Reading Alice Munro's story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage"

I tried to teach students how to read fiction, especially short stories, at California State University, Long Beach for forty years. Every time I went into the classroom, I had read the assignment for the day at least four times—once straight through to orient myself to the characters, plot, and style; the second time highlighting those passages that seemed to me to be more than verisimilitude, e.g. motifs that were repeated, passages that seemed to emphasize theme, allusions to other works, passages that puzzled me, etc.; the third time making annotations in the margins about connections and emerging patterns.  Finally, I would go back through the story a fourth time, typing up my notes, e.g. quotations, annotations, connections, developments.

The following comments on "Hateship, Friendship" are an example of those notes—notes that would sometimes later lead to the development of my "reading" of the story into an essay. I have developed these notes in preparation for my essay on five stories in the Hateship volume.

Since, this "reading" represents a fourth  time through the story, what understanding I have of the early events are conditioned by my knowledge of the later events. I already have in mind the events as they occur in time; my task now is to determine what kind of meaningful pattern they make. The most basic patterning device in a story is, of course, repetition of motifs that create a "figure in the carpet." 

The story opens with a variation of the "once upon a time there was a woman" fable device : "Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture."  There is a bit of the stylized grotesque about the woman's physical appearance. I am prepared for a fable.

The story establishes its central theme of "great expectations" (repeated throughout) at the beginning with the introduction of this unnamed woman planning for the future because she expects certain important things are going to happen, although the reader does not know what those expectations are. She seems so certain about the future, when the ticket agent asks if someone is coming to meet her, she does not hesitate, but says "Yes," although she has no knowledge that this is true. I know this is going to be an important theme in the story, for I know that the story ends with the young woman Edith translating the following Latin passage from Horace's ode "Carpe Diem": "You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know what fate has in store for me, or for you."

In the second scene, when the woman, who is now given the name Johanna, goes to a dress shop to buy her wedding dress, she thinks that when she was younger, she could not have  contemplated such "expectations," could not have had the "preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss." Thus, the story begins with what was once traditionally the most important expectation a fair young maiden could have—marriage.  However, this woman is neither young (just under forty) nor fair--"No beauty queen, ever."  She reminds the agent of a "plain-clothes nun" he had once seen on television.  But there is nothing mild nor gentle nor pious about this woman  The first description we have of her is that her "teeth are crowded together in the front of her mouth, as if they were ready for an argument." (another grotesque image—kind of like Maria in Joyce's "Clay")

Johanna has come to the shop prepared, even having "rehearsed" her request for the green dress in the window; she has worn clean underwear and put fresh talcum powder under her arms. However, she has no illusions about herself, calling herself a "sow's ear" regardless of the "silk purse" dress she tries on.

The sales woman identifies with Johanna, creates a "bond" with her, and has her try on a different dress that does not make her look as she has been "stuck into the garment for a joke." Since we know that the crucial events of the story are created by a "joke" that two young woman play on Johanna, we have here the first intimation of the theme of a joke that has motivated Johanna's expectations; we learn that it is indeed a "great expectation" when she tells the woman, "It'll likely be what I get married in."

Although Johanna seems absolutely "sure" when she says she will only get married once, she recalls that marriage had not been mentioned, even in the "last letter." She regrets that she has revealed to this woman "what she was counting on."  (This is another intimation of the game that gives the story its title, a children's counting game about the inevitable movement toward marriage.  Another allusion to expectation.)

Another fable/fairy tale allusion occurs when the sales clerk refers to the Western Fair and "she could have been saying 'the Castle Ball.'"  Even the minor detail of the woman giving the package ribbon a "wicked snip" suggests a fairy tale motif.

The sales woman's lament, "Ah, well. Maybe the man in the moon will walk in here and fall in love with me and then I'll be all set!" could be a simple bit of verisimilitude, characterizing a minor character, but since this is a short story the repetition of this motif makes us expect that this is indeed a story about expectation, hopes for what might happen. It's the classic fairy tale love story motif of "someday my prince will come."

