“Before the Change”
by Alice Munro
from The Love of a Good Woman
Trevor
There is a lot going on in Munro’s “Before the Change,” but for me, in this reading, the central line comes well in the story. After several pages of letters our unnamed narrator is writing to an ex-fiancé, letters she does not intend to send, the narrator recounts a time when she confronted her fiancé when he wanted her to get an abortion. She wanted the baby and was ready to start their family, and while he didn’t perhaps have anything against having a baby (or maybe he did, but that didn’t come up), he was studying to be a minister. Anyone can do the math, he tells her, and will know that she was pregnant before they were married, which is unacceptable. “They’d know. There’s always somebody who makes sure that people know.” The narrator remembers:
I was astonished at these arguments which did not seem to be consistent with the ideas of the person I had loved. The books we had read, the movies we had seen, the things we had talked about — I asked if that meant anything to you. You said yes, but this was life.
Yes, but this was life. So many ideals get demolished by people who say something like that when their own life presents a challenge to their ideals. Life is complicated, we say. And we can see the narrator’s fiancé saying that, yes, in any other situation he wouldn’t be encouraging her to have an abortion when she wanted to have a child and start a family — but not in this life they are living.
“Before the Change” is a story about abortion. The change in the title is, on the surface, a reference to the change in the law: the legalization of abortion in Canada in 1969. This story is set in the early 1960s. At the beginning, our narrator has moved back in with her widowed father, who doesn’t know about her relationship or pregnancy, and they watch Kennedy and Nixon debate. Father and daughter clearly don’t have a close relationship. He seems to resent her in some way.
In the meantime, she writes these letters to the man who, until she decided not to get an abortion, was her fiancé. She only calls this prospective minister “R.” through most of the story, though we do learn his real name in a moment when the narrator seems to be confronting her past more directly. At first she is still filled with grief:
If I decided to send all this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It’s too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don’t know where, is worse.
It is, as I said, a story about abortion, and there are more abortions in the story, including an account of one of the procedures, than just the one R. wants our narrator to get. However, it is important to note that the change in the law wouldn’t change the relationship between R. and the narrator. He wants her to get an abortion. Its illegality is not the issue. For him the pertinent law is the social one his peers impose that prohibit sex before marriage. Whether abortion were legal or not would not affect the narrator and R. one bit.
And so, it seems to me, the story is about more than just that change. It is, I think, about all kinds of rules and laws and mores, whether cultural, social, religious, or legal. These laws exert a force upon people that is independent of the natural consequences of the illegal action. The laws, when there are ways around them, also create an opportunity for some.
Importantly, the narrator’s own father is a physician who performs abortions for women seeking “specials.” The narrator tells her father, after she comes back home, that she knows what he does, that she doesn’t mind, that she thinks abortion should be legal. He tells her never to say that word in his house. He also invokes “knowing,” just like R. did when he implored the narrator to get an abortion, only he does it differently:
There’s a difference between knowing and yapping. Get that through your head once and for all.
It takes some time for the narrator to unravel how all of this plays out. There are people who know what her father does, of course. So long as they don’t “yap” her father is okay. And, in a way, so long as the physician doesn’t yap, the community, even a community that knows, will render tacit approval. There is a character who, it turns out, is threatening to yap, to air the situation in the open where it would demand repercussion, and so her father is threatened, reminding us of how R. feels threatened.
And so, for me, this time, “Before the Change” is much more about the change to power structures that occurs when a law or rule changes:
Change the law, change what a person does, change what a person is?
It’s a fascinating question for our narrator. Look how the law has affected her father, what it has granted him the opportunity to do, what it has granted others the opportunity to do to him. Look at the social codes that terrify R. and that effectively force him and the narrator to break off their engagement. Any little change in the codes would change these people entirely. This “life” R. is so concerned about would be completely different.
I don’t think Munro is using this story to advocate for any particular changes, though she is showing how some laws and attitudes can be particularly destructive. Instead, her narrator acknowledges that a change here would simply lead to another system of codes there. She wonders about how a change in abortion laws would change her father, and then questions, “Or would he find some other risk, some other know to make in his life, some other underground and problematic act of mercy?”
It’s a fascinating story, filled with conflicts and how codes and beliefs affect those conflicts.
Betsy
Amid the emotional tumble of “Before the Change,” I hardly noticed it when one night the main character searched her boxes of books for the journals of Anna Jameson. I hardly noticed the second time through, either. I was at that point still trying to sort through the mysteries surrounding the daughter’s father, the daughter’s lover, and the father’s housekeeper, not to mention also trying to sort out what Munro actually thought about abortion. That the main character had struck up an acquaintance with a photographer at the library was only briefly interesting. Amid all that, that the young woman wanted to give the man a book by an author I’d never heard of was not very compelling. At first.
Now I would argue, however, that said author, Anna Jameson (1794-1850), prolific British writer and feminist, is the intellectual lynchpin of the story.
Jameson is perhaps more familiar to Canadians, given that Jameson was the author of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), written while she was briefly married to a British jurist assigned to Canada. But after her legal separation from her husband, Jameson supported herself, her mother and her sisters with her very popular books on the topics of biography, travel, and art appreciation.
She was also, however, a feminist. Her essay, “Woman’s Mission and Women’s Position,” can be found in Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature and Social Morals. Many of her thoughts in this essay bear directly on the situation depicted by Munro in “Before the Change”.
Although Munro has set “Before the Change” in 1960 and centered it on conditions created by the illegality of abortion, and although Jameson’s essay, written a hundred-plus years before, is in response to appalling conditions for women and girls as laborers in manufacturing and agriculture, there is much in Jameson’s analysis that applies to the legal position of women in 1960. There is also much that corresponds to the emotional situation of the main character in “Before the Change.”
