This Alice Munro story might serve as a sixteen-page synposis for why some high-school students came to hate the idea of reading Canadian authors.
McClelland & Stewart, 2006
If you weren’t raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books?
If you weren’t an obsessive listener to weekly episodes of Winter Without Salt read aloud by your third-grade teacher?
You might not want to know whether it’s better to build a brick chuimney in the centre of a settler’s home or to position it at one end.
You might not care how long it took to travel between the communities of Shakespeare and Stratford in southwestern Ontario (a distance covered in about 15 minutes in a car nowadays).
But there’s something which fascuinates me about the layers with which a home can be constructed, literally and metaphorically, as one moves from foundations to furnishings.
And even more interesting is the human layer of strife and resentment which Munro captures in this pioneer tale.
Didn’t you wonder what happened when there weren’t enough men to join together for a barn-raising?
Did you adjust your plans to make a smaller barn? Or wait until the settlement grew to the size which would support (literally) a greater number of beams?
What happened when a stranger was required to hoist a joist?
In “The Wilds of Morris Township”, engaging strangers in business previously confined to familial exchanges of labour is a thorny matter.
And expecting your female relatives to serve potatoes to men they hadn’t grown up with? Beyond the pale.
These are the kinds of complications which emerge in this story, alongside the question of the kinds of day labour one could find in the Blythe area in the mid-1800s (which might be less interesting for some readers, especially those whose ancestors did not make a journey similiar to Munro’s).
Although the locus of this collection is a particular set of family members, the focus of this story feels like setting more than characterization, mainly because the process of establishing a home in this time and place required a particularly intense relationship between man and land.
Mind you, the people for whom this countryside was/is a homeland, the native dwellers, are afforded only a marginalized presence in this chronicle, represented by Becky (whose father was a white man) in the last story. These Laidlaws are settlers with rights to land (no mention of or — likely — thought of treaties) and plans to populate, who viewed this land as their future homeland.
But within their comfortable status of wrested privilege and ownership, there is a seemingly imposible amount of work to be done to establish roots in this new territory.
It’s no wonder there is more talk of plaster than of pleasure: these men built and sealed while the women prepared the food which would fuel the next labourious chores and swept the makeshift floors.
In this atmosphere of weariness, one man dreams of something more: a two-storey house. He stands out, as much of a mythic figure, perhaps, as the collection’s first Ettrick man, Will O’ Phaup, in this “new” land.
With this tale, the core characters exist in the memory of the author’s father: these are folks whose existence can be traced through memories and impressions as well as through documents and diaries.
Whether or not this affects the reader’s degree of engagement likely depends upon the degree of interest inspired by details revolving around shingles and planing, but there is also the matter of a mysterious packet left on a doorstop on Hallowe’en.
Who takes up house together is a scandalous matter, too, in the author’s fiction. As is a man’s understanding more than a woman about what lies beyond her innocent understanding of a neighbour’s judgement on an intimate relationship. The issue of one’s wanting a two-storey house where a single floor would do. Thwarting an older family member’s expectations. An unexpected death in the wilderness.
“The Wilds of Morris County”: not an untouched wilderness after all.
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s stories in The View from Castle Rock as I read through her work-to-date. She is one of my MRE authors and this is the fourth story in this collection. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story. Next week, “Working for a Living”.
Note: There are spoilers in the comments below.
I was pleased to learn that there was a “scribe” among Andrew’s sons to write down his memories when he became an old man. I am probably a little crazy but I loved the part giving the distances between Preston and Shakespeare and Stratford etc. Our family has an oft repeated story about my great grandfather walking once a month from Woodstock to Guelph with a bag of grain to be milled and then walking back. He stayed over a night or two in Guelph I believe. So walking to Morris and having to send the bags to Clinton because the stage was not running was a major undertaking. Transportation is so taken for granted in our world. And the weather? We think we can defeat it no matter what. It is easy to forget that it was only 150 years ago that Munro’s ancestors were getting lost in snowstorms in April which I thought for sure was going to happen to us in 2015. And there was a small child who got out of an apartment building and froze to death this year. I wonder if in another 150 years people will find it incredible that an ice storm in Toronto a year ago paralyzed a large part of that city and threatened lives. I loved Munro’s description of her uncles lives as a “monastic life without any visitations of grace or moments of transcendance”. Many people today might find that their lives are not so different upon a close examination. I found Forrest’s experience painful and disturbing: that he should quit his job at the planing mill because of the teasing? An early form of bullying from which no one was willing to protect him? How brave of Lizzie to defy convention (or ignorance) and take Forrest a new shirt and some bread and butter. I loved her fearlessness in demanding her share of the household goods. And the observation by Munro’s father who had only known these trodden down second cousins through seeing them at church. As a virtual stranger he “marvelled” at what they had done and wondered what had “squashed their spirits”. So many things in this story seem not so very different from our lives today if one looks closely.
The little snippets that you quote in your comments often make me feel like I’ve rushed through the stories, even when I have reread in short order, but I think that’s just a measure of how rich her storytelling is, the way that you can be so caught with one sentence that you are still absorbing it while your eyes are taking in the next bit, so that there is always something to rediscover when you revisit. Agreed that many of us would find some truth in the statement about living monastic lives without transcendance, if there was some reflection on the matter.
The way that qualities from her fiction do emerge in these tales does strike me as significant. Lizzie’s fearlessness is remarkable. It reminds me, too, of the narrator’s courage in “Tricks”, when she dares (against the “better judgement” of *her* sister) to travel to Stratford to watch a play every summer, even though that’s clearly viewed as an unnecessary (at best) and undesirable (at worst) activity. These questions of how we grapple with community expectations (whether that community is rooted in family or in a group of pioneering homesteads or, in this case, both!) and balance them with personal happiness/contentment are certainly just as relevant today as they appear to have been for this generation of the Laidlaw family in “The Wilds of Morris Township”.