“Family Furnishings”
by Alice Munro
from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Trevor
What an astonishing story we have here. I have read “Family Furnishings” several times since I set off to write about it a month or so ago, and each time I come away with more. I’m not entirely sure how to contain my thoughts to something that makes sense here, but I will try.
With “Family Furnishings” Munro once again takes a look at the life of a female writer (this first-person narrator remains nameless), of the lives that writer uses for material, the effect they have on one another.
Much of the first half of the story is about this writer’s early life in a provincial home with little money. It’s a life built by ceremonies (family dinners, the conversations while washing up, etc.), and one that narrator sees as apart from her. Instead, she focuses on Alfrida, an aunt who has left and who seems to be living quite the cosmopolitan lifestyle.
More and more, the narrator grows up to love a life that was not the life she grew up in. She sees no relationship between her and the family she leaves. Distance is easier.
That was the kind of lie I hoped never to have to tell again, the contempt I hoped never to have to show, about the things that really mattered to me. And in order not to have to do that, I would pretty well have to stay clear of the people I used to know.
Part of this life is her own fascination with stories that are larger than life. She is attracted to men at college who go to movies and concerts with her. She eventually marries one. In describing him, Munro once again perfectly states what I think so much of her own art is about:
He admired opera and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy — for the squalor of tragedy — in ordinary life. His parents were healthy and good-looking and prosperous (though he said of course that they were dull), and it seemed he had not had to know anybody who did not live in fairly sunny circumstances. Failures in life — failures of luck, of health, of finances — all struck him as lapses, and his resolute approval of me did not extend to my ramshackle background.
Munro’s work has so often sought to look at the “squalor of tragedy in ordinary life,” and that seems to be what this narrator is attracted to as well. Later in the story, after Alfrida offers her some details about her own tragic past, the narrator walks away with an epiphany:
I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida — not of that in particular — but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.
This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted to live my life.
She thinks back on the moment she heard Alfrida say the phrase that would set the narrator off on a life dedicated to her own kind of art:
And the minute I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself.
It’s rather self-centered and self-gratifying. It’s a price many pay for the life of an artist. It’s a life that not everyone appreciates, of course. Alfrida, for one, resents her story’s appearance, something the narrator at first cannot understand:
I could not even think, at first, what Alfrida might be upset about. My father had to remind me of the story, published several years ago, and I was surprised, even impatient and a little angry, to think of Alfrida’s objecting to something that seemed now to have so little to do with her.
“It wasn’t Alfrida at all,” I said to my father. “I changed it, I wasn’t even thinking about her. It was a character. Anybody could see that.”
But as a matter of fact there was still the exploding lamp, the mother in her charnel wrappings, the staunch, bereft child.
And so the narrator continues to see herself as separate from the ordinary, even as she wants to convey that ordinary tragedy. She doesn’t think anyone understands her, and distance grows.
There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting — set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say it was worth the trouble.
So does this narrator have what she wants? She’s told off in no uncertain terms as the story comes to a close, and she learns that there is more tragedy and pain in her family that she herself didn’t see. She’s converted some of this complexity into art. This story looks at that conversion and what that perspective might feel like from the point of view of the artist. It’s wonderful.
Betsy
“Family Furnishings” is notable for its exploration of the writer as a young woman.
Other stories also discuss the work of the writer: “Material,” “Meneseteung,” “Differently,” “Labor Day Dinner,” “My Mother’s Dream,” and “Who Do You Think You Are?,” with “Epilogue” being chief among them all.
In “Family Furnishings” the narrator remembers the gauzy day when she was about twenty and felt her serious writing life was about to begin:
When I had walked for over an hour, I saw a drugstore that was open. I went in and had a cup of coffee. The coffee was reheated, black and bitter — its taste was medicinal, exactly what I needed. I was already feeling relieved, and now I began to feel happy. Such happiness, to be alone. To see the hot late afternoon light on the sidewalk outside, the branches of a tree just out in leaf, throwing their skimpy shadows. To hear from the back of the shop the sounds of the ball game that the man who served me was listening to on the radio. I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida — not of that in particular — but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.
This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.
