Consolation Prizes The Power of Secret Intimacy in Alice Munro s Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage
Consolation Prize: The Power of Secret Intimacy in Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage In four of the stories in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro explores the topic of illicit secrets and their impact on women whose lives have come to be defined by the men and children to whom they are attached. “What Is Remembered,” “Floating Bridge,” “Comfort,” and “Nettles” share similar themes of women and the healing power of their secret, internal worlds. ... Munro does not present her characters with the opportunity of seeing their extramarital romances evolve into new relationships or even brief encores, but all of them utilize their secret experiences as powerful and sustaining sources of consolation and redemption that help to ease the pain of the trials in their lives. ... She is a mother of young children, with that role’s attendant rewards and frustrations, but her husband Pierre is attentive and respectful, expressing concern that, “God knows how long [she’ll] have to wait for the bus” (Remembered 224). ... Munro describes young husbands as “stern, in those days,” quickly required to confront the challenges of life in the public sphere while feeling the need to remain in control of the private (Remembered 220). ... This is as close as Munro comes to providing Meriel with a motive for her eventual adultery. In the stories entitled “Comfort” and “Floating Bridge” Munro’s wives are older, each many years into a marriage a man who seems to be passionately committed to many things, but not his wife. In “Floating Bridge,” Jinny has allowed her own life to be subsumed into her husband Neal’s, surrendering her individuality in the face of his relentless campaign to improve the world, and she only rarely allows her resentment to drive her into action. ... Like the artwork she brought with her into the marriage, she has been rendered invisible (Bridge 57). Now forty-two and struggling with terminal cancer, Jinny must also face the humiliating spectre of her husband’s barely concealed romantic feelings for Helen, a much-younger, troubled woman he has hired as Jinny’s caregiver. ... He is so oblivious of Jinny’s exhaustion and nausea from her cancer treatments that he is angered by her refusal to meet Helen’s foster parents, saying, “You know what it looks like if you don’t. ... The story opens with her preparations for the funeral of her husband’s childhood friend, Jonas, a man she dislikes to the extent that she feels “apologetic,” and perhaps a little guilty when she informs her husband of the death (Remembered 219). ... For Meriel, all experiences, from death to adultery, are simply threads from which she can weave a more colourful internal, secret life. ... For the central character in “Nettles,” death touches her only through the grief of a man she has loved since childhood, although she is familiar enough with grieving, having lost this man, Mike, as a child, and then lost the regular presence of her children as she fled her marriage for a life “that could be lived without hypocrisy or deprivation or shame”(166).