This story was originally published in Ms in September 1978, under the title “The Honeyman’s Daughter”.
Thinking about this changes the focus of the story somewhat because the honey-dumper goes around cleaning toilets. That’s his job. And Cora is his granddaughter.
Rose greatly admires Cora (and Rose is at the heart of this collection of interconnected stories, with her mother, Flo).
“Cora had plenty of clothes. She came to school in fawn-colored satin, rippling over the hips; in royal-blue velvet with a rose of the same material flopping from one shoulder; in dull rose crepe loaded with fringe.”
Everything about her impresses Rose. Her grown-up hairstyle, her richly painted lips, her cakily powdered cheeks, her “tall, solid, womanly” form. The way that Cora responds to the boys who torment her. The chummy relationship she has with her two girlfriends.
Rose wants to be Cora. Flo is not impressed. “She is a far cry from good-looking. She is going to turn out a monster of fat. I can see the signs. She is going to have a mustache, too. She has one already. Where does she get her clothes from? I guess she thinks they suit her.”
And, it’s true, that Rose does not continue to idolize Cora for long. She begins to think her rather ordinary. “So long after, and so uselessly, Rose saw Flo trying to warn and alter her.”
It’s clear from the beginning of the story that going to the toilet is, in some ways, a great equalizer. Everybody does it. And lots of children actually watch old Mr. Burns do it. Peering in through the bottom boards of the outhouse.
But it’s also clear from that early scene that there are those who watch and those who are ashamed to have been watched using the toilet. (And, soon enough, we learn that there are those who empty the toilets.)
Rose does everything she can to avoid the shame that surrounds using the school toilets, but in her struggle, she actually wets herself two or three times because she doesn’t make it home in time to go.
“Justice and cleanliness she saw now as innocent notions out of a primitive period of her life. She was building up the first store of things she could never tell.”
What is it that she could never tell? What was unjust? What was unclean? Was it simply too much to consider the reality of these incidents?
The only thing that is “captivating, lovely” about school for Rose is that year were the pictures of the birds in her classroom: the woodpecker, the oriole, the blue jay, the Canada Goose.
(From Ethel Wilson to Martha Ostenso, the appearance of feathered friends having symbolic importance to young heroines in Canlit is familiar.)
These images seem to represent “some other world of hardy innocence, bounteous information, privileged light-heartedness. No stealing from lunchpails there; no slashing coats; no pulling down pants and probing with painful sticks; no fucking; no Franny.”
Ah, now readers realize what it was that Rose couldn’t tell. In fact, she has not told it. But there is plenty to consider in “Privilege” all the same.
What makes the renaming of this story to “The Honeyman’s Daughter” so interesting is that readers might have expected it to have been named The Honeyman’s Granddaughter.
But it is re-named not for Cora but for Cora’s mother. Cora’s mother does not appear in this story. Not even a glimpse.
“Her mother worked somewhere, or was married.” Cora was illegitimate. Cora’s mother was elsewhere.
So readers are forced to wonder, if Rose is leaving out all the heavy-heartedness, what has been left out of Cora’s mother’s experiences.
Whether Alice Munro’s characters live in or out of town, in town on one side of town or the other side of town, in town on the right-side of town but on a street of lesser status: these details matter.
The “various scandals and bits of squalor” that Rose offers to readers are revealing and as revealing when they are not offered but neglected.
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s story collection Who Do You Think You Are?, which will continue on subsequent Thursdays. Please feel free to join in, for the series, or for a single story. Next week: “Half a Grapefruit”. My Alice Munro reading project began with Dance of the Happy Shades, followed by Lives of Girls and Women, and Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, and I aim to read through her work to date. She is one of my MRE authors.
Next week’s story is “Half a Grapefruit”, one which I remember being particularly good. Care to join in?
it is interesting to me to see you discuss this story so in depth. I feel rather inadequate in comparison. But perhaps I can use the excuse of reading this collection for the first time? (I assume “The Beggar Maid” is the same collection, with a different title?)
Up to now I found Royal Beatings to be rather difficult to follow, perhaps because it spans a larger amount of years, or feels like it does? Privilege was a much easier read for me. Perhaps it is also a matter of slowly getting more of a feel for the characters and the overall setting.
The toilet thing stands out from the start, doesn’t it? Especially with that first page, those descriptions made me feel so gross. I wonder about the above conversation about toilets as “dangerous places”, because just thinking back to my school years, I recognised so much in Rose’s shame, admiration and want to belong (though the latter is more my inability to find the right word and not the actual word I’m looking for). The comment on how Flo’s coming to school was viewed as somewhat of a disgrace is kind of funny knowing what parents would complain about nowadays, but also appeals to the feeling of being somewhat ashamed of your parents when you are in school. The part you quoted, I felt, especially evoked this whole school as otherworldly, as a place where your parents do not belong, which they do not understand, and where they are better forgotten or they might make you feel ashamed (both in the sense of Flo showing up at school, and Flo ridiculing her for her obsession with Cora). It was that simple quote that made that all those feelings flooded back to me (even though the feeling to me is connected to different things about school):
“She believed the order of things at school to be unchangeable, the rules there different from any that Flo could understand, the savagery incalculable. Justice and clealiness she saw now as innocent notions out of a primitive period of her life. She was building up the first store of things she could never tell.”