This is a side of the writing life. To me, it is a stage of the writer’s life, when the writer can indulge herself in the “heartbeat” of the world. The thought is gorgeous, but romantic. It’s a twenty year old’s writing — beginning with the reheated coffee and the skimpy shadows, and ending with the “almost inhuman assent and lamentation” of the crowd. It’s a stage. It’s the period of very high hopes, but it’s a stage marked by a lack of experience.
Contrast it with Del’s famous passage from the “Epilogue” of Lives of Girls and Women, published almost thirty years before.
[. . .] what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together — radiant, everlasting.
Concision marks this passage. Note that in “Family Furnishings,” in the earlier stage of the writer, the challenge of writing is to “[grab] something out of the air.” Later, the writer will be able to define what it is that must be grabbed: a very specific catalog of “every last thing.” It’s not that the writer in “Family Furnishings” is no good; it’s that she is at an incomplete state of development. Whereas the one writer hears “heartbeats,” the other, more experienced writer is after “every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together [. . .]”
Note that while the narrator of “Family Furnishings” believes she hears heartbeats, she writes a story that hurts the woman whose story she is telling.
The story she wrote about Alfrida is completely incomplete, but this is something the writer would only realize later in her life. There are stages. She’s young. I think that’s the point. She’s way beyond the point of Edith in “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” but she’s not quite yet Del. For one thing, Del has suffered.
I want to note that for the third story in a row, Munro says it is a hot day, this time in the section where Munro addresses her narrator’s intention of becoming a writer. The point is, I believe, that the heat is a part of the writer’s lot, that heat is a necessity, most likely. Munro mentions how some coffee the writer-to-be drinks was “reheated,” much as the stories a writer tells can be served reheated. Is Alfrida’s story merely reheated? I think, however, that Munro means that when a story is merely reheated and not actually passed through a crucible it’s not going to be great.
But the writer’s lot is, necessarily, a hot seat.
In the case of “Family Furnishings,” the young writer has used the story of a family friend she considers only tangential to herself. Alfrida was an acquaintance of the family who very occasionally visited for dinner throughout the writer’s childhood. Alfrida was a “writer” for a newspaper who took an interest in the young writer’s career. Alfrida’s strange life made up the core of a story the young writer later sold, but Alfrida took great offense and cut the young writer dead. It turns out that there was more to Alfrida’s story than the young writer knew, a secret of substantial significance and connection to the writer of which she knew nothing. Would she have used Alfrida in the same way had she known? Would her conception of the writer’s responsibilities to her “material” have been any different?
One of the challenges a writer must live through is the inevitable burden of inexperience.
Does the writer sign a Hippocratic Oath? First, do no harm?
How, for instance, does publishing fiction differ from gossip? Gossip is something which apparently serves a function in everyday society.
David Sloan Wilson (professor and author of Darwin’s Cathedral) says (see here):
[. . .] gossip appears to be a very sophisticated, multifunctional interaction which is important in policing behaviors in a group and defining group membership.
Wilson’s research emphasizes that gossip is how we investigate the world and its rules. In particular, gossip is how we learn what is not taught in school: how to function productively in society.
The problem for the writer is that gossip is private and published fiction is not. Published fiction is public. Regardless of whether a published story is instructive or not, there is a difference between stories which are complete and those which are incomplete.
The problem for the writer in “Family Furnishings” is a life-long conundrum — whether using someone else’s story was right. The problem is on a spectrum: how is the use of someone else’s life instructive? Or a necessity? Or cruel? Or a violation of the person’s right to privacy? Or an assault on trust? When do you have the right to use someone else’s life?
“Family Furnishings” does not answer any of these questions. It does raise them, however. It specifically raises the lesser problem of being cut dead. Munro herself suffered some significant cut dead experiences.
In a superior bio-essay in The Guardian in 2003, Aida Edemariam says (see here):
Her subjects — or those who believed they were her subjects, the residents of Wingham — were not appreciative. They wrote wounded editorials and angry letters; attempted to ban her in schools; there was even a death threat.
Edamariam points out that the book title Who Do You Think You Are? comes from a letter writer from Wingham.