We now get the background of Mr. McCauley, for whom Johanna works as a housekeeper, an elderly man, who walks about with his hands behind his back like a "kind landlord inspecting his property or a preacher happy to observe his flock." (another fable/fairytale motif). We are also introduced to Sabitha, his granddaughter, for whom Johanna was the closest thing to a mother since her mother, Marcelle, died (the stepmother motif—not wicked, but certainly not likeable) We also meet Edith, the daughter of the shoe repair man, Sabetha's great friend.

Now we are introduced to the important motif of letters, as we read Johanna's letter saying she is sending a (yet unnamed) man his furniture, adding that she is also coming with it to "be of help" to him. This is the first letter she has sent directly to him, having sent earlier ones via Sabitha's letter to her father (now given the name Ken Boudreau). Gradually, we learn that Boudreau is Mr. McCauley's son-in-law and that McCauley has loaned Boudreau money in the past.  All this gradual revelation of information creates an illusion of plot mystery.  Alice Munro has noted that this story depends more on plot than many of her stories.  However, since this is a short story, in spite of its novella length, it is not what will happen that interests us, but rather what the pattern of those events actually mean about human experience.

We now get the background, via Mr. McCauley's recollection of the past, of Sabitha's dead mother, Marcelle, who was always sneaking out of the house to run around with carloads of boys. "The house was full of a feeling of callus desertion, of deceit."

The next section of the story focuses on Mr. McCauley, who goes about the town telling anyone who will listen about his being wronged by his son-in-law conniving with his housekeeper who has stolen furniture and gone west with it.  This introduces the "Ancient Mariner" motif of the man who stops the wedding guest and compels him to listen to his misfortune.

It also introduces Herman Schultz, the father of Edith, who creates the plot to "catch" Johanna. Herman's shoe shop is like a cave and McCauley who has not reflected on it before now sees Schultz's whole life in the cave. "He wished to express sympathy or admiration or something more that he didn't understand." (Any time I run across something that a character tries to understand but fails, it strikes me as something important, for short stories are often about mysteries.)

This also introduces Edith, a "childishly thin "girl who slides in and out of the house when she came to visit Sabitha. "You never got a good look at her face." (Edith is thus introduced as a mysterious figure who slides in with no definite identity) The introduction of Edith is important.  Now that Sabitha has gone, Edith has "reverted to being the person she had been before Sabitha came here. Old for her age, diligent, and critical." She is getting past what is called "silliness" with Sabitha (We do not know what this is yet).  But when she thinks about Johanna going out west, which she has heard from old Mr. McCauley, "she felt a chill from her past, an invasive alarm. She tried to bang a lid down on that, but it wouldn't stay."

It seems appropriate that she would be reading a Dickens' novel, David Copperfield, for Great Expectations would have been too obvious).  She identifies with David and dramatizes her own situation, feeling she might has well have been an orphan like him "because she would probably have to run away, go into hiding, fend for herself, when the truth became known and her past shut off her future."  (This is the expectation motif again—fear that the past will condition the future). She is now worrying that her past trick on Johanna will affect her future.)

The whole joke began when Sabitha tells her on the way to school that she has to send a letter to her father. The two girls create a sort of secret bond, talking in nonsense language or walking with their eyes closed—mostly ideas of Edith.  Sabitha's only idea is the child hood game of predicting the future by playing the Hateship, friendship game, in which you write down your name and a boy's name and then strike out all the letters that appear in both names.  Then you tick off the remaining letters on our fingers, saying "hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage until you get the verdict of what would happen to you and that boy, sort of like the "He loves me, he loves me not" game with daisy petals. (I did the game using my name and my wife's name.  The result was "marriage.")