It is amazing to me how, in one short paragraph, the whole liminal feeling of school for children is expressed.
Okay, enough rambling without much sense from me 🙂
It is definitely the same collection, Iris, and, you’re right, I couldn’t think about these stories in such detail if I hadn’t already spent a fair bit of time with her work over the years, but like you’ve said, what she does with one short paragraph is quite amazing, so I’m sure others could write entire chapters about a single story.
“Royal Beatings” does feel a bit of a jolt, doesn’t it; I could see where “Privilege” might help things settle out. I’m just reading “The Beggar Maid” now and am really getting the sense of things coming together, of more completely understanding Rose, in a way that I didn’t before; now I wonder if I would notice different things in “Royal Beatings” if I were to re-read now.
I also agree with you that she captures the emotions of that time in a girl’s life brilliantly, without making it all about the details, so for Rose, it’s “the toilet thing”, but each of us can read this and feel it, right along with Rose, though the details are different for each reader, so it’s that much more powerful on (and off) the page.
On this reading of Privilege the condition of the school toilets grabbed my attention more than on any previous reading. Rose couldn’t tell Flo about the situation because Flo might have shown up with a shovel and thoroughly embarrassed Rose by cleaning up the situation. Such a far cry from the times later on when in urban schools every little thing sometimes brought a complaint to the principal or the school board. I was also reminded of Margaret Laurence’s character, Christie Logan, who drove around and collected the junk and thoroughly embarrassed Morag Gunn who was raised by Christie and his wife. And I was thinking too how eventually toilets were installed in basements of schools and how it was always a little eerie going to that area alone when one was very young.There were fears that small children faced every day that were never known to their parents: part of that “store of things” that Rose could never tell. This seems related to the description of school as a place where “fights and sex and pilferage were the important things going on”. No wonder Rose wanted to be Cora and saw the bird pictures as representing “privileged light-heartedness” as compared to what her vision of school contained. Jeanette Winterson describes the loo or Betty at her home in England as “a good loo: whitewashed and compact with a flashlight hanging behind the door.” She smuggled books in there and “read them in secret,claiming constipation.” the downside of that was that her mother “was keen on suppositories and enemas.” Her mother also tacked up threatening and unpleasantly pituresque (melting bowels) verses from the Bible in the loo where one’s eyes could not avoid them. Perhaps there are toilet/loo/Betty stories in everyone’s childhood. I found it interesting that Cora’s only connection with the toilets was through her grandfather: Rose seemed to think that Cora did not have to deal with these less pleasant aspects of life and she judged Flo harshly for not letting her crush on Cora go. So I am left wondering what Rose learned or was it like she said: “Life was altogether a series of surprising developments, as far as she could learn.” ?
Re: Sandra’s comment on “Privilege”
I thought of Christie Logan too, which makes sense, given Munro’s acknowledgement of Laurence’s influence. It is interesting to consider how often this kind of thing would have preoccupied students (perhaps, particularly female students) and, now that you mention it, I think even in the ’70s there were stories about school bathrooms being “dangerous places”, dark and basement-y. Wasn’t there something in Judy Blume’s Blubber? Maybe even in Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest? In one of those, I’m sure there’s a girl who is either afraid to go downstairs or who is cornered in a stall. Someone has probably done their thesis on this, or maybe not!
I haven’t read Winterson’s memoir yet; I kind of fell out of touch with her work after Weight, although I used to follow it religiously. Now part of me wants to catch up (including her writing for young adults, which I’ve heard so many good things about) and part wants to jump immediately to the memoir! But even if I weren’t already interested, the snippets that you’ve referenced would have piqued my interest immediately, even if I hadn’t read a single one of her novels. Glad you enjoyed it so much too!
I am a little behind in that I just read the story, Royal Beatings but will try and catch up. The phrase used when I was younger was “royal thrashing” but the power was more in the threat than in the action which was nothing compared to that which Rose experienced. I found the descriptions of Hanratty and West Hanratty reminded me of the short time which I lived in Wingham, Ontario and the way in which the town was divided into Lower Town and Upper Town by the older citizens. And those Salada Tea signs in front windows of closed up businesses: we used to see them everywhere it seemed. The end of this story was very powerful for me: the transformation of Hat Nettleton from “horsewhipper into centenarian” . Three very disturbing words capsulizing a lifetime. “Living link with our past.” So back as far as 1977 Alice was pushing her readers(The New Yorker) to go to uncomfortable places. Surprisingly, I found the life Munro gives to Rose very like the life Jeanette Winterson describes in her recent memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? c2011. As always, it seems to me, there is so much more to a Munro story than meets the eyes. Thanks for returning to these stories: I am looking forward to reading Privilege and Half a Grapefruit.
Re: Sandra’s comment on “Royal Beatings”
The reason that I especially love company with these stories is that there are always little bits that strike one reader more than another, but when they’re remarked upon, they add another layer to the reading. That phrase, “horsewhipper into centenarian” hadn’t jumped out at me, but I’m glad to take note. Very interesting observation about Wingham as it would make sense that that influenced her writing. I had planned to read these stories later last year, and it’s taken me longer to return to the project than expected, but I’m intensely satisfied to be back in Munro territory now, and I’m happy you’re enjoying the re-reads too.