“Lives of Girls and Women”
by Alice Munro
from Lives of Girls and Women
Trevor
“Changes and Ceremonies,” the prior piece in Lives of Girls and Women, was suggestive of sex and a boy’s capacity to destroy. In that story, Del, at twelve years old, was focusing more and more on sexuality. In contrast, there is no suggestion in this, the title story. Here Del, in her first year of high school, is “fanatically curious” about the endless ways sexuality presents itself and its endless effects. She’s fascinated by what is still a mystery, a mystery which seems present in so many facets of society. But this is not a story of a girl’s sexual awakening. There’s an awakening, to be sure, and we get one of the most shocking scenes in this book — indeed, in Munro’s entire body of work — but it leads to something that I found surprising.
Del’s ambition, her feeling that she has something artistic to offer the world, has been clear for a few stories as we’ve seen her become more and more separate from the community she is describing, but it’s here, when her mother brings up Del’s future children, that she fully admits them to us:
Her speaking of children amazed me too, for I never meant to have any. It was glory I was after, walking the streets of Jubilee like an exile or a spy, not sure from which direction fame would strike, or when, only convinced from my bones out that it had to. In this conviction my mother had shared, she had been my ally, but now I would no longer discuss it with her; she was indiscreet, and her expectations took too blatant a form.
Yet the story does not dwell here. Rather, Dell — older, as she tells this story — remembers how she and her best friend Naomi would talk about sex nearly every day, talks that “took one tone, so that there were degrees of candor we could never reach. This tone was ribald, scornful, fanatically curious.”
That passage shows a link between the language used to talk about something and one’s impression about that thing — the language and the thing influencing each other, sometimes boxing us in. Here, besides being limited by inexperience, Del and Naomi’s understanding of sex is limited by language. In a way, these are limitations they impose upon themselves, but, of course, to break away, to free oneself in language in order to approach something head-on — that’s an act of courage, but also one of deliberation, and when the story begins Del is not yet conscious enough of any of this to make that act of courage.
In the first part of the story, when Del is “fanatically curious” about sex, she and Naomi talk quite often of Fern Dogherty, Del’s mother’s friend and boarder. Fern has a friend named Art Chamberlain. They are both older, yet Naomi’s mother — a woman who freely talks about the evils of sex with her child — has said that Fern and Art are having illicit relations. In what could be considered an act of courage, Del brings this up with her mother, who is convinced Fern and Art are not having sex:
“They enjoy each other’s company,” she said. “They don’t bother about any nonsense.”
Nonsense meant romance; it meant vulgarity; it meant sex.
Again, we see how the words affect Del’s own understanding of sex.
And it’s words that first get Del fantasizing about Mr. Chamberlain. One night, he is telling everyone about his experiences in Italy during the war. There, he says, men were hooking up with girls “no older than Del here.” These words shock Del. They open up a world to her, and in that world she imagines herself with Mr. Chamberlain. What follows is a lengthy passage, but one I find mesmerizing. Here, Del describes what these fantasies are composed of. We get a sense of her sense of sex and how far she allows her own mind to go, as she fantasizes about nothing more than Mr. Chamberlain seeing her naked:
It would have to be the summer holidays, when I was home from school. Fern would not yet be home from the post office. I would come downstairs in the heat of the late afternoon, a sulphurous still day, wearing only this dressing gown. I would get a drink of water at the sink, not seeing Mr. Chamberlain sitting quietly in the room, and then — what? A strange dog, introduced into our house for this occasion only, might jump on me, pulling the dressing gown off. I might turn and somehow catch the material on the nail of a chair, and the whole thing would just slither to my feet. The thing was that it had to be an accident; no effort on my part, and certainly none on Mr. Chamberlain’s. Beyond the moment of revelation my dream did not go. In fact it often did not get that far, but lingered among the preliminary details, solidifying them. The moment of being seen naked could not be solidified, it was a stab of light. I never pictured Mr. Chamberlain’s reaction, I never very clearly pictured him. His presence was essential but blurred; in the corner of my daydream he was featureless but powerful, humming away electrically like a blue fluorescent light.
Obviously, Munro herself has a fantastic control over language.
The story takes an even more disturbing turn when Mr. Chamberlain, in the presence of Del’s mother and Fern — though out of their sight — rubs his hand over Del’s breast. This initial assault leads to several more:
He went straight for the breasts, the buttocks, the upper thighs, brutal as lightning. And this was what I expected sexual communication to be — a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances.