The game or joke on Johanna begins when she writes to Boudreau to thank him for taking her to the Fair with the girls and giving him the background of her uneventful life.  The girls open it and read it and laugh about it, with Edith mocking it, as if it were from a sentimental Victorian novel. When Boudreau writes back to Sabitha and makes no mention of Johanna, Edith decides she and Sabitha will write for hi. While Sabitha is silly in her suggestions, Edith says she is going to be serious. Her letter to Johanna is indeed typical of melodrama and fairy tale, Boudreau supposedly lamenting that he has no friend, but that now Johanna is his friend. Thus begins a correspondence of letters between Johanna and Boudreau, both of which are written by Edith

The next section of the story is about Sabitha's return from visiting her cousins and the changes that have taken place in her.  She is plumper and now has breasts, which Edith notices and thinks they seem to indicate a "completely unearned and unfair advantage." Sabitha tells Edith about her visit with her cousins, about how they played games in which they pull down a girls' pajama bottoms to show if she had hair.  They told stories about girls at boarding school who did things with hairbrush handles, and how once a couple of cousins put on a show in which one girl gets on top of the other and pretends to be the boy, and they groan and carry on.

Sabitha tells how her Uncle Clark's sister and her husband game to visit on their honeymoon and he was seen to put his hand inside her swimsuit. Sabitha says they were at it day and night, saying "People can't help it when they're in love like that." She says one of her cousins had already done it with a boy and then she puts a pillow between her legs and says, "Feels so nice."

 Edith knows about these "Pleasurable agonies" but once when she went to sleep with a blanket between her legs, her mother tells her about a girl who did such things and had to be operated on for the problem. (Clitorectomies were sometimes performed in the nineteenth century because it was felt that girls should not have pleasurable sexual feelings—certainly none self-induced).

Later when they write another letter, Sabitha suggests her father should say he imagines Johanna reading his letters in bed with her nightgown on and that he would crush her in his arms and "suck on your titties." Edith does not write this, but does end the letter with Boudreau saying he imagines her reading his letter in bed with her nightgown on and crushing her in his arms. As a result of this letter, Johanna decides to send the furniture and go West with it.  All this girlhood initiation into the mysteries of sex seems to play a role in Edith's attitude, for her thoughts about her future are becoming increasingly important in the story.  However, the key effect of the sexual references is that Johanna makes a crucial decision to go to Boudreau after reading Edith's letter (supposedly from him) about wants to crush her in his arms.  Female romantic/sexual notions are an important part of the story.

The story now shifts to Johanna arriving at Boudreau's hotel, and appropriately it is painted blue, a reference to Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel" in which fantasy leads to a reality, albeit in a tragic way, when the Swede in that story imagines he is going to get killed and then acts in such a way as to make that happen.  It is a story of a game becoming a reality, when fantasy becomes fate.

It is an interesting shift that Johanna, who has come to Boudreau's home because of a romantic fantasy, as soon as she sees he is ill and that his life is in disarray and that he needs her, she shifts from romance to reality immediately--checking the color of his phlegm, wiping her hands on her new brown dress, changing into old clothes from her suitcase, seeing him as being like a "delicate, stricken boy." Checking her bankbook, Boudreau is impressed enough to let her take care of him. We now get his background financial problems and his realization that Johanna is a solution to his problems. She takes control, makes decisions, and begins using the plural first person pronoun, seeing them as a couple.  All this is based not on romantic illusions, but on pure practicality.

Because she decides never to mention the letters in which she thinks he had "laid himself open to her," neither one of them ever know how this has come about. She thinks there is nothing in him that she cannot handle and is taken up with all the commotion of this relationship, all this "busy love."

The story might well have ended with this phrase, but since the story has to do with expectation and making things happen, the future must be projected in some way that relates to Edith's concern for the future. This takes place when ;Mr. McCauley dies two years later and the death notice in the paper says that he is survived by his granddaughter Sabitha, his son-in-law Ken Boudreau, and Mr. Boudreau's wife, Johanna and their infant son Omar..