Before diving into Jameson, however, I want to be clear: I make no claims as to Munro’s own position on abortion. Discussion of “Before the Change” must admit that the discussion is of a particular character and her father, a particular minister who was her lover, a hapless lawyer, and a particularly venal housekeeper who poisons everything she touches. Abortion is the set and situation and debate in “Before the Change,” and it also functions as a metaphor for other terrible losses. As always, Munro sets out a complex variety of points of view from which one might argue that Munro has a particular stand, but that is not my purpose here. In this essay I would like to show that Munro is in conversation with Anna Jameson throughout, that she is also in conversation with William Butler Yeats and his poem “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” and that she is, at the same time, investigating the twin issues of the education of women and the authority of women.
1.
In “Women’s Mission and Women’s Position” Jameson is writing in response to the 1800’s British report on the state of working girls and women, a state which Jameson sees as cruel and unusual. Some girls are sent out to work at three! Jameson says that being forced to work deprives the girls and women of the orderly state of home, and, in fact, being forced to work deprives some women of the possibility of husband and motherhood. Jameson also complains that those few women who are given an education are not educated well enough to enjoy teaching as a vocation. She argues that these women are poorly prepared to be teachers and governesses and that they are consequently often abused by their employers. She complains that even if the situation of lower and middle class families is that they cannot survive on the husband’s wages, England will not do what France does — which for one thing is to allow women a role in business as clerks, cashiers and accountants.
Jameson argues that at England’s core is a fundamental hypocrisy:
Woman’s Mission” of which people can talk so well, and write so prettily, is incompatible with “Woman’s Position” of which no one dares to think, much less to speak.
This reminds me of Munro’s town in “Before the Change,” a town which the doctor’s daughter suggests was perfectly well aware of his services but about which services the town both looked the other way and simultaneously withheld any other indication of their tacit approval.
Jameson also argues that the legal position of women and girls in England is complicated by this fundamental contradiction:
Man’s legislation for women has hitherto been like England’s legislation for Ireland; it has been without sympathy; without the recognition of equality; without a comprehension of certain innate differences, physical and moral, and therefore inadequate, useless, often unjust and not seldom cruel.
This is an argument that Munro’s abortionist in “Before the Change” might have used, except that his motivation for performing abortions appears to be specifically in reaction to having lost his own wife in childbirth. Jameson’s argument is one that Munro’s main character might have used to defend her unexplained position that she supports the legalization of abortion, even though she herself refused to have one when she was caught in an accidental pregnancy that ruined her career and ended her engagement.
Jameson says that English law “lays upon [its female citizens, both women and girls,] the duties and responsibilities of a free subject, though as yet it refuses her some of the dearest rights of freedom.”
Jameson is, of course, arguing about the horrific working conditions and equally horrific family situations created by the lack of a living wage for men.
There is a gestalt to Jameson’s thinking, however, that mirrors Munro’s. Jameson argues that female children are improperly nurtured by the state and by families. In “Before the Change,” Munro is clearly arguing that regardless of pieties surrounding abortion, some children are improperly nurtured by the state and by their families. Some parents neglect the children they do have in callous, blind, and driven ways. Both Jameson and Munro are talking about the possible abuse of children and the abuse of girls in particular.
Education, in Jameson’s words, is one of the “dearest rights of freedom.” In Munro, the right to education is of course important. But Munro typically extends education to mean experience of and understanding of the world. In “Before the Change”, the daughter is subjected to secrets imposed on her by her father and by society that torque her entire existence. She appears to have an ignorance of sex, for instance, that may have led to her accidental pregnancy. Her boarding school education may not have improved much on her parental sexual education. She has an ignorance of normal or healthy family relationships, an ignorance which may have led her into an engagement filled with hopeless ideals. She may know certain church pieties, but she is ignorant of the mechanics of forgiveness. Her real education is, in the end, the unveiling that occurs in her confrontation with the real world of home, school and church.
There is another subject on which Jameson and Munro converge, and that is the responsibility of women to speak up. “Before the Change” turns on the very clever daughter’s perception that she has a tendency to get up on her “high horse”. She wonders if this “high horse” attitude may have wrecked her engagement and wonders if it may further wreck any of her future relationships.
The reader has a slightly different perception of her difficulty. The reader perceives that she is not supposed to get up on her high horse, that she is supposed to put up and shut up. This put up and shut up situation is an expectation of her by both the girl’s father and her lover.
The reader sees women’s ‘put up and shut up’ situation very clearly when the girl’s father tells his patient, for whom he is performing an abortion, that she is a “good girl.” He then clarifies that praise. He tells her that she is the “good quiet girl” that the situation demands. To protect herself, the doctor, and future clients, she cannot be heard screaming during an illegal procedure.
Munro’s main character has heard society’s idea that it would be best for her if she, too, were a “good, quiet girl.” The father, in fact, has created a hypocritical upbringing for his daughter — she is very well educated, but he expects to have nothing to do with her at all and she is expected to accept that neglect like a “good quiet girl.” Note that he is cruelly casual and distant with his daughter and that he hardly speaks to his own daughter with the praise, care or or gentleness he gives his patient.
On the same note, Jameson addresses the silence that is expected of women:
When I see people haunted by the idea of self, afraid to speak lest they should not be listened to . . . I have been inclined to attribute it to immaturity of character – to a sort of childishness; or to what is worse, a want of innate integrity and simplicity.
Jameson argues here that the silent obedience society expects looks like childishness. Jameson argues passionately and eloquently that women are expected to be what Munro deems “good, quiet girls.”
If a woman presume to question such rights and privileges [of men over women], or even allude, in the most distant manner, to the horror and moral disorders to which they give rise, it is “unfeminine” — it shocks the nice delicacy of “her protector, man.”