These are Del’s first sexual experiences, “brutal as lightning,” but rather than explore how these negatively affected Del, which most of us would feel absolutely compelled to do, Munro has Del further exploring the language around sex. She finds some books in Fern’s room:
All I read now about foam and jelly, even the use of the word “vagina,” made the whole business seem laborious and domesticated, somehow connected with ointments and bandages and hospitals, and it gave me the same feeling of disgusted, ridiculous helplessness I had when it was necessary to undress at the doctor’s.
Soon, we get to that horrifying scene. As usual when writing about Munro, I don’t hold back spoilers, so feel free to look away.
Mr. Chamberlain picks Del up from school one day and drives her to an empty field outside of the city. There, he exposes himself to her and masturbates, staining her dress. It’s a scene that makes the mouth go absolutely dry. Del, for her part, goes along with it, wondering if he’s going to rape her or what, but she goes along with it because she wants more personal knowledge, something language — however adequate — can hardly substitute. Seeing it for herself, Del essentially finds sex, at least, this pathetic display, ridiculous. Suddenly, it has been stripped of its intrigue. She says the penis she sees — and describes bluntly, in stripped down language — had nothing to do with her. She examines this act impersonally, objectively, and we are reminded that “[b]ooks always compared it to something else, never told about it by itself.” Much has lost its luster on the way back in to town. Besides going through what must be shock, though Del does not dwell there, Del sees most things are not what they are chatted up to be.
She feels the urge to tell someone what happened, not necessarily to receive help but to tell a “funny, though horrifying, story.” But she’s still not found someone she can tell even her stories to. Consequently, she “did not know what to do with it.”
When talking about attraction and loneliness in my post about “Changes and Ceremonies” I said that the destructiveness of sex was for another story. Strangely — because here Del is sexual assaulted multiple times — this is not that story. We might expect an exploration of the negative impact this assault had on Del’s life. At most we get Del’s disappointment after the encounter. And we see Del getting a sense of empowerment. We see that she no longer wants the sex — if she ever did — she wants the knowledge. She wants to experience and, contrary to what society says a woman is capable of, “go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what [I] didn’t want and come back proud.”
As with all of the stories in Lives of Girls and Women, though we are watching Del develop this story stands completely alone as an examination of an adolescent mind trying to make sense of the world around her. But it leads nicely to the next story, where Del is dating a boy and “words were our enemies.”
Betsy
The title story of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women is startling and rich. A reader could easily write a book in reaction to this disturbing story in which fourteen-year-old Del intentionally seeks out a sexual experience with a middle-aged man already gone gray. Although she has a graphic recall of the assault, Del’s recollections are told in a flattened tone, and Munro leaves it to the reader to judge the extent of the damage done.
In this story, “Lives of Girls and Women,” Del is “fanatically curious” about sex and sexuality. Munro explores this aspect of being a girl with no ribbons to fancy it up, no veils, no apologies. It appears that no useful information will be forthcoming from her mother, a woman who thinks of sex as “nonsense.” While Addie hopes that Del will have children, she views relationships with men as distractions.
Using these words from Tennyson, Addie warns Del against men:
He shall hold thee, when its passion shall have spent its novel force,
a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.
Addie has an asexual approach to life, and these peculiar lines are apt to Addie’s purpose. Del knows, as we learned in “Princess Ida” that her mother is not likely to be able to answer any questions about sexuality, given “the gloom that overcame her in the vicinity of sex.”
This silence on the topic of sex was complicated by Addie’s dreams for Del. Del had brains to spare, and her mother knew it. Addie’s own ambitions have gone largely unfulfilled, and she was determined for Del to succeed. Ironically, although she was determined to provide her with a better education than she had had, Addie was unable to provide what a mother should: sex education and a healthy sexual model.
Given this vacuum, Del and her friend Naomi have “almost daily discussions on the subject of sex.” These discussions, says Del, are “ribald, scornful, and fanatically curious.” They pour over Naomi’s mother’s nursing textbooks. They are barely beyond the days when they would draw exaggerated cartoons of male and female bodies that portray, in fact, their fears. Del herself (who doesn’t like the revealing nature of nightgowns) is very afraid of her own body. The girls feel so powerless they pull tricks like writing the names of the popular girls on the walls of the Town Hall toilets or pretending to have cerebral palsy.
What Del and Naomi needed was a good book about sex and sexuality written from a woman’s point of view. They also needed acknowledgment that it was normal, right and good for women to have sexual feelings. They also needed copious reply to any question they could think up. This would have been the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s Our Bodies Ourselves, except that it would be twenty years before it would be available. The Joy of Sex would have been very useful to them as well, but it, too, would only become available twenty years later. In contrast to these affirming points of view, what little education Del had had made her think of sex as “a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of appearances.”
