Friendships between schoolgirls like Jessie and MaryBeth — for that is how their names are properly spelled, although they like to pretend to be Jesse and Meribeth — are complicated.
It’s not the first time Alice Munro has grappled with the subject. The intricacies of relationships between schoolchildren also feature in “The Day of the Butterfly’ and “Half a Grapefruit” (Dance of the Happy Shades and Who Do You Think You Are?).
And female friendships are more specifically considered via Del’s relationship with Naomi in The Lives of Girls and Women and Rose’s relationship with Jocelyn in Who Do You Think You Are? across these linked collections.
But complicated, yes.
Though it’s not like that in books, as Jessie explains:
“In the books I had read all through my childhood, girls were bound two by two in fast friendship, in exquisite devotion. They promised never to tell each other’s secrets or keep anything hidden from each other, or form a deep and lasting friendship with any other girl.”
The “code” that Jessie describes is pulled directly from the L.M. Montgomery stories that Munro has openly professed to adoring, particularly the Emily stories. But Emily’s friendship with Ilsa, though it does follow the rules that Jessie discusses, had its roots in Anne’s friendship with Diana.
Anne and Diana met in Anne of Green Gables and from the moment of their meeting, wherein they recognized each other to be kindred spirits, they were exquisitely devoted, indeed.
They followed all the rules that Jessie describes (and the passage goes on at some length), marrying, yes, but always preserving their devotion to their friendship, even naming their daughters after one another.
And in the books, although sometimes Anne is a little disappointed with Diana (and, to be fair, Diana sometimes a tiny bit frustrated with Anne), they remain bosom friends without serious incident. As do Emily and Ilse, with a single hiccup in each friendship, which is resolved and only intensifies their lifelong bond.
In real life, however, the relationships which served as a composite model for these friendships in L.M. Montgomery’s fiction were less satisfying. (This is discussed in her journals, which were published by Oxford University Press.)
They were, yes, complicated.
Jessie seems disposed towards putting a hearty portion of the responsibility for her troubled relationship with her friend on MaryBeth, who “was adept at small fibs, gentle refusals”.
But only two pages earlier, Jessie mentions that she wasn’t always truthful. “That wasn’t true, but I believed it,” she says.
(Quite possibly, the reader thinks, MaryBeth believed her “small fibs” too. Or, at least, believed that a gentle refusal was the kinder of two choices.)
Jessie does admit to being conflicted about the friendship, about the contrasting views that she held of her girlfriend.
“Beside MaryBeth, I felt that I was a crude piece of work altogether, with my strong legs and hefty bosom – robust and sweaty and ill-clad, undeserving, grateful. And at the same time, deeply, naturally, unspeakably, unthinkably – I could not speak or think about it – superior.”
Nonetheless, the girls are united in many respects, against the teacher, for instance, who refuses to address Jessie as Jesse (it is a boy’s name, she declares, and as readers of “Boys and Girls” in Dance of the Happy Shades will recall, that might as well be another dimension, socially).
“Neither MaryBeth nor I expected anything but the most artificial, painful, formal contact with the world of adults.”
Yet, ironically, the strain on their friendship is rooted in just that, contact with the world of adults.
Some of that contact is real, but much of it is manufactured. And not by our practiced teller of small fibs, but by Jessie, who spins a web of lies about her relationship with a man who is vaguely known to both girls. (There is, however, a real relationship with his wife, which is quite interesting in its own right.)
“I had to keep arranging and rearranging things, then fit them into place by means of the bits of information I chose to give out. I consummated the affair but did not tell her, and was glad afterward because I decided to unconsummated it. I couldn’t adequately imagine….”
Finally, progress in love (after so many stories in which there was no love, only grudges, or in which there was love, but regression rather than progress).
But it is invented. And then revised, replaced. Is that the only kind of progress that’s possible?
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. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story. This story is the seventh in The Progress of Love, with next Thursday reserved for “Eskimo”.
Your post was really helpful in sorting some things out. I like how AM switched the perspectives as she did–letting the insight come from Jesse in a sort of roundabout way–almost without her even realizing what happened. She’s such a clever writer.
It’s so interesting, isn’t it? Had the structure been altered, I think it would have been a completely different story. As it is, I think we begin by thinking that the story is more about MaryBeth than it actually is. Really, in the end, it’s all-about-Jessie. And, maybe, that’s the “problem” in their friendship, for maybe it always was all-about-Jessie from the start.