Jameson goes on to call it heartless that society requires that regardless of what women know, they must dissemble that they know anything :
. . . the assumption that the woman consults the decorum of her sex by appearing not to know that which she does know — that which all the world knows she knows — the common and oftentimes fatal assumption, that women have “nothing to do” with certain questions, lying deep at the very root and core of society, has falsehood on the very face to it; but no one dares to look it in the face, and show its heartlessness — its hatefulness!
Jameson and Munro are clearly on the same page. Not only are women expected to be quiet, they are to pretend they do not know the things they know.
Knowing is the knife edge for both Jameson and Munro. Asserting yourself on behalf of yourself is part of the agency and authority of being an adult. Both Munro and Jameson argue that women cannot survive if they are muzzled. Jameson was not muzzled. She was a prolific author who had confidence in her own learning and who spoke up. Munro was not muzzled. At 150 stories, she is a prodigious force, and made risky enough choices in that writing for her own home high school to have banned her book Lives of Girls and Women.
I argue that Anna Jameson is an intellectual lynchpin for “Before the Change.” Jameson argues that British law treats women as it treated the Irish. And she argues that women who remain silent in the face of the contradictions of society seem “immature” and even “childish” to her. Munro presents us with a young woman who has been brought up in silence and secrets and who is expected to question none of these secrets. Even her fiance requires that she not question his hypocrisy or the hypocrisy of his colleagues or that of the department wives or that of the church itself. Her father requires that she not question him – not about her mother, not about his work, not about his money, not about anything. Her survival and her “education” depend upon confrontation of the expectation that she put up and shut up. For both Munro and Jameson, it is not “unfeminine” to be assertive. For both of these writers, being assertive on your own behalf is only human.
2.
In the same way that Jameson is an intellectual lynchpin for this story, Yeats provides Munro, in “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” with an emotional one.
The doctor’s daughter has discovered that he is providing illegal abortions about once a month. His assistant, the poisonous housekeeper, is out of commission, and the doctor asks his daughter for her assistance during an abortion. In the midst of the painful procedure, the daughter hears the patient pleading with her to “recite something.” The thing that pops into the daughter’s head is strange: a poem that her own lover used to recite.
“The Song of Wandering Aengus” tells of the mythic strongman and the day he readied his pole and caught a trout. He is busy preparing the fire when the trout turns into a girl with an apple blossom in her hair. When he sees her, she runs away. The poem echoes the men in “Before the Change.” The lover seems to think he is the sole creator of the child he has engendered and the sole creator of the future the fiances would have. The doctor neglects his daughter with the casual ferocity of a strongman, and like a strongman, he imagines that the loss of her will never matter to him.
Faced with the patient’s request, the daughter can only remember a part of the last verse:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands —
Except that she misremembers the poem and transposes you for she and your for her.
Why does the daughter recite this particular verse for the patient with these particular emendations? The recitation is like a Freudian slip where she tells the patient a difficult and painful home truth. This recitation is telling the patient she will never forget the child she is aborting. The recitation warns that the patient may endure a lifelong search of memory or the world to find out where or why the baby has gone.
But the daughter is also answering her own lover’s callous demand that she get an abortion. She warning him, regardless that he broke the engagement, regardless that he thought he was ridding himself of the child, regardless that he, it seems, has disappeared, that he will search lifelong for the child he discarded. It is reminiscent of the lifelong pain that the mother endures in “The Children Stay.”
But the Freudian slip is even neater than that. The daughter is telling her cruel and distant father that he too will sometime regret having thrown away his own daughter — that he, too, will search for her some time. It is as if she is telling her father that he has as much as aborted her.
Don’t get me wrong: I understand that the daughter realizes that her father’s motive for risking everything for years may not have been solely his love of power and risk, but that he could have also been driven “by love.” People are complex. We have simultaneously opposed motives and emotions. This is true of the daughter and the father both, Munro seems to be saying.
Why do I think that the Yeats poem is the emotional lynchpin of the story? Because the poem is about the mystery of creation, the mystery of parenthood, the mystery of power, the mystery of ignorance, the mystery of yearning, and keenly, keenly, keenly, the mystery of loss.
3.
“Before the Change” is a great story. It addresses one of the great moral debates of the twentieth century, but its moral answers are multiple. It uses the detective story to great effect, but its final effect is to persuade the reader of something greater than a mere solution. This reader sees the daughter muddling through her essential education — the necessity that she must understand the secrets of the very house and society she inhabits before she can actually make use of any other education she is offered.
Once again, it is experience that must precede education. To a degree, the story is an exploration of the daughter’s slowly dawning perception about the multiple realities of her life. I really like the fact that it is cross country skiing that brings her the most clarity. After skiing, she lets the whole picture sink in — the money, the blackmail, her father’s precarious situation, and the possibility that in addition to his natural anger and rebelliousness, her father may have acted out of “love.” The reader is left to consider whether that love is in memory of his dead wife, in misguided service to the distant care and feeding of his daughter, or a way to help the “good” girls who are facing one death or another, either by back-alley abortion or by dissolution of a marriage, or by the one-more-child that will break the mother’s mental or emotional back.
I want to briefly mention a few other threads that interest me: the effects of the epistolary structure of the story, the multiple uses of debate as part of that structure, the role of theft in the story, the characterization of the housekeeper, the function of abortion as a metaphor for loss in general, and the debate about appropriate assertiveness versus the misuse of power. But I leave these discussions for another time.
I offer that the meanings of the title (“Before the Change”) are multiple: the risky period of fertility before its cessation at “the change”; the risky period before the abortion laws were changed or even the period before the voting laws were changed; the risky period before parents finally realize their responsibilities to the children they actually have; the risky period before experience causes a person to change, or the risky period before a person stops putting up and shutting up.
In particular, I want to mention that the main characters’ name, Strachan, apparently means “the valley of the horses.” If the name did have this meaning for Munro, it plays on the daughter’s perception of herself — that she sees herself as getting up on a high horse. One thing that occurs to me is that the daughter is born with this name, just as she is born with her powerfully clever and powerfully assertive nature. Is the issue not that she gets up on a high horse, but that she must learn to manage the high horse she actually is?