Into this overheated, rebellious atmosphere comes a single man, the gray-haired boyfriend of Addie’s boarder, a kind of aged gentleman caller. Mr. Chamberlain had been seeing Fern for some time. That he shares a name with Neville Chamberlain is probably not a good omen.
Watching Del and Naomi chew gum in a purposely suggestive manner, Mr. Chamberlain sees an opportunity. He grooms Del (right under her mother’s nose, right under his girlfriend’s nose) with weeks of suggestive overtures and inappropriate, furtive, and extensive touching. His seductive routine includes calling Del a “bad girl” and getting her to collude in a scheme to retrieve his letters out of Fern’s room. In her search, Del finds instead information about abortions, condoms, pessaries, and tampons. Although Del finds nothing she can give Mr. Chamberlain, he does get the benefit of proving to Del that she is, indeed, a bad girl, having broken into Fern’s room.
Del’s mother sees, or chooses to see, nothing, perhaps because she enjoys the cultured company that Mr. Chamberlain, who is a radio announcer, provides. In addition, although everyone in town, including Del and Naomi, knows that Addie’s boarder is having an affair with Mr. Chamberlain, Addie chooses to believe this is not so.
Del’s unsatisfied sexual curiosity is being fanned by all these flames. She fantasizes that Mr. Chamberlain will be some kind of sexual partner — but all she can imagine is him seeing her naked. When he appears one day in his car just outside her school and offers her a ride, she is ready.
What comes next is strange, difficult to read, and bluntly graphic. Mr. Chamberlain takes Del to a secluded riverbank, has her stand beside him, and he masturbates. Del watches him, close enough for him to stain her skirt, just as she was meant to do. Del also observes that he probably meant for her to be afraid, except she wasn’t. He comments, “Quite a sight, eh?” Then, he tries to shame her, makes her ride on the floor of the car, lets her out outside of town, and by the next day he has disappeared, leaving Fern an airy, offensive letter of parting.
Del says of the assault, “I didn’t know what to do with it.”
The reader hardly knows either. It’s useful, however, for the reader to remember that Munro has made Del’s dilemma clear. In order to be an artist, she must make sense of sex. But in order to make sense of sex, she needs guidance. What Addie has done is prepare Del to be a victim.
Before the trip to the river, Del “had been looking at fields, trees, landscape with a secret, strong exaltation.” But heading back to the car after the attack, she says, “the landscape was [. . .] meaningless.” For sure, Del doesn’t know what to do with what has happened. She thinks of herself as above being debased by Mr. Chamberlain, but if the way she perceives the landscape is any clue, she feels enveloped by the same gloom her mother felt “in the vicinity of sex.”
By story’s end, she has decided to do as men do: “go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what [she] didn’t want and come back proud.”
This feels dangerous. Depending on the experiences she chooses, she could end up dead. The reader thinks of men who have been caught after having held girls like Del prisoner for years. Does Munro know it’s dangerous? Yes, I think so.
Although the story takes place in about 1950, Munro is writing in the 60’s. Nabokov’s Lolita appeared in 1958. Before Nabokov’s novel closes, Lolita is dead. Next time, this could be Del.
One difference between Lolita and Del is that Del is a little older. Lolita is an unformed middle school nobody, while Del is a high school student known for her essays, a girl who writes poems, a girl who intends to write a “masterpiece.” Not only that, Del has a vision of her own ambition: “It was glory I was after, walking the streets of Jubilee like an exile or a spy, not sure from which direction fame would strike, or when, only convinced from my bones out that it had to.” Lolita actually dies after she leaves Humbert; whether Del is damaged is not clear, but she is alive, and she has also begun to write in earnest.
Another difference between Nabokov and Munro is that the pedophilia in Nabokov is told from Humbert’s entitled point of view. It is important to note that Nabokov’s intent was often misunderstood; he was not writing pornography, he was writing about sexual slavery. But nonetheless, Lolita’s is not the voice that tells the tale; it is Humbert Humbert who “hums” the tune.
Munro’s story, however, has answered Nabokov; it is written from the girl’s point of view. While Humbert thinks of himself as clever and delightful, Del thinks of Mr. Chamberlain as infantile, evil, and repulsive. She says his face looks blind and wobbling, like a mask on a stick. Del remembers the penis: “It did not seem to have anything to do with me.”
Del assesses Chamberlain: “self-satisfaction stretched over quite an abyss of irresponsibility, or worse.” She could have been describing Humbert Humbert. What Munro has done is give Lolita a voice. She has riffed on one of the most famous books of the fifties. In so doing, she has questioned the true nature of girls, and she has questioned the nature of art, which for so long had been primarily the province of men.