Munro provides the reader a clue to the problem of what gives a writer the right to use someone else’s life. The clue lies in the metaphor of Alfrida’s apartment. Alfrida lived in a jumbled state with a lot of family furnishings she’d inherited. She also had a jumbled emotional life in that her partner was actually someone else’s husband. The place is claustrophobic. Nothing has been sorted out, not the furniture and not the relationships. For one thing, the reader gets the idea that Alfrida wants to assume a relationship with the young writer she does not actually have the right to assume.
Alfrida, to the writer’s surprise, appears to have borne a child out of wedlock at the age of 16 or 17. The father was the writer’s father. Alfrida gave up the child. It seems that perhaps Alfrida wanted a close relationship with the young writer as a substitute for the child she had given up. The young writer feels there’s something off in Alfrida’s advances upon her. At the very least, Alfrida feels claustrophobic.
Alfrida’s situation is a depiction of the writer’s dilemma. Alfrida has a lot of furnishings she’s not sorted, she has someone else’s husband, and she has assumed a closeness to the young writer that is inappropriate.
The writer has a lot of “family furnishings,” but it is the writer’s responsibility to sort it all out. Which are the stories to which she has a right? And which are the one she has inappropriately appropriated?
Do you just grab something out of the air?
We know that Munro has used her mother and father over and over in her writing, but the reader at least knows that she knew them very, very well. She did not just snatch their stories out of the air, the way you might catch a falling leaf or a caterpillar hanging by a thread. Their “heartbeats” are not some vague romantic thing.
The young writer knows she must “pay attention.” But what is it, to really “pay attention”?
Is it to hear the “lamentation” of the world? Or is it to deeply understand an individual life or individual situation or individual emotion? Remember that what the young writer calls “lamentation” is actually only the noise of the crowd at a ball game. The young writer has a way with words. But she has a long way to go.
In the famous interview with the Paris Review (#137), Munro says (see here):
I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem.
For those of you who will be commenting on this story, I have a question I didn’t raise above: is Alfrida’s daughter also the narrator’s half-sister? It seems that Munro suggests that without ever making it clear. Then again, I’ve read this several times, and I am not sure just how such a point supports any of the other themes. Alfrida’s disdain for the narrator — “not as smart as you think you are” — is well supported by her taking Alfrida’s story for her own; it doesn’t require anything additional. It also feels a little overdone if the narrator both learns that Alfrida had a child and that the child is her half-sister. But is this why the woman goes to the father’s funeral?
Anyway, I go back and forth here, though right now I’m thinking: No, Alfrida and our narrator’s father were just close cousins, and nothing incestuous is clearly supported in the story.
Trevor, to me Alfrida´s observation that the narrator was not as smart as she thought, also, and specifically, means that in spite of knowing everything she knew, she did not comprehend the real relationship between the two cousins, cold fish as she was.
I like the way Betsy states as a fact, ‘the father was the writer´s father’. It´s a ‘fact’ also to me, although Munro has left it open, once again making her readers to read between the lines.
The narrator finally gets it listening to her half sister´s version of the the armistice day story, understands that bells were ringing also to the unholy union of their father and Alfrida and their descendant.
By the way, in most countries, including Canada, sexual relations between cousins are not considered incestuous under law.
Trevor, I would answer a fairly definitive ‘yes’ to your question. And I think you’ve framed it correctly in that I think the important fact is that Alfrida’s daughter, the woman at the funeral, is the narrator’s half sister. They have the same father. Otherwise her presence at the funeral doesn’t make much sense. And then of course there’s that “you weren’t ever quite as smart as you thought you were.” remark. If this isn’t the narrator’s half-sister, then that remark is inexplicably cutting. Why would she want to report to the narrator (who she’s just met for the first time) a belittling remark about her that her mother made, unless she herself (Alfrida’s daughter) has skin in the game? And perhaps because she wants to give the narrator a clue about something important to both of them (ie “hey, we’re half-sisters”)? I know Alfrida’s daughter says “That’s [Alfrida] talking, not me. I haven’t got anything against you” – but I read that as referring to the ‘cold fish’ remark.
There are other clues….
1. How about that remark the narrator makes about her close family: ‘they all agreed about something they could not say’?
‘… it was the way that my grandmother would be spoken of by Alfrida—a sudden sobriety and concern in her voice, even a touch of fear … Then there would be a similar restraint in my mother’s reply, and an extra gravity in my father’s—a caricature of gravity, you might say—that showed how they all agreed about something they could not say.’