I also want to mention a strange comparison that occurred to me, but that I have no evidence played any part in Munro’s conception of this story. Contrast “Before the Change” (1998) with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). I would argue that in the face of terrible injustice, Lee created an idealized and sentimental southern lawyer and father. Atticus Finch is an unbelievable hero, and, in fact, we now know that the father he was based on was no actual hero. In contrast, Munro has created a repellent father who may be a monster to some and an anti-hero to others, but he is no one who could ever be sentimentally portrayed by Gregory Peck.
Munro’s main character makes a point, early on, of saying to Robin that she wants her letter to avoid “pretentious gush,” which any high school teacher who has ever taught To Kill a Mockingbird knows it is full of.
I want to close with one further comment about “pretentious gush”. The moment of clarity for Munro’s main character is when the housekeeper presents the daughter with the sight of the basin and its aborted material. This is the “gush” Munro allows herself. Contrast this with John Irving’s abortion novel Cider House Rules (1985), a story sentimental enough to have been made into a movie with A-list actors.
Munro is very clear. Write a story about abortion, and you have an obligation to deliver “a package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.”
I have not read the story, but I thought I might be able to add a little background information that may or may not be relevant to one’s reading of the story. Munro knew she was writing for both a Canadian and an American audience, so the details on the “change” to abortion laws and the acceptance of abortion are probably left vague enough to fit both countries’ experiences. Those experiences were very different in the two countries, and so the Canadian version of them is probably worth knowing a bit about.
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Trevor is right that abortion was illegal in Canada until 1969, but the change in the law that happened then was quite limited. The law changed to allow for abortions to be performed in a hospital after a panel of doctors had decided that it was medically necessary. Any abortions performed in any other circumstances were still illegal. In practice, access to abortions remained very limited (if available at all) in many parts of the country and women often were refused an abortion.
.
In 1969, Dr, Henry Morgentaler opened his first abortion clinic in Quebec, which he knew was illegal. He was arrested in 1970 and charged with performing illegal abortions. In several trials from 1973 to 1975 Morgentaler was acquitted by juries, but on appeal the verdict was overturned and he was convicted. He took the case to the Supreme Court and lost and ended up serving a year in prison. (As an aside, it was as a result of his conviction that Canadian law was changed so that an appeals court could no longer change a jury verdict from an acquittal to a conviction, but could order a retrial.)
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As a result of his efforts, Quebec decided to allow abortions in clinics like Morgentaler’s. But abortion remained illegal in the rest of Canada. Eventually, in 1983, Morgentaler was charged again for operating an abortion clinic, this time in Munro’s original home province of Ontario. The case ultimately ended up with Morgentaler back in the Supreme Court in 1988, but this time the Court struck down the abortion law as unconstitutional. In the 31 years since, there has been no new law passed in Canada to impose any criminal restrictions on abortions. (Abortion activists will tell you that there do remain many barriers that make access to abortion services not easy for many Canadian women, but it’s no longer illegal.)
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Henry Morgentaler died in 2013. But his name and his impact on abortion laws are as well known in Canada as Roe v Wade in in the US. Munro’s story is set before the 1969 change in the law and was written ten years after the Morgentaler decision that completely legalized abortion in Canada. If I had to bet which “change” she had in mind by the title, I would bet that it is more likely the 1988 change than the 1969 one.
David, this survey of abortion in Canada is so very helpful. I am particularly moved by the story of Dr. Morgenthaler.
Thank you for writing such a cogent and pertinent comment. We would be so very interested to hear, once you have read the story, what you think of it. I wonder if you also will find its purposes difficult to parse, even for as clear a thinker as you demonstrate yourself to be. I am particularly curious as to how you see the historical background playing out in the story. .
I didn’t think I was going to read this story at all, but after my last comment I found myself doing just that … twice. I had the same experience I have often had reading Munro – both thinking that there is a lot of interesting things going on in the story, but also finding myself quite puzzled, and not in a good way. It feels like there is more going on here that I could figure out if I just found the key, yet I keep coming up with nothing. I found myself doing something I generally strongly dislike, coming up with an idea that is consistent with the story, but not really fully indicated by it. It’s the sort of reaction people have when a story is not fully realized on its own so they come in as co-author to try to save it. The idea, which I really cannot endorse, is that the story is about a lot of different kinds of social change since 1960, including attitudes towards race, and that the doctor and Mrs. B are a secretive inter-racial couple.
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Ok, so let’s start with the negatives. Nothing in the story actually says that their relationship is anything more than a professional one. Yes, the narrator speculates that her father gave her his money out of love, but we really don’t know where his money went or why. Also, we don’t even know Mrs. B’s race. Sure, she’s a domestic worker in 1960, has black hair like everyone in her family, and speaks in a manner that might seem to indicate she might be black, but we don’t even know that. But yet … the story begins with the mention of the Kennedy-Nixon debate. The election of JKF was a transformational moment, and the debate really symbolized that. Old vs young, the beginning of the 1960s, a decade that would lead to the civil rights movement winning major victories, etc. 1960 is before more than just one change, and a change is gonna come.
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The father tells his daughter that “there’s a difference between knowing and yapping.” He is talking about his abortion service, but could he also be talking about his relationship with Mrs. B? Is it possible his daughter knows all about their relationship, but decides she should not “yap” about it, even in letters she never plans to send to Robin? Maybe, but probably not.