This unlikely story of a girl’s molestation can be read as a kind of Ars Poetica, in which literature and art would allow for a female point of view, and maybe specifically the point of view of a woman or girl who is also an artist. But we are not exactly talking about Addie’s triumphal bluestocking attitudes, where women’s rights and women’s education and philosophical barnstorming are the goals. We are talking about an art that sees the whole girl or the whole woman: determination and foolishness, triumphs and mistakes, mind and body, good and bad. It is an art that longs to represent people as they really are. As odd as the comparison is, there is something of the Mary Cassatt in Munro in this book, in her determination to make lives of girls and women vibrant, touching, important, rich, and whole. But Mary Cassatt belonged to a different former world — Addie’s world — a world where a woman usually had to choose between being an artist and having a family.
The feminism in this story is strange and alien: Del is not crushed by her experience with Mr. Chamberlain. At least she got a little of what she wanted: experience, knowledge, and separation from her steam-roller of a mother.
It is no mistake that the perp in this story is named Art. It’s a kind of a joke, but it’s not a mistake. For one thing, art is a twin subject in this story: opera, story-telling, novels, sculpture, and poetry are some of the arts that play a part. Radio announcing is Art’s “art.” Naming the molester “Art” suggests that there could be something fraudulent, something of an assault, something of the entitled male, something of the Humbert Humbert in art as it has been up til now. During Mr. Chamberlain’s “performance,” Del describes his face as looking “blind and wobbling like a mask on a stick,” thus blending abuse, blindness, performance, and art.
When Addie quotes Tennyson, she is quoting “Locksley Hall,” a famous poem in which the speaker believes in the supremacy of men. He has been driven somewhat crazy by having been rejected by his true love. This well-known poem has the hero imagining his right to kill the woman who has turned him down. It also imagines him cooking up a peculiar revenge in which he marries a “savage.” By using a couplet from the poem, Munro hints at an artistic atmosphere dominated by male concerns and male points of view. Although it could be argued that Tennyson himself did not share the speaker’s views, the world of “Locksley Hall” is the world of art Del has inherited. This is the world Del must enter if she is to become an artist.
Will Del become an artist? We have the negative example of Fern, who is everything a girl should not be if she wishes to become an artist. When asked if she “planned” to be a singer, Fern replies, “Well, I did and I didn’t. The work, the training. I just didn’t have the ambition for it [. . .] . I always preferred having a good time.”
At the same time, Addie has ambitions for Del, but she can only imagine Del choosing what she chose: to be an asexual woman. Neither Fern nor Addie offer possible guidance.
What is tragic is how Addie has completely misjudged what Del needs. Addie shares Del’s ambition. Addie believes in education. But her attitudes deny Del any right to a natural sexuality, and if Del is to be an artist, she needs to be a complete person, a whole person. What is equally tragic is how Addie, in her need for companionship and friendship, set Del up for Chamberlain’s miserable assault. When there is no man in the house, children are at risk from gentleman callers. Addie’s inability to imagine Art as a sexual being also puts Del at risk; that Addie let him in the house is worse, and that she didn’t see what was going on was worst of all.
Or did she see? There was that stain on the skirt. As the story closes, Addie is lecturing Del, but much as Del knows she needs the protection of a mother, Del is beyond Addie. Del is going to take her own advice now. We just don’t know if she’ll be so lucky as to survive the second time.
With all the best intentions, Addie has alienated Del from her natural self. As a result, Del has learned to become secretive, but she is not just secretive about her sexuality, she is also secretive about her artistic self. She thinks about writing a poem about the white peacock that she and Naomi saw. Naomi says, “It was beautiful.”
Del thinks: “To have her thinking about it too was almost like trespassing; I never let her or anyone in that part of my mind.”
Artistry and sexuality are both secrets to Del; they are both the province of men; and they are both areas where Del has no reliable guide. She insists she will seek experience, and maybe with experience Del will knit her several selves together. But it looks dangerous. Just look at Fern.
Nevertheless, Del is determined to take her own advice now, only her own advice.
One last thing: in the story’s first paragraph, we hear how a huge snow fell that was deep enough in which to carve a human sized arch. The newspaper took pictures of Fern and another woman standing under the snow arch. The snow arch is an elegant shape, and also somewhat vaginal. At the heart of the arch stands Fern, the sexual gal who has a sexual good time with shabby Mr. Chamberlain. Although it is a girl’s name, Fern is also a slang term for female genitalia. Munro has announced herself at the outset. Art must contain the sexual natures of women as well as men.
There is always a high-low-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality to Munro’s writing. This story is no exception. Munro is dead serious — witness her title. The girls and women of the story have at their center questions of sexuality, motherhood, education, experience, ambition, and art. In addition, the lives of girls and women can often be powerfully impacted by evil, weak, or irresponsible men, and if you are a woman who is an artist, you have the whole long history of art that believed that women are an afterthought.