The story ends with Edith, who is no longer afraid of being found out, although she does not know why she has not been found out. Then there is this judgment by the narrator/storyteller:

  "And in a way, it seemed only proper that the antics of her former self should not be connected with her present self—let alone with the real self that she expected would take over once she got out of this town and away from all the people who thought they knew her.  It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her—it seemed fantastical, but dull. As if it was an inept joke or clumsy sort of warning, trying to get its hooks into her.  For where, on the list of things she planned to achieve in her lie, was there any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person named Omar?"

The last line of the story is Edith's translation of the first line of Horace's famous ode "Carpe Diem: "You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know what fate has in store for me, or for you."

I am not going to try to pull these ideas together and write an analysis of this story until I have given the other four stories the same kind of fairly thorough reading.  Next week, I will "read" "Floating Bridge."

Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: A Review of Commentary

Whenever I plan to write an analysis of a certain literary subject, I always do a "review of the literature," checking to see what other critics and reviewers have said about the subject I am undertaking.  It is a result of old graduate school training that has stayed with me for fifty years (I started graduate school in 1963 at the age of 22).  I always encouraged my students—graduate and undergraduate--to do the same when they wrote papers for my classes, for I told them that there was absolutely no point in their writing an analysis or interpretation that just repeated what someone else had already discovered or devised. 

So, I offer in this week's blog post the results of my review of the literature on Alice Munro's collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.  Most of it comes from reviews published in newspapers and magazines when the book was published in 2001, for it often takes at least ten to twelve years after a work appears for academic critics to get around to writing and publishing a full-length analytical paper of said work.

In what follows, I will cite those critical comments that I think might be helpful—those that support my argument, those that serve as straw men/women with whom I can argue, those that provide me with thought-provoking ideas I can further develop. After each citation, I will make a brief comment on how I might use the comment:

John McGahern, "Heroines of Their Lives." Times Literary Supplement. Nov. 9, 2001. PP. 23-24.

Any time an important fellow writer reviews a book, I pay particular attention, because it has been my experience that other writers are much more perceptive about good short stories than newspaper reviewers, who often underrate the form.

McGahern says, "I know of nobody who writes as well as Munro about 'the hardhearted energy of sex.'" He says in Hateship, desire has become "in part, memory and reflection." He says the "marvel of the volume" is "Floating Bridge."

Me: What is it about sex that Munro writes about?   Although the physical is important, sex is something more in her stories.  It seems to have some to do with the nature of desire, but more than orgasmic desire. Sex has something to do with freedom or control. Desire is not just something you do, but something you think about and something you recall. It always seems to be more important in the past and in the future than in the present.  Why does McGahern like "Floating Bridge" so much?  It has something to do with the importance of metaphor, I think, and the complexity of the story's theme and its stylistic restraint.

Mona Simpson. "A Quiet Genius." Review of Hateship.  The Atlantic Monthly Dec. 2001: 126-35.

Mona Simpson, like most writers,  admires Munro's fiction. Although  she says it has the simplicity of the best naturalism "in that it seems not translated from life but, rather, like life itself," she says "at the heart of all great naturalism is mystery, an emotional sum greater than its technical parts."

Me: How is this possible? If a fiction focuses on the physical surface of things, how can it be mystery, greater than the sum of its parts. Only mystery if there is some sense that inherent in the physical there is meaning.  Marina Warner talks about the mystery of "things" in Arabian Nights.

Simpson quotes the writer Allan Gurganus who said "Munro is our greatest and most subtle surrealist. The plainest of surfaces ignite with the fugitive erotic undertow.  After sex, even a readymade supermarket lemon cake can feel like a miracle." Simpson adds: "The shock and credibility of the sexuality (alluded to more than rendered) derives –like Chekhov's—from its absurd, yet dead serious, collisions with the mundane, tactile elements of her characters' lives."

Me:  There is something quite paradoxical about sexuality in Chekhov and Munro, something incongruous about the triviality of its physicality and the excessive power it has over those possessed by it. What is a fugitive erotic undertow? What does sex do?

Simpson says the title story is a "love story, perhaps the hardest spell to cast in 2001." "It is as though Munro has set for herself the challenge of writing credible love stories for a culture that usually satisfies its romantic cravings at the movies and turns to fiction for the hard, ugly truth about marriage."