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And then what about the revelation of the family surname, very late in the story and only mentioned once. With a short story, every detail could matter, so it seems odd to mention the name at all if only to do so in passing late in the tale. So why? At first, I thought about how John Strachan, the nineteenth century bishop of Toronto, is a significant historical figure, and his connection to education (there is a Bishop Strachan school in Toronto) might be significant. But I got nowhere with that. Then I put three odd bits of information together and came up with this. Bear with me, because, like I said, I cannot endorse this theory. The doctor’s surname is Strachan, pronounced “Strawn”. The housekeeper’s name is “Barrie”. Put them together and you get “Stachan Barrie”, or “Strawn Barrie” or … “strawberry”. What is the narrator’s favourite film? Wild Strawberries. The main character of the film is a doctor. He has a daughter-in-law (not a daughter) who is pregnant and not planning to stay with the baby’s father. The doctor in the film recalls a woman he loved who married someone else. So many connections when you go looking for them, but it seems so absurd. None of this is in the story. But my confusion over the story sends me on this chase anyway.
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Something that is in the story that I thought a bit about is the final line, “Remember – The present King of France is bald.” It ends the story, is the final thing she wants to say to Robin, is a callback to the earlier mention of this line, and so it must be significant. She explains (sort of) the idea of the significance of it. The sentence comes from Bertrand Russell as an example of one we have a bit of a problem assigning a truth value to. It’s clearly not true, but it also seems problematic to say it is false because that might imply that the present King of France has hair. Applied to this story in general, the narrator (and Munro) is pointing to the idea that the way we see the world might not be simply described, and descriptions might both seem not to be true and not to be false at the same time. This idea is actually first suggested near the start of the story when we are told that the potted plants in the house are “not flourishing and not dying”. Even the discussion of the Greeks not having the concept of zero is about ways of looking at and conceptualizing the world. So this is a theme through the story.
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The narrator gets to some of this complexity as she tries to deal with how she feels about how Robin reacted to the pregnancy, the demands he made of her. But the story, as much as it is about abortion, is more about the predicament of being pregnant in 1960. Abortion was only one of three options available to the narrator. She chose to give birth and put the baby up for adoption. But the third choice would have been to keep the baby and raise it without Robin. She could have driven home in her Mini and showed up at her father’s house with a newborn baby and settled in. Except she couldn’t do that. In 1960 an unwed mother raising a baby was not available as an option, socially speaking. Adoption was the only real choice she had. Well, maybe. That’s both not false to say, but not true either. But what is true is that 1960 was before this other social change, before the change that would have allowed her to keep her baby. Now I’m about to go off on a tangent again, one I also cannot endorse, but which seems to me to be a little less precarious (I’m probably wrong about that). In my first comment on this story, before reading it, I mentioned Dr. Henry Morgentaler and how I think he figured into Munro’s thinking when she wrote the story. Now I’m going to go in another direction and talk a bit about Joni Mitchell.
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In 1965, before her music career began, when she was still Roberta Anderson, when she was 21, she became pregnant. She gave the child up for adoption, as one did at that time, and then went on with her life. Through her career she never revealed that she had had this child, the only child she would ever have. Then in the mid-1990s, the story became public. Joni Mitchell is music royalty in Canada. If we have a Mount Rushmore (to borrow that American symbol) of singer / songwriters it would probably be Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell. So this was a bit of a big story in Canada. It became bigger when she and her biological daughter met for the first time a couple of years later, and just a couple of years before Alice Munro wrote this story. I don’t know if the two women know each other at all, but as two of the most celebrated artists in the country, Munro would have been well aware of this when she wrote her story. In 1965 abortion was not an option for Mitchell. She also never told her parents that she had given birth because of the social stigma. It was a different time. I am reminded of something the father tells his daughter in the story. He says, “It may not be quite the same day and age you think it is. Not around here.” Small town Ontario and small town Saskatchewan would not have been very different at that time.
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In the story, when the narrator is telling Robin the story of Madeline’s abortion, she actually goes back and forth between talking about that and talking about her own experience giving birth. Through this alternation it gives the impression that she is saying there is something very similar about the experiences. Childbirth can be a very messy and painful and traumatic experience as well. And when you give up the child for adoption, in both cases you leave with no child at all. When Madeline is in pain and the narrator tries to reassure her saying “I know”, she does not actually know the pain of an abortion. But she knows the pain of childbirth and directly equates them.
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So is this a story about abortion? Well, “no” is the wrong answer and so is “yes”. Is it about adoption or pregnancy in general? Not no and not yes. Is it about changing attitudes about race or more broadly all social change since 1960? Probably not yes, but maybe not no either. The present King of France is bald indeed!
Betsy demonstrates that Munro converses with Jameson and Yeats, something I would not dream of understanding on my own.
Instead I was understanding that besides about abortion the story was also about the narrator finding her way.
“Before the Change” is one of several epistolary stories Munro has written, but the only one at least hitherto composed only of letters, all written by same person.
The narrator converses with herself, facing her past and present in letters which are never sent. In the process of writing she understands she can´t change the two men who have acted unjustly towards her, but she may change herself.
The nameless protagonist frees herself from being a belittled daughter and fiancee. Writing down her emotions and pains helps her away from ‘quiet good girl’.
The result is healing and empowerment , ending ‘putting up and shutting up’. She is ready for a new start as a stronger person, as a subject of her own life, which really started with her decision to not have an abortion.
I have loved reading all the comments on this story. Is this one of Munro’s more overtly political texts? I can’t think of many others where she is so open and bold with her politics. Of course she always is, in every text, but it is hidden in ways it isn’t in this open, frank masterpiece.
Oh boy, lots of stuff to read here as I get back in the chair. I’ll try to catch up because there’s a lot to look at!
David – thanks for the long comment! At first I thought that the blackmailer was a lover. But I think the love the doctor feels is for the “good” women. The genius of Munro, however, is the ambiguity.
Harri – “healing and empowerment” – on the scales are both together better than an inheritance. Thanks.
SHORT PLOT SUMMARY
Canada, when abortion was still illegal. Her fiancé wants her to have an abortion but she has the child adopted instead. Now she realises her father, a doctor, has been carrying out illegal abortions for years.