Del’s rebellion has begun, and like Phaeton, she may drive too close to the sun. But the tragedy of the story is that Addie only wanted Del’s success; she never saw that making sex a secret could risk Del’s life. Like Addie, the society never saw, either, that making sex a secret created all the wrong results.
It is significant that Munro has made this the title story: in “Lives of Girls and Women,” Del chooses experience and separation from her mother over obedience and ignorance. It’s an artist’s credo to choose to live free. Choosing autonomy is not all that easy for men, and it may not be all that easy for Del, either. But it’s one of the necessary steps.
Terrific piece, Trevor. You say,”… to free oneself in language in order to approach something head-on — that’s an act of courage, but also one of deliberation, and when the story begins Del is not yet conscious enough of any of this to make that act of courage. ” That is at the center of this story: “to free oneself in language”.
And, I sense, to free oneself from language. I started William H. Gass’s On Being Blue today, and I was struck by a line that fit here, as Del explores the various shades of meaning in sex, perfectly:
Another quote from On Being Blue that reminded me of this post:
Of course, what if the point is to show it’s ludicrous, as Munro so often does? It’s been fun to see how my thoughts on this story are being explored, even tangentially, in On Being Blue.
“Before the trip to the river, Del “had been looking at fields, trees, landscape with a secret, strong exaltation.”” But look at the passage after that. She sees it that way only when she is alone. And with Chamberlain the landscape becomes “maddeningly erotic” and she sees is as a “vast arrangement of hiding places” with fields like “shameless mattresses”–or in other words, places for covert sexual intercourse. She is anticipating having sex with Chamberlain and a certain part of her is seeking that and is going down to the river with him in that state of mind. But then when Chamberlain stops part way there in just openly masturbates in front of her, it is “raw” and “blunt” and “stupid” and “did not seem to have anything to do with [her].” It is following this and on the drive home that she finds the landscape “meaningless.”
Thank you to “Sometime Reader” for your Munrovian comment. Flat. You leave it to us to react or comment.
This story is a ghastly foreshadowing of Fremlin, Munro’s second husband and the man who subjected Munro’s daughter Andrea to his own pedophilia.
When did Alice Munro know that Fremlin was a pedophile? Who knows. She met him in college.
My edition of this “novel” has this statement from Munro on the copyright page: “This novel is autobiographical in form but not in fact. My family, neighbors and friends did not serve as models.”
I find this unusual statement riveting. Why is it here? What is the history of such statements? Why would she assert something that is clearly untrue of her writing in general? There’s a book here, as Robert Thacker clearly knew. I find it chilling.
We addressed this story ten years ago. I notice my opening paragraph with a chill.
“The title story of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women is startling and rich. A reader could easily write a book in reaction to this disturbing story in which fourteen-year-old Del intentionally seeks out a sexual experience with a middle-aged man already gone gray. Although she has a graphic recall of the assault, Del’s recollections are told in a flattened tone, and Munro leaves it to the reader to judge the extent of the damage done.”
Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” was published in the United States in 1958, when Munro was 37. Most likely she had read it. But did she get it? “Lives of Girls and Women appeared in 1971. This story was published in 1971 when Alice Munro was 40. She divorced Jim Munro in 1972. She moved back to Ontario after the divorce and moved in with Fremlin in 1975. She met Fremlin in college. I have always wondered if she corresponded with him during her marriage. Did they discuss Vladimir Nabokov? Did she and Fremlin discuss “Lolita?”
Who knows.
This story could easily be compared to many other Munro stories in which girls this age are bold lolitas – especially “Open Secrets” which appeared in the New Yorker in 2010.
Chilling. My reaction to Sometime Reader’s comment is that I am deeply chilled. There seems to be a debate going on in Munro – that some men go after young girls but that out of a need, in a puritan society, to understand themselves and sex they wildly pursue experience. The story suggests the danger Del is in, but unlike Nabokov’s lolita, Del is not dead in the end.
Right here right now I notice a ghastly thing. In the novel “Lolita”, lolita’s real name is Delores, sometimes known as Lo – as google AI tells me. Delores. Lo. Del.
Betsy, it is chilling to an extreme.
Did you have a chance to read the
Rage. Blind rage is what I feel.
The summary news stories were chilling in the extreme. But then, when I read the details, and reread several of Munro’s stories that seem to have a connection with these, I’m at a loss of words…events, it just gets worse.
Did you read the Toronto Star article dated July 7, 2024 that broke the story? And let’s remember that the victim, Andrea Munro went to the paper to tell her story.
She was only nine years old when it happened. Nine.