****some minor spoilers****
This story left me feeling saddened more than anything else. When I looked back to the beginning I realized that Alice Munro had probably warned me when she had Jessie begin with “I had a tender, loyal, boring friendship with a girl named MaryBeth Crocker.” Boring? used to describe a friendship? Perhaps that was the problem all along for Jessie: she wasn’t really looking for the kind of friendship that Anne and Diana had. To be fair, my disappointment and sadness is probably based in my belief in the kindred spirit kind of friendship. However, when MaryBeth slipped into the seat beside Jessie in Music Class Jessie “felt astonished, almost dismayed, at being chosen.” She does use the word “boredom” again although she applies it to the “old school smells”. She states that “For weeks afterward,I would wake up in the morning knowing I was happy and not knowing why. Then I would remember this moment.” So it would seem that Jessie did recognize the value of friendship and even, possibly, wanted the kind of friendship Anne and Diana represent. Later on she finds herself paying less attention to MaryBeth’s conversation and says “Not that I wished to be elsewhere, or even to be alone. I understood that this was what friendship was like.” Was it really what friendship was like or was it like the examples she had seen in the residence where Beatrice, MaryBeth’s sister, lived? Or was it just boredom or adolescent hormones or a combination of things? Was it Jessie’s drive to do one better than Beatrice and her barber apprentice boyfriend that drove her to conduct an affair in her head with Mr. Cryderman. She said that when Mr. C began to play a role in her imagination, “he faded in reality.” When Mr. C faces Jessie with “the reality of other people” she makes her exit almost immediately in the face of “intimate failure”. And then MaryBeth told Jessie that she (MB) did not believe Jessie’s story about Mr. Cryderman. Jessie uses this as an excuse to break off the friendship with MaryBeth and, although Marybeth writes an apology, Jessie gets some satisfaction from wounding her. And when she went back to that town and meets MaryBeth in the office where MaryBeth works, Jessie cannot exercise the generosity of spirit which MaryBeth shows and runs away from any extended visit. “I didn’t see that I was the same one, embracing, repudiating. I thought I could turn myself inside out, over and over again,and tumble through the world scot free.”
I found myself pondering this notion of “progress” again and as you have indicated there is a sort of progress but it is “invented. And then revised, replaced.” Some definitions simply state that progress is a “forward or onward movement towards a destination”(Oxford Modern English Dictionary) sometimes implying betterment but not always. “Progressive” when applied to disease or violence is defined as “increasing in severity or extent”. When the two young women meet again, MaryBeth has a good job, takes good care of herself and remembers the high school days as “crazy” while Jessie, in graduate school, still remembers her “abysmal confusion in the summerhouse.” From the point of view of growing up, if growing up can be seen as progress, it would seem that MaryBeth has possibly attained a higher level of maturity than Jessie. In the title story Munro wrote “Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.” Perhaps the progress here is in MaryBeth’s generosity of spirit? In her continuing kindness in the face of Jessie’s rejection?
* Spoilers, continued *
My idea of friendship came from the same Montgomery books that Munro read (which is why I so immediately recognized the descriptions), so real-life friendships simply could not compare on those criteria. Like you, in the beginning, I thought that Jessie really did value the friendship, even so, but I suppose it all seemed bright and new and filled with potential, which slowly leaked out as reality replaced the dreamy expectations.
It’s quite revealing that Jessie had to “fictionalize” her relationship with Mr. Cryderman, and that she was clear herself that the real man didn’t have any true connection to her imaginings at all. I found it interesting that she could so clearly articulate this, and, yet, that the story isn’t about her relationship with him, but it’s about the way in which she was compelled to share her inventions about it with MaryBeth. Perhaps she was trying to inject some saving grace into their friendship, to instill a passion in it, even though it was false and was rooted in competitiveness, but, even so, maybe it was always more about MaryBeth than it was about Mr. Cryderman.
I absolutely loved that sentence about tumbling through the world, and I stopped to re-read it a few times just to catch the feel of it. It, too, contains an admission of sorts, doesn’t it. She is a more self-aware character than one would have guessed if they had only met her during the events of this story, not ages hence.
MaryBeth does seem more mature as presented here, does seem to have progressed beyond Jessie in many ways, but whether it is progress simply to have accepted less-than-one-dreamed-of does seem to beg the question of whether one should not keeping reaching and striving for more. But, then, where does the happiness come in (which also recalls the last story, doesn’t it). So much to think about.