SCORE
07/10
FAVOURITE PARTS
In a dark story like this, the humour. Dr Strachan’s fractiousness. His patients wanting to re-read again and again their favourite Reader’s Digest jokes. The preference for instant coffee ‘because it always tastes the same’.
Probably best to declare one’s position. I’m generally pro-choice. So…
Only 07/10 because the confluence of events/circumstances feels forced: a Canada before abortion was legal; the narrator’s fiancé wants her to have an abortion but she has an unwanted child instead; the narrator eventually realises her father is an illegal abortionist; meanwhile, in the past, as deep background, the narrator’s mother died giving birth to her (probably).
Also: the omissions. Regular Munro readers get used to all the really significant things that she leaves out of her stories, all that she leaves unsaid. Munro’s elephants-in-the-room. But in this story some omissions were really noticeable and unsatisfactory. Things absolutely central to the story just left, as far as I can see, as a kind of vacuum. The narrator remembers well the recent pain of childbirth but apparently has no feelings for her child? Really? And apparently no feelings – good or bad – about the death of her father? Really?
After Rich As Stink, perhaps the lightest story in the collection, ‘Before The Change’ is definitely a dark tale. A smorgasbord of bad tastes in the mouth.
The general setting of abortion is obviously a dark one, and the central scene of the book – Madeleine’s abortion – is excruciating. But strangely enough I find the darkest thing of all – and I think it’s the central point of the story – is the narrator’s decision to have the child, but never to see it, and to have it adopted:
‘I told [my father] that the baby had been adopted right away and that I didn’t know whether it had been a boy or a girl. That I had asked not to be told. And I had asked not to have to see it.’
By this point in the story the narrator has already told us “I believe in abortion … I believe it should be legal.” She now tells us emphatically the reason she herself doesn’t have an abortion is not ‘because of the baby’:
‘Never. It was because I believed I was right, in the argument’. (Her argument with Robin, that is.)
As for the closing stages of her relationship with Robin:
‘ … it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right’.
So I read this as the narrator basically saying “I had the baby because I believed Robin should’ve married me and let me keep the baby. But I didn’t really want the baby. So to prove my point I went ahead and had the baby and had it adopted.” Wow, that’s heavy.
So I’m seeing another Munro couple engaged in a power struggle. In ‘The Jack Randa Hotel’, Gail’s struggle to gain ‘the upper hand’ in her relationship with Will is given a relatively light setting. Here in ‘Before The Change’ it’s really dark, with a child’s future at stake. This has even more weight given that, as I said, we’re probably to understand that the narrator’s mother died giving birth to the narrator.
So I’m not sure Munro fully intends us to like her Bolshy, ‘smart aleck’ narrator. And I shake my head a bit when I realise that, despite this, at the end of the story I sort of do.
I recently read Eric Dupont’s excellent novel Songs For The Cold Of Heart. There was a part of this story that reminded me of his book. I don’t know if he has read this story, but I would not be surprised if he has. In an interview he said, “The first notion I had for this book was an image of girl named Madeleine. It’s the 1960s and she’s on a Greyhound bus to New York CIty to get an abortion.” The scene Dupont describes happens close to the middle of the book, so it is interesting that this was the idea he started with. It is also worth mentioning that his Madeleine, like the Madeleine in Munro’s story, goes to see a doctor whose daughter is his assistant.
That’s a pretty strong case for homage, I’d say. I haven’t heard of Dupont’s novel, but looking at the premise it sounds very good, even though I’d never have guessed about the scene you describe from the book’s blurb!
I am working on the post for “My Mother’s Dream,” though I got delayed a bit. I’ll get it up soon. I’d still like to come back and talk more on this story. Your insights have been great, David.
David, I think it’s more likely that Mrs Barrie is of Chinese/Japanese/SE Asian extraction.
I notice you say that Munro’s stories often leave you ‘quite puzzled, and not in a good way’. I’d be interested to hear more about that.
Howard, you left out one possibility clearly on offer: in Ontario there were quite a few black haired indigenous women for Dr. Strachan´s inter-racial relationship. In his time it was still quite PC to define them Indians; nowadays the origin would be First Nation.
You ask Really? about two omissions. I think they are due to the context. In a letter to R. it is natural that the narrator leaves out the feelings about her father´s death, it´s none of his former fiancee`s business any more, even as the letter never gets sent. The process of her dealing with the death is unfinished as sensed in the second to last chapter.
Same thing with adoption, nothing direct about her feelings is possible to say to the father of the child. Indirectly the narrator deals with it and criticizes herself, as you quote, always wanting to be in the right. In fact in some of what she writes, she projects to R. what she feels herself.
Giving away the baby she penalizes not only R., as she explains, but above all herself. Your Really? will really materialize some time, sooner or later.
I refer to how Betsy connects Yeats poem to Robin, who´s warned that he´ll have a lifelong search for the child. Same affects the narrator even more.
Harri, yes, I take your point about Mrs Barrie’s origin possibly being First Nation. I hadn’t thought of that.
But as for the apparently epistolary nature of the text, this I find unconvincing. Or maybe ‘misleading’ would be a better word. In, for example, ‘A Wilderness Station’ Munro does the epistolary text thing perfectly. Whereas in ‘Before The Change’ I get the sense of a journal being written, rather than a series of letters that are intended to be mailed one day. After all, the narrator refers to it as ‘all this’ (‘If I decided to send all this to you, where would I send it?’)
So I believe that the narrator is, as it were, thinking out loud to herself, with her thoughts much of the time only vaguely directed towards Robin. Yes, one day she might send ‘all this’ to him – but there again maybe not. Why is she undecided? Because it’s being written for therapeutic reasons primarily. So why would she evade arguably two of the most troublesome/traumatic events of her recent life (the loss of her child and the loss of her father)? I guess I’m saying that for me the journal-like nature of the text actually makes the elephants-in-the-room larger than ever.