Alice Munro and Jim Munro had divorced, Alice had married Gerry Fremlin. Jim Munro had also remarried. Their children were living with Jim and his wife in Victoria in British Columbia. Alice had moved to Huron County, Ontario on the other side of the country–close to Wingham (aka. “Jubilee”). Andrea (again, age nine) is sent to Ontario.
“One night, with her mother away, Andrea asked Gerry if she could sleep in Alice’s bed, which was next to his in the bedroom the couple shared.
As she lay there, Gerry crawled into her bed and began to rub her genitals. In Andrea’s own words, he “tried to get me to hold his penis. My hand kept going limp though as I was pretending very hard that I was asleep.”
All the adults in Andrea’s life failed her. Alice’s husband, Fremlin criminally molested her. After Andrea returned home to her father, she told her stepbrother what had happened who reported it to his mother who in turn told Jim. “Jim didn’t confront Alice; he didn’t speak with Andrea. He instructed Andrea’s sisters not to tell their mother, either.” Even worse, they send her back to her mother and Fremlin the next summer, where abuse and inappropriate behavior continued.
““(My father) didn’t want to tell my mother what had happened to me,” Andrea says. “He felt that her needs were greater than his child’s needs. And he didn’t ever come to ask me about the experiences … or follow up after summers.””
“Gerry continued abusing Andrea — not touching her, she says, but exposing himself to her, propositioning her for sex — until he lost interest when she reached her teenage years. Until then, when they were alone — say, in his truck — he would expose his penis. Sometimes he would begin masturbating.”
The article describes Andrea as manifesting mental and physical effects of trauma starting that first night in 1976 and continuing on to the present, 48 years later.
In 1992, when Andrea was 25, she wrote a letter informing her mother of what Fremkin did to her. From Alice’s reaction, we can surmise that she was not already aware of what had happened. Below, I will quote at length from the article. Take note of Fremlin’s “defense” in which he cites Nabakov’s “Lolita.”
Clearly both Alice and Gerry Fremlin were familiar with Lolita in order for Fremlin to extensively reference it in justifying his actions. But my reading of Lolita was that Humbert Humphrey was clearly an unreliable narrator. And any reading that is not superficial reveals that and also that Humphrey is a predator and pedophile. Dolores is victimized by him. Humhrey is not seduced by her. Rather he relentlessly pursues a plan to target her.
That Andrea was only 9 (in contrast to Lolita being 12)… well, it just further bogles the mind.
Here are the quotes:
—
“Alice left Gerry, fleeing to her condo in Comox, B.C. Back in Clinton, Gerry found the letter. “It was chaos and mayhem and hysterical actions all around,” Jenny remembers. “But the focus was not on Andrea.” Everyone was afraid that Gerry was going to kill himself, which he had repeatedly threatened to do.”
“Then came another round of letters, these ones from Gerry. Addressed to Jim and Carole Munro, they contained graphic descriptions of the abuse, but far from being apologetic, Gerry appeared to put the blame on Andrea.
“I started to think that Andrea was interested in me sexually, and in consequence got an erection,” Gerry wrote. “I pushed the covers back and let the erection show and fondled it. I felt sure she was watching but didn’t look to see,” Gerry wrote. He characterized nine-year-old Andrea as a Lolita, who must have been aware of her impact on him.
“While the scene is degenerate, this is indeed Lolita and Humbert,” he wrote, referring to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. “It is my contention that Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure.”
In the letters, Gerry describes his sexual assault of nine-year-old Andrea in graphic detail, admitting to rubbing her external genitals for his own pleasure, and to his own delusional belief that she was enjoying it. In the letter, he concludes that his own sexuality is “not in accordance with the canons of public respectability.”
He also wrote, “I feel dishonourable and deeply disgusted with myself for having been unfaithful to Alice after I had committed myself to her.”
“Not that he had molested me,” Andrea points out, “but that he was unfaithful to my mother.”
—
After several months living apart from him, Alice went back to Fremlin.
The article contains photographic excerpts of letters from Fremlin:
From the first excerpt: It is my contention that Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure. If she were in fact afraid, she could have left at any time. She was sexually receptive and mildly aggressive. While the secne is degenerate, this is indeed Lolita and Humbert. For Andrea to say she was “scared” is a simply a a lie or a latter day invention.”
From the second excerpt: “When Andrea says, referring to alleged sexual abuse, “Gerry … believes we were in on it together Lolita style (Paragraph 11) she is indeed right. That is in fact what I believe now and believed at the time. I know [know is underlined in the letter] there are Lolitas, and I know that I can respond to a Lolita, if I’m not careful, as a Humbert Humbert. I think Andrea has recognized herself to have been a Lolita but has refused to admit it. To admit to it does not allow her to be a blameless victim of abuse.”