I suggest the significant thing here, that the family is eager to keep from the narrator, is that the grandmother raised Alfrida and was therefore intimately bound up in Alfrida’s early sexual exploits and pregnancy, and knows about the child out of wedlock, and put out for adoption. The narrator’s close family ‘agree’ the narrator shouldn’t learn about all this.
2. And then there’s the narrator’s father’s jealousy towards Bill (Alfrida’s live-in man friend for a while).
3. As I recall, the chronology is fuzzy as to when the narrator’s mother died and when the narrator’s grandmother died. But anyway, when the grandmother dies, Alfrida moves into the grandmother’s house, which of course is near the narrator’s father’s home. And then she moves out again when he remarries. I think she was hoping to rekindle their relationship.
4. Then there’s the business of the narrator’s father and how ‘he and Alfrida seemed now to be on such formal terms. I wondered what he was leaving out.’ And also the earlier business about Alfrida no longer coming round for family meals after the historic meal when the 15/16 year old narrator has a cigarette. It crosses my mind that once the narrator’s mother became seriously ill, that’s when Alfrida may have started to have designs on the narrator’s father. And, perhaps over an extended period of time, he rebuffed her – and eventually married someone else. (Yes, I may be being over-fanciful here, but Munro encourages that sort of thing. Ha ha.) I don’t think this new distance between the narrator’s father and Alfrida is anything to do with the narrator’s writing career.
SHORT SUMMARY OF STORY (AS OPPOSED TO PLOT)
How the plate-tectonics of family life contribute to, or accompany, the narrator discovering her vocation as a writer.
SCORE
07/10
FAVOURITE PARTS
The narrator’s father’s hilarious, sarcastic rejoinder to Alfrida at the end of their talks on politics: “You’ve put me straight … if I had any sense I’d be obliged to you”.
At the beginning, with this book, Harri provided a quote from Munro: “And I notice with these latest stories that my idea seems to have become simpler. And more scaled down. For a while, my stories were opening to such a complexity. And I could not do anything about it. That was the only way I could find to tell them”.
Well, I’m not sure ‘Family Furnishings’ bears this idea of ‘simpler’ out. However, once I’d worked out what I’d missed on my initial two readings – namely that Alfrida had a child with the narrator’s father – I liked the story a lot more.
And then I liked the repartee between the narrator and Alfrida’s daughter. Particularly “She said you were smart, but you weren’t ever quite as smart as you thought you were”. Which I read as Munro commenting on readers like me ha ha. Especially apposite here because the narrator is the kind of writer Munro is.
Having said that, I’m a bit iffy about writers writing stories about writers or would-be writers. It’s just that Munro is so very damn good.
So perhaps it’s a good thing I don’t see this story as primarily being a story about being an aspiring writer. I tend more to see the narrator as an extension of the ‘Before The Change’ narrator, who is a history student (who, despite writing her journal to her ex-fiance, has no apparent ambitions to be a writer).
The narrator’s mother is worth a mention. She falls seriously ill when the narrator is 15/16. Had been a schoolteacher. Early on the young narrator suggests she kind of hates her, but we never really learn why.
I felt this was perceptive:
‘Nor is the narrator’s mother the stodgy matron who embarrasses her teenaged self. It’s hinted that it was perhaps she who was the one—her bookshelves stocked with Eliot, London, and Scott—who chafed most at her town’s restrictions, who scolded her daughter not so that she would be repressed but that she would not grow up, like her extended family, to be unkind.’
http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/family-furnishings/
Harri, I’m still puzzling over the opening section, and its recapitulation towards the end. Yes, the suggestion seems to be that the half-sister was conceived, after high school, on the day the 1st world war ended. But then I can’t make the arithmetic of the years add up. Everything indicates the narrator was born in the mid-1930s. Yet her half-sister ‘was only a few years past my own age’, ‘she was somebody of my own generation’.
Howard, you end your post with a couple of sentences.
After mentioning ‘my own generation’, the narrator goes on: ‘and it came to me that she must be one of the other family, a half sister of Alfrida´s, born when Alfrida was almost grown up.’