For me this dual nature of the text shows itself most clearly in the fifteenth section (when Dr Strachan has his stroke), with the narrator freely recounting the events of the day until her focus shifts for a while to addressing Robin, doubling down on him, until returning to the events of the day.
Howard, as I see it, there are five different ways a story can be puzzling. Yup, five. Three are good, one is very bad, and the fifth (where I often find Munro) is in between. Here are the five, starting with the three good ones:
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1. A story can puzzle you because there is something you don’t know and have trouble figuring out, but you know that you’re not supposed to know it, supposed to be trying to figure it out, and also expect that the story will eventually tell you fairly explicitly. A crime mystery is the perfect example of this, but in more literary fiction it can also happen when a story uses the device of starting at the end, then jumping back to the beginning to explain how that ending came about.
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2. A story can puzzle you because it is complex in ways that make ideas or themes or even events and aspects of character not immediately clear on the surface. It’s a story where you have to put some thought and effort into coming up with the best complete reading of it, sometimes requiring input from other readers to help. (“Oh, you’re right! I didn’t notice that!”) With these sorts of stories there is puzzlement, but also a kind of confidence that a satisfying best reading of the story is there to be found, if not somewhat hidden from clear view.
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3. A story can puzzle when the point is to be puzzled and for there not to be a clear resolution. This might happen in a story with a narrator describing a person he knew whose actions do not always make sense. The narrator might have an unresolved puzzlement that the reader shares with him. Often a case like this, when well done, is where we gain something from the process of trying to make sense of the person or situation even if we never come to some sort of clear conclusion, and that is the desired effect.
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4. The worst kind of puzzlement is when a story is little more than just a mess. Things happen, characters do things, scenes are described, and it does not really ever make a whole lot of sense. You come away from reading a story like this wondering why the author thought this was a story worth telling or, at least, why the author thought it was a finished story at all. This is a puzzlement that is a clear indication of bad writing. There is nothing much gained by the process of trying to figure things out and you strongly suspect that there is no there there.
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5. That leaves one more type of puzzlement, the kind I often have with Munro. I am not sure how best to describe it, but it might most simply be viewed as a bad combination of 2 and 3 above. From 3 it is a sense that the puzzlement, no matter how much thought you put into it, will not be resolved and it might even be a complexity that is put into the story by design, but at the same time it shares from 2 the idea that you feel like if you work at it enough that some clear picture should emerge. But it never does, and the result is frustration rather than satisfaction.
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Being puzzled in the 5th way is not, like with 4, a clear sign of bad writing. In fact, as I describe it as an odd combination of two things each on their own that are good, it usually means that there is a lot of good in the writing. But there is still too much missing or unclear for it to be a thoroughly satisfying. One thing that often can happen with writing like this is the thing I mentioned previously where a reader will find an interpretation of the story that is consistent with it, but not really ever fully indicated by the story as being one intended. In such cases, the reader might convince himself that this is how the story should be read because he can’t find a more clearly presented reading and reading in something that is consistent with the story, but not actually there, feels more satisfying than accepting that there are holes in the story.
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With “Before The Change”, one of the holes I never understood (and still don’t) is why the father started providing abortions in the first place. If he were found out and arrested, he would have been sentenced to life in prison. So it is not something you decide to do without strong motivation. But as a regular doctor, there is no suggestion he needed the money. And as a man who seems to be gruff and terse, he does not seem like someone who is dedicated to the cause out of a strong feeling of compassion for the women he helps. So why does he do it? The worry you (Howard) expressed above when talking about the confluence of events is one possibility, but that is not a positive interpretation for Munro. So I kept looking and never found any good answer. In the end I am just left with a hole.
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Sometimes with a story where there is an “I don’t get it” reaction, listening to how others interpret the story can lead to a “now I get it” moment. Too often with Munro I have a “that’s interesting, but I don’t buy it” reaction. So it is puzzlement not in a good way, but at least it isn’t a type 5 case. Munro is too good a writer to fall that far.
David, I want to reply specifically to two things.
First – ” But there is still too much missing or unclear for [the story] to be thoroughly satisfying.” With most of Munro’s stories, women are likely to find them as a whole satisfying because Munro gets so much right about women’s lives.
In addition, to me, women are more comfortable with the ellipses of life because our lives are so filled with ellipse and contradiction. There is a moment during childbirth where it seems very likely you will die. It is a very vivid moment. It seems inevitable. And then the child is born. This is an ellipse and a contradiction of the greatest order.
Women are the ones, also, who are likely to be present at a death. We are keenly aware of all the answers we never heard from the person who has just died, and we are also keenly aware of all the answers we never gave the person who has just died. There is just so much we do not know. That’s life – so much we do not know. For sure.
Second – you mention – “With “Before The Change”, one of the holes I never understood (and still don’t) is why the father started providing abortions in the first place.”
To me (but I am not a husband who lost his wife in childbirth, nor am I a doctor who ever lost a wife, so there are gaps in what I can understand) – to me – a variety of motivations could be at work in Strachan’s decision to become an abortionist.
It’s a reply to the cruel universe that stole his wife from him and the mother from his child.
He can prevent childbirth itself.
He can also prevent a death due to a back-alley abortion.
He can prevent the suffering that the woman has persuaded him will occur were she to bear this child.
Maybe primarily, he can answer the pleas of the desperate women. He can save them.
In “Before the Change” the narrator thought she was finally building an adult discussion with her patiently listening father. Instead she was talking to a dead man.
The discussion could have ended with the explanation of why Dr. Strachan was an abortionist.
In this discussion, Betsy´s observation has been sufficient to me: ‘his motivation for performing abortions appears to be specifically in reaction with having lost his own wife in childbirth’.