Me: I like this, for while I agree that the title story is a love story, it is  surely an unlikely love story, given its central characters—grotesque Romeo and Juliet and a devious teenage Iago—and then ending, ironically, not as melodrama or tragedy or pathos, but comedy.  Can there be such a thing as an accidental love story?

Simpson says there is something she has always hoped for in fiction that has no literary term but is best explained by an analogy.  She notes a painting by Degas of a woman drying herself after a bath with one foot on the rim of the tub, her body leaning over.  "Seeing that image, one might recognize a human position common in life but never before seen through the bending lens of representation… Munro gives us such recognitions."

Me:  This is very good, for it gets to the heart of the mystery of art.  It has something  to do with an ordinary gesture that is caught in such a way as to embody its essential form.  We see it, although we have never seen it before, we recognize it, for it is not its content or "stuff" that makes it alive, but its form, its gestalt in space—things coming together in an inevitable way that makes it feel that it had to be just that way and no other way.

Lorrie Moore," "Artship." The New York Review of Books. Jan. 7, 2002, pp. 41-42.

Moore says: "The birth and death of erotic love, and the strange places people are led to because of it…is Munro's timeless subject."  She says that Munro knows that the "arranging of love…and the seismic upheavals of its creation and dismantling…is both a kind of pornography of life as well as the very truth of it: it is often the most pervasive and defining force in the shape of individual existence and individual fate." She says one of her signature themes is "the random, permanent fate brought about by an illusion of love."  She says title story is an example of this theme.

Me: Lorie Moore is still another fine writer who greatly admires Munro's stories. I am glad that she singles out erotic love as the central Munro subject and that she recognizes that Munro is fascinated by the "illusion" of love. What is an illusion of love?  All romantic/erotic  love is an illusion, isn't it? It is most powerful at its beginning and at its end.  In between, there is often merely reality.

Gail Caldwell, Review of Hateship.  The Boston Globe. Nov. 4, 2001, p. C3.

"She is so thoroughly a master of both structure and plot that the crafting of the work is nearly invisible; he stories often feel like effortless, half-conscious slides into another universe."

Me:  The theme of the sometimes wrenching shift into Another Country is a common one in the short story. It is a common observation that Munro's stories are so well-crafted that they seem like no craft all—the essence of art being the concealment of the art.

Sebastian Smee, Review of Hateship. Prospect. Oct. 25, 2001.

Smee says Munro's "great theme is sex. No one alive writes as well on the vicissitudes—the pleasures and aches—of relationship between men and women, nor with such a balance of detachment and compassion."  "For Alice Munro, desire is never just unruly and destructive.  It is also expansive, creating room for experience."

Me: When you think about sex, sex loses its riotous passion, and becomes an object of contemplation—Wordsworth's recollections in tranquility. Love stories are usually told by one of the lovers when the story is over—death, desertion, etc. Or else it is told by a sympathetic or envious observer.  Seldom is it told by one of the lovers in the very midst of the passion, for there is really little one can say about the passion, except when one can recall it.

Michael Ravitch, "Fiction in Review." Oct. 2002, vol. 90, Issue 4. Pp. 16070.

Ravitch says, Munro's stories attain the strangeness and exhilaration of perfectly realized dreams." He says she "embraces all that her contemporaries repudiated: exposition and analysis, plot and character….Yet while her concerns may be old-fashioned and humanistic, Munro is also an acute aesthete.  Her narratives are as elusive as they are satisfying."

Me: The questions is:  how can the stories be so realistic and so fantastic at once?  Carver did it by paring down; Munro does it by amplifying.  How? How are the stories surreal and yet real at once?  This is only possible by transforming the real into an aesthetic object, a formal structure that means something.

Ravitch says the drama in her stories is not merely in what happened, but in how it is remembered and explained." 

Me: Yes, this is true; Munro says the same thing—"how" things are recalled and how the story is told.

