Alice Munro Redux
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in July 2024.
Toronto Star’s July 7th story about Alice Munro’s clay feet will resound across the nation, and I think will tell us as much about who we are as any other shifting of the tectonics of certainty. There will be those who castigate her – that devious witch! She had us all fooled! There will be those who claim to have known all along -- well maybe not the specifics but that something was amiss with that woman. (Although that’ll be a bit hard to pull off, because the theme of the story is not so much what happened but how ‘naturally’ it was silenced, so to be among the silenced is not a great position.)
And surely it will put some flesh (ugh!) on the debate about whether the daughter, Andrea’s, experience was real sexual abuse, since no penetration was reported. And maybe it was a one-off (it wasn’t; it continued in some fashion until Andrea reached puberty and was no longer Gerry’s ‘type’). And whether Humberto was really a bad man or Lolita was really at fault for tempting him beyond his capacity to resist – that argument allowed Gerry to forgive/explain himself, as it has many others. Gerry was 80 when the accusation became public – or what passed for public – and there will have been many who agree that at that age, there’s no value in making his transgressions public because he’s too old and flabby (ugh!) to be an active threat.
(The story is particularly interesting in context of Frank Stronach, the same week, being hauled into court at age 91 with a line-up of accusers that grows by the day – none, as far as we know, children. Gerry was in court in 2005 and got two year’s probation; it’ll be interesting to see what Stronach gets – in part because he’s the icon, whereas Gerry was the one-plus.)
In my peon to Alice on the occasion of her death, I ended up wishing she had told us the way out of the dilemma of women’s complex sexuality that dominates her writing. Guess what? The dilemma she describes is her dilemma and she died without naming it, let alone claiming it as hers to solve in any way. That’s what we now know.
So if she were the protagonist in her own story, she’d be the woman who walked out of what seemed like a perfectly good relationship, leaving her three daughters in the care of their father Jim, falling for Gerry (as in can’t live without him), turning a blind eye to Gerry’s pedophilia, giving the personal and professional consequences to herself precedence over the harm to her daughter when Andrea told her the truth, using her status and power to model silence/erasure as the way forward when Gerry was found guilty in a court of law (in teeny tiny Goderich, far away from urban glare), taking her power to the grave.
Well, none of those elements are missing from Alice’s oeuvre.
So Alice named it without claiming it and certainly not, as far as we know, trying to solve it. Much like her characters. She did what writers are told to do, write what you know. But not in first person. Didn’t adopt the yoke of truthfulness that memoir demands. Left that to the brave. In this case Andrea.
Andrea is telling her story to change the world. Very specifically, she is suggesting that families – all kinds of families, including ‘good’ ones, encompassing those with people of great power and those without – look to see if sexual impropriety (to use a neutral phrase) is at play before their very eyes, and to drag it into the light of day.
This takes our awareness of sexual abuse a step beyond #MeToo, into the private world of families and the unthinkable world of sexual abuse of children. It raises the terrible reality that it happens in ‘good’ families. Famous families. And that there is a pervasive and powerful intent to keep it secret. That secrecy is warranted because the harm of outing the story spreads across a very broad spectrum – in this case, in addition to Andrea as the direct victim, four parents, three siblings, their subsequent families, their larger social networks, and yes, the Canadian literary world! (What would choosing a pedophile over your daughter do to a writer’s chance of getting a Nobel prize? Not enhance it, of that I’m sure.)
So who’s to blame here? No one and everyone. Patriarchy, the power of the penis. All of us, for a long time, in many ways, making sex the centre of life. Giving the penis power it does not deserve.
Who made it the boss? We did. We do. We should absolutely reconsider.
I am reminded here of what my husband said in his later days, when dementia was well in place. He frequently dropped his drawers or reached deep inside to rearrange himself. Eventually I asked him why he kept fussing with his genitals. He looked bemused and said, ‘Dunno. For such a little thing, it causes a lot of trouble.’
Yup. If we let it.