That was also my conclusion, but in my thoughts I was specific. Because it was not on Betsy´s list of motivations, I make it public here: maybe Strachan´s wife would have liked to have an abortion, but he did not agree.
A Munro story can be compared to a puzzle, but it is about human lives, and as in life we do not get all the answers
Betsy, I have some thoughts about both subjects you addressed. Taking them in order, we start with….
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1. “With most of Munro’s stories, women are likely to find them as a whole satisfying….”
Although you don’t quite say this directly, it seems this answer is saying that women are more likely than men to find her stories satisfying. If not, then the reasons women might find them satisfying don’t help explain why I or other readers might not. If this is the claim I would want to resist it for two reasons. First, as an empirical claim I am not sure it is true that Munro has a greater percentage of women among her admirers than other writers. She is both very widely read and appreciated by both large numbers of men and women. This suggests that the perplexity problem I have reading her is more a me-thing than a he-thing. Second, if it were true that she appealed more to women than other writers do that might actually point to a flaw in her writing. The best writers generally are able to communicate well to all audiences, even if it is a very particular type of experience due to factors like race, sex, gender, nationality, class, etc. So if she speaks more clearly to women than to men it suggests a weakness in her ability to reach male readers. But like I said, I don’t think there is empirical support that she doesn’t do this and so I am wary of this claim. She is far too successful a writer with all audiences for this to sound right.
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2. “To me … a variety of motivations could be at work in Strachan’s decision to become an abortionist.
My first thought on the idea that there are many possible explanations is that this sounds like another way to say there isn’t any one good reason, so let’s hope that a bunch of “maybe this” claims will add up to one. But then looking at the possibilities, I am not sure I buy any of them. A response to losing a wife in childbirth might be to become an obstetrician to make sure other women don’t die that way, but it doesn’t seem connected with providing abortions. The thought, ‘since my wife died in childbirth I should try to prevent as many women giving birth as possible’ just sounds pathological. A desire to prevent the suffering of back alley abortions makes more sense, but risking life in prison for that? That takes a special kind of person with a special dedication, and he doesn’t seem like that kind of man. (Especially in how he treats his own daughter.) Harri T’s suggestion that the doctor’s wife had wanted an abortion, but could not get one, and then died in childbirth makes more sense to me, but it sounds like one of those answers I described as being consistent with the story as told, but not at all indicated by it. It requires adding a lot of information to the story to make the pieces all fit, and that is itself a weakness in writing.
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As a final thought, there is one other plot point I want to mention. When I first read the story, I found the fact that the father just happens to have a massive stroke as his daughter tells him about giving birth seemed too coincidental and too much a writer’s trick than a natural event. But a consequence of this is that it opens the door to one of those ellipses you mentioned. We don’t know and never will know if the stroke was caused by his reaction to what she was telling him or if it would have happened at that moment regardless. This, despite the slightly contrived method she gets there, is a good example of type-3 puzzlement I mentioned above.
David – I think it’s very possible that in general women experience the Munro stories differently than do men. It seems to me that Munro often tries to see it from both sides. Hence the discussion.
David, I’m interested in your reaction to the mystery element in Munro’s stories because I have to assume in my own case that this mystery element is one of the very reasons Munro’s my favourite short story writer. Indeed, I’ve concluded that trying to ‘solve’ her mysteries is – in my case – one of the main pleasures. And regularly failing is all part of the game too – ha ha. So with your type 5 puzzlement, for ‘a bad combination’ I guess I’d substitute ‘an intriguing combination’ – and conclude the type 5 frustration you allude to is usually – perversely – part of my pleasure.
But sometimes Munro goes too far. I’ve already indicated where I find this in ‘Before The Change’.
Because the focus of the story is the narrator, on balance I’m comfortable not knowing Dr Strachan’s motivation for performing abortions. As a pro-choicer, I’m happy to consign this to my ‘Dr Strachan’s a far nicer guy than his relationship with his daughter superficially makes him appear’ file.
In a similar vein I’m comfortable with not knowing about the true nature of his relationship with Mrs Barrie. Or, if we assume Mrs Barrie came into some money when Dr Strachan died (despite not being in his will), not knowing how that transfer of funds was achieved. There are further examples I’m sure.
(In your penultimate sentence I assume you meant to write ‘at least it isn’t a type 4 case’ and not ‘at least it isn’t a type 5 case’.)
Warning, warning, Munro story at work … ha ha …
In my first post one of my criticisms of this story was: ‘the confluence of events/circumstances feels forced: a Canada before abortion was legal; the narrator’s fiancé wants her to have an abortion but she has an unwanted child instead; the narrator eventually realises her father is an illegal abortionist; meanwhile, in the past, as deep background, the narrator’s mother died giving birth to her (probably)’.
Thanks to the comments from Betsy, Harri and David I’ve suddenly realised it isn’t forced. Just the opposite: it’s a wellspring of the story. Until David raised it, I have to confess I hadn’t thought about Dr Strachan’s motivation as abortionist at all. So when Betsy’s and Harri’s comments then point out the possible/probable link to his wife’s death … a light-bulb suddenly goes on for me.
Sorry, the filling’s a bit short in one of my sandwiches at the picnic sometimes.
Unfortunately for this realisation to cause me to up my score from 07/10 I’d ideally need to see a knock-on effect on my two major elephants-in-the-room (as I see it, the narrator’s failure to communicate her feelings about the loss of her child and her feelings about the loss of her father). Not sure I can re-open my investigations at this late stage. Must rush. Really need to be getting on with ‘My Mother’s Dream’. Ha ha.
Hi Howard – There’s an enforced silence between father and daughter on the topic of their mutual loneliness and abandonment. It’s like the worst case of any reserve you ever heard of.
I agree with you – I enjoy the puzzle of the stories. Reminds me of the puzzle of my parents …also of the puzzle of a couple of people I know pretty well …