Alice Munro’s work is like poetry written on the walls of a prison cell, a voice bearing witness to a woman’s life, writes Roxana Robinson.
t is a truth universally acknowledged that a mother has her child’s best interests at heart, and that she will put those interests before her own. Nature has made this a necessity: Without constant care and solicitude, an infant will die. If mothers don’t protect their children, who will? How will the they survive? This is baked into us: Regardless of our feminist beliefs, we expect women to be good mothers.
Munro’s response is not unique. In fact, the troubling narrative of sexual abuse is played out in many families as a dark unspoken story. Silence and complicity are essential, and the family dynamic becomes a taut cat’s cradle of tension. The mother is often involved, denying reality and protecting her partner. Denial, too, is essential to survival. There are many accounts of women who deny the truth about their partners: battered wives, who return to their brutal husbands.
To hear about the hideous reality of her husband’s behavior would be like hearing that the air she breathed was poison. If this were true, the life she knew was over. If she could make it not true, her life could continue. Like many women, Munro chose the latter path. She denied his actions and her failures. Of course her abuser would welcome that response: Fremlin was Alice’s abuser as well as Andrea’s. He lied and dissembled to them both, he bullied and manipulated them both.
The strength of Munro’s work is in setting down truths about women that no-one else had told: about their power and their vulnerability, and the way they act, driven by passion and by determination. She has revealed a kind of deep emotional knowledge about women that no one else had mined. Because of this deep knowledge, it was easy to see her as a kind of sybil, wise and compassionate, possessed of an understanding beyond our own.
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