That fits perfectly, it is precisely what happened, when Alfrida had her daughter fresh out of high school, making the narrator and not Alfrida the half sister.
Perhaps with the narrator´s observations of the half sister´s looks and age, Munro is deliberately confusing her readers and just stumbles arithmetically on her own dexterity.
On the other hand, we might read ‘generation’ here not referring to an age cohort, but to a group of people behaving and expressing themselves similarly in a way that differs from Alfrida and the narrator´s parents.
Harri, you say ‘Munro … just stumbles arithmetically on her own dexterity’. That’s wonderfully diplomatically put.
At this point in the story I scribbled in my early notes: ‘Is Munro slightly muddled?’
Argh, must rush. On to ‘Comfort’ already….
Wow. I’m a tremendous fan of Betsy’s insightful reviews. But I’ve read this story multiple times over the years, and I have never – not once – felt that the author was trying to depict Alfrida’s daughter as the product of a tryst involving the narrator’s father. I think Munro makes her point fabulously in this story, and I (personally) don’t believe she needs to insert such a detail to do so. My sincere apologies, Betsy – your perceptions are always brilliant. I simply feel that this particular interpretation might be overreaching. Just my own opinion, of course.
I do whole-heartedly agree that this story is about youth, and the realities of being a youthful writer. But I also find it to be a tale about generational manners and courtesies. The narrator’s father and “Freddie” were first-cousins, and close in their youth – that’s made clear immediately. Also clear is that the adult Alfrida’s visits are considered something special – altogether different than the usual holiday meals with relatives – and that “she was really there to talk, and make other people talk. Anything you wanted to talk about – almost anything – would be fine.” Whatever her personal faults and failings, Alfrida was naturally interested in others. She honored the art of conversation.
I interpret Alfrida’s chiding/kidding exchanges with the narrator’s father as simply representing a type of verbal sparring common among long-time friends (“Did not” – “Did so” – “Did not”). But perhaps most importantly, I see Alfrida’s repeated invitations to the young narrator as a generational courtesy. A sincere courtesy stemming from this long-standing family association, and a shared love of writing. And frankly, I see the narrator as an insufferable snot who needs some basic manners knocked into her.
Once in college, the young narrator is busy and self-absorbed. She rudely fails to return or even acknowledge Alfrida’s calls. When she finally does (reluctantly) agree to a shared meal, she has the gall to show up late. Then she hardly even attempts to participate in the conversation. She’s filled up with the confidence of youth, silently judging this older woman who’s merely trying to be hospitable. She’s not shy about helping herself to the free food, of course; but barely hides her desire to get away. She even makes up a lie to cut the time short. Munro provides some telling character insights earlier, when the narrator’s parents comment on her “cruel tongue.” As her father says, “What makes you think you have the right to run down decent people?”
When we later find out about the horrible circumstances surrounding Alfrida’s mother, her desire to nurture and connect with this young lady becomes even more poignant. And toward the end, when we learn about the daughter, Alfrida’s nurturing motivations are downright heartbreaking. Here again, I think the daughter is at the funeral as a means for Munro to illustrate simple courtesy. This daughter seems to know her birth mom had been close with the deceased, and wishes to express condolences on her mother’s behalf. A basic expression of human sympathy, not that uncommon.
I personally think these two key details are introduced to make the narrator’s youthful behavior – and her tone-deaf appropriation of the burn story – even more contemptible. One painful tiny detail I noticed was that after the story is published, the narrator’s father stops referring to Alfrida as “Freddie” altogether. It sounds as if Alfrida is so hurt that she’ll only correspond via written note from that point forward, even though she came to live not far away from the father (in the grandmother’s house). Things are formalized; an age-old friendship suffers.
I absolutely do see the narrator as a “cold fish,” especially during her younger years. In fact, Munro repeatedly makes reference to parental reservations about the narrator’s empathy/discernment in this story. I think Munro is saying that in writing, in art, there IS a line. Perhaps it’s different in every circumstance, but mature writers come to recognize where/how/when it’s drawn. No amount of youthful bravado, swagger and boldness can make up for intuitive sensitivity, and basic human compassion.