Ravitch says: "Her cardinal principle is surprise. She plays with exposition as other writers might play with sentences, always coming up with new ways to perform the trick of concealment and discovery. Just when we  think we have understood the story line, the narrative emphasis shifts, logically and yet magically. The stories seem spacious at first, organically growing, digressing down haphazard paths.  And yet, by the end, all the disparate elements have been fused in rigorous and meaningful ways." "Her stories are like spokes on a wheel, stretching out in all directions at once, opening themselves up to an endless range of interpretation.  Their rich ambiguity converts them from mere fact into fable." 

Me: This is a key concept What is ambiguity in a Munro story?  Something that is not seen clearly, something that could be one thing and at the same time another thing.  When this happens, the thing becomes an object of contemplation and thus an element in an art work, part of a formal pattern, a gesture, a thematic suggestion. Munro's characters wish to remove themselves from the everyday.. Ultimately it does not matter if that "other country" they seek is true or false, real or fantasy. Randall Jarrell once said, we have to reckon with what is true and dreams are true also.

Ravitch says: "What most interests Munro about adultery is the drama of the self-divided." Says her women do not swallow arsenic or thrown themselves under trains but find new sources of happiness; "their imaginations sustain them." "One thing Alice Munro teaches is to interrogate stories, always to ask: What is the motive for speaking?  She presents storytelling as an act of power, an assertion of meaning, a way of taking control of ourselves or other people." 

Me:  Ravitch's review is the best review I have found of the collection Hateship.  I might go back and take another look at the psychologist R. D. Laing about the divided self theme, for I found it helpful in an essay I once did on Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." He is right in noting that Munro's women are not like Anna Karenna or Emma Bovary; they are too smart for that, too imaginative.  And he is also right, I think, about how important the power of storytelling is for Alice Munro.

Ann Beattie,  "Alice Munro's Amazingly Ordinary World." The Globe and Mail [Toronto, Ont] 29 Sep 2001: D.2.
Beattie says, Munro's" selectivity and her ability to transform something mundane into metaphor are truly astonishing.  Beattie adds that Munro's accomplishment "is to make the ordinary magical: tree limbs, rocks and water almost alarm us by their viscerally tactile quality. Under her delicate touch, they are transformed; as we connect, we are drawn in to deeper meanings, as in a fairy tale."

Me: Beattie makes a valuable point here.  Too often we try to read Munro's stories as if they were realistic, as if "stuff" in them were merely stuff to stub your toe on.  But instead, like the stories in Arabian Nights, they are magical and metaphoric and meaningful. 


David Crouse, "Honest Tricks: Surrogate Authors in Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage." In Critical Insights: Alice Munro, ed. Charles E. May. Salem Press, 2013. Pp. 228-41. 
Crouse says: "Munro deemphasizes physical action in favor of the mind in action. In her stories, the central action is almost always the act of perception itself; other actions, what we might normally consider to be the plot, are subsumed or transformed to this end." He argues that her techniques run counter to those used by other realistic writers.  In fact, he says, her stories are also indebted to those of John Barth and Robert Coover in the sixties who made the process of writing their subject. He argues that one of the central conflicts in Hateship is the "conflict between reality and meta-reality, the authentic and the manufactured." He says her narratives are often  in conflict with each other, "possessed of a designed messiness that asks the reader to assemble them, jigsaw-like." 

Me: I think Crouse is right to "correct" our usual assumption that Munro's stories are simple realism, rather than self-reflexive explorations of storytelling itself. He most convincingly argues that in the title story, Edith, the young girl who engineers the lying letters to Johanna, is actually a "surrogate" author of Johanna's story and that her plot succeeds only because she grows more empathetic with Johanna.  I agree.  Johanna's story is created by Edith, much as Othello's story is created by Iago. You don't have to love the neighbor as your self to "know" the neighbor as if he or she were yourself. Johanna's story is "created" by Edith's storytelling.

Next Week:

Time to talk about the five stories from Hateship I have chosen to write about.