouth” she feels grateful and confident at first but later “a new and still mysterious humiliation.” Another difficult lesson in the journey to becoming a girl/woman. I found the progression in these stories from girl towards woman an interesting study.