This is why the last lines of this story are so poignant and powerful for me. They take us back to the youthful narrator walking away from Alfrida’s courteous hospitality, having lied to secure her freedom. “This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.” I wonder if this now-older narrator would agree with the choice.
Mare, I don’t think any of us can be sure we’re correct about Alfrida’s daughter being the narrator’s half-sister. But then how would you explain the significance of the story’s opening section. And how it’s recapitulated towards the end. Why? What’s going on here? I mean, historically it obviously was a significant day – end of 1st world war and all that – but surely there’s something else going on for the characters at a personal level?
I do absolutely see what you mean, Howard. I thought it was interesting that the narrator’s early and persistent mental picture was of young children playing together in a field. Munro was obviously purposeful in having her learn later on (significantly, from Alfrida’s daughter) that they were apparently teenagers in high school. I certainly see how readers might immediately assume an unexpected dalliance between those two characters, given the supposed time frame. Of course, we’re all familiar with Munro’s propensity for inserting similar twists and liaisons into other stories. But for me personally, my attention was much more drawn to the daughter’s immediate change in tone. The narrator instantly noticed that “the feeling of apology or friendliness, the harmlessness that I had felt in this woman a little while before, was not there now.”
Almost instantly on the heels of that, the daughter asserted to the narrator Alfrida’s opinion that “you were smart, but you weren’t ever quite as smart as you thought you were.” I think it’s extremely meaningful that the daughter is the one to convey this judgment, in a rather triumphant way.
I feel like Munro is using this detail to remind writers (all human beings, really) that stories can stare us in the face for so long we make shorthand assumptions about vital details. We can hold these assumptions with such confidence that they feel like fact. And then a new perspective comes swooping in unexpectedly — from a comparative stranger, no less — and the entire landscape shifts.
The young narrator goes through the story approaching Alfrida, and her own world, in this rather presumptive way. Learning about Alfrida’s tragedy doesn’t shake her out of it — on the contrary, she uses it to her own advantage. But this virtual stranger, I think, finally gets through. The woman can tell; it practically radiates from her eyes. And she then drives home her point, by sharing the unfavorable impression this narrator has made on Alfrida. I feel like Munro is saying, “Never be so bold and confident that you take the details for granted. Soften your heart. Practice humility. Approach the world like a student, not a master.” Alfrida, for all her flaws, tended toward this approach. By the end of the story, I think the narrator has only just begun to learn.
Mare, about that ‘immediate change in tone’…
At the funeral it’s the daughter that approaches the narrator (not the other way round). And it’s the daughter that, out of the blue, introduces the end of the 1st world war anecdote into the ensuing conversation. So I think we can think of her as being on a mission. I assume this is because in the past Alfrida has told her about her half-sister, and how the narrator’s family had wanted to keep this a secret from the narrator, and also – much less important in my humble opinion – how the narrator had annoyed/upset her with the ‘she would want to see me’, story.
So now, finally face to face with her half sister, at first she’s in a sense gradually ‘sounding out’ the narrator, wondering if the narrator has, in the intervening years, learned the truth. And while she does so, perhaps partly out of consideration for a family secret, she initially continues the facade by always referring to ‘your dad’ (and not ‘our dad’). (Including what we might think of as a bit of a giveaway when she says “[Alfrida] was pretty good on remembering anything involved your dad”.)
She’s only just getting to know the narrator, so she’s probably a little cautious before unveiling her revelation, uncertain of how the narrator will react (even if there starts to be, as we’re told, a ‘sense of triumph’ about her, as the conversation proceeds). But behind all this, in her, there also must be this eagerness to be able to say to the narrator “do you know we’re half-sisters?” (Which she only feels she can do now, at the funeral, because the last family member who was keeping the secret – the narrator’s father – is dead.)
So, as I see it, their discussion of the 1918 anecdote demonstrates beyond doubt to her that the narrator still doesn’t know the truth. At this point I think we could say that her frustration – and her eagerness – bubble over. Hence the ‘immediate change in tone’ you refer to. As I say, I think we could also surmise that ultimately, all along, she’s been determined to tell the narrator the truth. So, at this point, in her own mind, she’s already one half-sister talking to the other – and can therefore start deploying all the usual familial devices siblings use competitively to try and keep each other in line. As I said in my earlier comment, in this conversation, Alfrida’s daughter has skin in the game – as the narrator’s half sister she feels fully justified in her cutting remarks, which otherwise would be quite shocking.