The article goes onto describe how in 2002, after she herself became a mother, she became estranged from her mother.
==
“Then, in 2002, something happened that meant pretending was no longer possible.
Andrea became pregnant with twins.
After becoming a mother, Andrea told Alice simply that Gerry couldn’t ever be around her children. “And then she just coldly told me that it was going to be a terrible inconvenience for her (because she didn’t drive).
“I blew my top. I started to scream into the phone about having to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze that penis and at some point I asked her how she could have sex with someone who’d done that to her daughter?””
Alice, Andrea says, called her the next day, “to forgive me for talking to her like that … and I realized that I was dealing with someone who had no clue who needed to be forgiven. And that was the end of our relationship.””
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This happened in 2002. Recall that the Juliet trilogy of stories, “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” were published in 2004, and presumably were written after Andrea estranged herself from Alice.
I found it a very worthwhile endeavor to reread the entire trilogy in light of this new information regarding Alice. Especially because the estrangement of a daughter is so central to “Silence.”
And of course “Lives of Girls and Women” is much more disturbing. Chamberlain’s sexual interest in Del seems to have started when Del and Naomi suggestively dangle chewed gum they remove from their mouths around him in a manner intended by them to evoke phalluses. And Del is suggested to be a willing recipient of Chamberlain’s attention. When she goes with him towards the river it is seemingly with the hope that it would result in actual sexual intercourse with him.
And let us revisit “Wild Swans” in “The Beggar Maid.” A barely pubescent Rose is molested by an older man on a train. The progression of this molestation is described in detail over the course of multiple pages in very evocative language, starting with an uninvited touch of her leg and progressing, eventually, to digital penetration. It is made amply clear that Rose is a knowing, willing participant in allowing this to happen. She did not initiate the encounter, nor does she (initially) do anything that could be construed as welcoming it. But as she gradually becomes aware of what is happening, she not only does nothing to stop it, but eventually takes a subtle but affirmative action to facilitate his penetration of her. She is both “victim and accomplice.”
“The hand moved up her leg past the top of her stocking to her bare skin, had moved higher, under her suspender, reached her underpants and the lower part of her belly. Her legs were still crossed, pinched together. While her legs stayed crossed she could lay claim to innocence, she had not admitted anything. She could still believe that she would stop this in a minute. Nothing was going to happen, nothing more. Her legs were never going to open. But they were. They were.”
She gradually opens her legs to allow him to access her privates, making what the story describes as a “ slow, and silent, and definite, declaration.”
Rose’s thoughts as she is penetrated, “This was disgrace, this was beggary. But what harm in that, we say to ourselves at such moments, what harm in anything, the worse the better, as we ride the cold wave of greed, of greedy assent. A stranger’s hand, or root vegetables or humble kitchen tools that people tell jokes about; the world is tumbling with innocent-seeming objects ready to declare themselves, slippery and obliging.”
It is implied metaphorically that Rose orgasms.
There is no indication that she has any regrets over this incident. Rather the last words of the story indicate she has a a certain amount of pride over what happened. “She thought it would be an especially fine thing, to manage a transformation like that. To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.” This is ostensibly directed towards Mavis transforming her identity, but implicitly it applies to Rose as well.
So both “Lives” and “Wild Swans” depict an adolescent being complicit in welcoming the attention of a molester/abuser, and of the resulting experience being somewhat of a “growth experience.”
To what extent did this reflect Alice Munro’s own experience or her own attitudes and beliefs towards this type of encounter? To what extent did her beliefs shape her ultimately deciding to stand by Fremlin.
This quote from the article–I cannot get it, and the question posed by it, out of my head: ““I blew my top. I started to scream into the phone about having to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze that penis and at some point I asked her how she could have sex with someone who’d done that to her daughter?””
The article goes on to describe that Andrea pressed charges and Fremlin was convicted after pleading guilty. WHY was this never described by any of Munro’s biographers, or anyone else writing about her during her life? Some of them must have known about this. We know for sure that Robert Thacker did. And it is clearly very relevant to understanding some of her literary works.
==
“In October 2004, 28 years after the initial assault, the New York Times Magazine published a feature interview with Munro titled “Northern Exposures.”
In it, the reporter, Daphne Merkin, visits Munro in Clinton, Ont., talking with her at length about her life, her writing, and her relationship with Gerry Fremlin.
“Munro invokes him frequently and affectionately as ‘my husband’ rather than by his name, like a proud Midwestern banker’s wife whose one great claim to glory is that she has married well,” Merkin writes. She mentions that Fremlin sounds like the love of Munro’s life, to which Munro says that she immediately “fell for him.”