Indeed we might imagine that her last reported comment to the narrator should read “She said you were kind of a cold fish. That’s her talking, not me. I haven’t got anything against you. After all, we’re half sisters, dumbo.” (Possibly said with a splash of affection?)
I may have got it wrong.
I don’t think the narrator’s ‘she would want to see me’ story is a particularly big deal for Alfrida. Yes, when it’s published it annoys her, I’m sure that’s true. But I don’t think it plays a decisive role in her increasing distant relationship with the narrator.
I think the reason it’s distant is mainly down to two other things. Firstly, and most obviously, the narrator’s youthful ambition and her rebellious, youthful wish to put her family and her past (Alfrida included) behind her – at least temporarily. And secondly Alfrida’s negative reaction to being rebuffed by the narrator’s father, after his wife’s death.
This is a key passage (in section 8):
‘When I was home visiting [my father] and learned that Alfrida was living not far away—in my grandmother’s house, in fact, which she had finally inherited—I had suggested that we go to see her. This was in the flurry between my two marriages, when I was in an expansive mood, newly released and able to make contact with anyone I chose.
My father said, “Well, you know, Alfrida was a bit upset.”
He was calling her Alfrida now. When had that started?
I could not even think, at first, what Alfrida might be upset about. My father had to remind me of the story, published several years ago…’
I suggest that here the father is using the narrator’s story as a pretext not to go and see Alfrida. And that the real reason he’s reluctant to go is that things are a bit tense between him and Alfrida because he’s trying to fend her off now that he’s a widower (or his wife’s terminally ill – I’m not sure of the chronology). Of course when he eventually re-marries, Alfrida gives up and moves back to the city.
Howard, I think all of these are excellent insights. One of the most brilliant aspects of Munro’s writing (which could likely be said for any great writer) is that she weaves in room for interpretation. As readers, I suspect, we “insert” parts of our own experiences and life-paradigms into the story, and our perceptions are shaded accordingly. This is what I so love about art, and why I feel Munro’s stories are truly timeless. And I agree one-hundred percent: the daughter is on a mission to meet the narrator. At first, maybe it’s for the reasons you mention, familial curiosity, something along those lines.
But I also remember the idea of those narrative preconceptions I mentioned above. In all honesty, if I walked up to meet a stranger and my mother had told me in the past, “this woman is a cold fish” and “she thinks she’s so smart,” it would at least slightly color my preconceptions. Especially if I’d known that this woman had “borrowed” my mother’s tragic story in a hurtful and rather callous way. In all fairness to the daughter, she starts out trying to be friendly. But the moment she realizes there’s a disagreement in their perceptions, her tone shifts. I feel like she’s silently saying to the narrator, “See, look at that, you don’t know every detail. You didn’t even know about me. But my mother told me plenty about you.”
What stands out to me most is that Munro opens with the **narrator’s** version of the WWI story. As you so astutely note, the author feels quite strongly about including this. I personally think it’s because the story is told in the narrator’s voice, and the narrator is presenting these details as factual. We, as readers, have no reason to doubt them. And then, at the end, they’re upended by a perfect stranger. We experience the narrator’s sense of surprised disorientation firsthand — it never once occurred to her that she should doubt her own assumptions. But I might note that even the daughter, initially prepared to grant some grace, quickly slips back into her own preconceptions about the narrator based upon “stories” she’d undoubtedly heard from Alfrida.
Again, for me, this is a story about artistic humility, basic human courtesy, and the pitfalls of preconceptions through and through. But that could very well be some of my own life experience, creeping in to influence my interpretation. :-)
I agree with everyone who thinks the stranger is the half-sister. Freddie realized even as a child that her mother “would want to see me” before she expired. The adopted daughter also realizes the her mother Freddie would want to see her. This is the sort of kindness that escapes the narrator. Her father would not have wanted to see his unwanted daughter. He is not a kind man. All Freddie ever had were the “family furnishings” but no family. How tragic. And the father pretending all along to be so sexually conservative! Family secrets are what she must write about – stories don’t come out of thin air.