Andrea was devastated. “She was painting a new reality (where) my stepfather was the heroic figure of her life,” Andrea says. “And also made light of her parenting and how she had ‘no moral scruples.’”
“I felt, it’s convenient for my mother to have me out of everyone’s life,” she says. “It’s actually imperative to her that she rewrite this and she’s in a position where she can have a narrative that others will believe.”
The article unlocked something in Andrea; she felt continued silence would be a betrayal of herself “and the child I’d been.”
She got in touch with the Ontario Provincial Police and provided them with the letters Fremlin had sent.
At the time, Fremlin was 80 and still living in the Clinton, Ont., home he had long shared with Alice. He was charged with indecent assault. On March 11, 2005, he appeared in the Goderich courthouse before Justice John Kennedy, where the clerk read the indictment that “between the 1st day of July 1976 and the 31st day of August 1976, in the Town of Clinton, in the County of Huron, West region, he did indecently assault Andrea Munro, a female person.”
Fremlin pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault. He received a suspended sentence and probation for two years. There was to be no contact with Andrea, nor could he attend any parks or playgrounds. He was also ordered to submit a DNA sample, which would have been uploaded to the National DNA Data Bank operated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Even after the conviction, little changed.
Alice and Andrea continued not to speak.
“The family went back to socializing with the pedophile,” Jenny says. “My mother went on a book tour.”
======================
Regarding Robert Thacker, he clearly wasn’t staying silent to protect the victim, Andrea Skinner. This is from a Washington Post article, “‘I knew this day was going to come’: Alice Munro associates say they knew of abuse,” published July 9, 2024.
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“An extra shock was Skinner’s claim that some who knew Munro had been aware of the story for years.
Robert Thacker, a Canadian academic and author of “Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives,” said that he expected this revelation and its fallout to happen.
“I knew this day was going to come,” Thacker told The Washington Post on Monday, later adding, “I knew that it was going to come out, and I knew that I would be having conversations like this.”
Thacker said that Skinner wrote to him about her experience in 2005, after she had contacted police about Fremlin and as Thacker’s book was going to press. He decided not to act on the information.
“Clearly she hoped — or she hoped at that time, anyway — that I would make it public,” he told The Post on Monday. “I wasn’t prepared to do that. And the reason I wasn’t prepared to do that is that, it wasn’t that kind of book. I wasn’t writing a tell-all biography. And I’ve lived long enough to know that stuff happens in families that they don’t want to talk about and that they want to keep in families.”
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Dear Sometime Reader,
Your discussion raises so many good points that I’ve printed it out (5 pages) in order to pursue your line of thought carefully. I note your first words: “Blind. Rage.” You were responding to my saying I felt “deeply chilled.”
You are right call me and raise me on my ‘deep chill.’ But there is also in your careful analysis a deep chill – your careful analysis having not been written in the heat of anger but, by necessity, performed with a fierce, terrible and necessary coldness. A necessarily cold fire. I thank you for that. Given how writing and teaching can be waylaid and ruined and wrecked by a writer (or teacher) being unable to manage blind rage.
You ask – “Did you read the Toronto Star article date July 7, 2024 that broke the story?” I think you are asking me and anyone else on board. As for me, yes. I read it. Over and over. I say again – Andrea’s bravery, honesty, understatement and leadership was and is almost beyond comprehension.
And I say again – I give thanks for the help Andrea got from the Gatehouse in Toronto, “a safe place where everyone has a voice.” https://thegatehouse.org/
The Star followed up on July 18th with a story about the Gatehouse entitled “Inside The Gatehouse, the Toronto sanctuary that helped Alice Munro’s daughter confront her childhood sexual abuse.” https://www.thestar.com/news/inside-the-gatehouse-the-toronto-sanctuary-that-helped-alice-munro-s-daughter-confront-her-childhood
I am angry that Andrea was abused by her mother and by so many adults. I await, for instance, some honesty from the New Yorker.
But I give deep warm and grateful thanks for the Gatehouse. The Winnipeg Free Press ran an article a month after Andrea’s essay in the Star. In a month after Andrea’s article, 81 “survivors” had come up the 5 front steps at the Gatehouse to confront their “shame, guilt, and fear.”
The Gatehouse has apparently also received numerous phone calls from people and agencies in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
I give profound thanks for the Gatehouse, for the work of Arthur Lockhart, Sabra Desai, Maria Barcelos and the Gatehouse staff. Their hope and energy waken me from my deep chill. And I give profound thanks to the Star. But of course, I give thanks that with help, Andrea Skinner found her way to the bravery that enabled her to tell her story.