In “Hired Girl” we see the casual contempt that people often have for their hired help. Alice is maybe seventeen and has been hired to do housework at the big summer cottage on a private island at Pointe au Baril.

The entire story concerns itself with how Alice reacts to being classed as lower than the people she works for, or, even, invisible. Several times she naively doesn’t realize that she is not an equal, that she doesn’t eat lunch with them, that she eats in the other room, that she is the one being talked about when her employer says:

So you just make allowances . . . . You do the best with them you can.

This story covers familiar ground to me. My West Virginia grandmother was a hired girl to an oil widow in the next town and learned some fancy ways that may have not been good for her in the end. But just like Munro says, everybody had hired girls in those days. My grandmother had hired girls herself when she had small children. It wasn’t that my grandparents had money — they didn’t — it was: what were families going to do when their daughters finished eighth grade? The girls were too old to hang around the house and too young to get married. So they were traded up and down the country side.

I was several times a baby-sitter for families whose means were spectacular. And yet, like Alice, I sometimes had trouble knowing my place. After all, I thought myself their equal or better, given how I did in school and what my ambitions were.

Alice says:

But a barrier was up. Perhaps barrier is too strong a word – there was not a warning so much as something like a shimmer in the air, an indolent reminder. Not for you. It wasn’t a thing that had to be said. Or put on a sign.

Alice tells how the dress she made for the trip to the island was completely the wrong material and how the belt actually stained the waist of the dress. Reminds me of the dress I made for my Radcliffe interview — bold vertical stripes of yellow and brown and cream, along with which I wore bright capezios and carried a wicker cat purse, both bought at a thrift shop. The woman who interviewed me was reserved to the point of ice. I had met some unusual people, but I had never met anyone like her. Riding back home to Connecticut in the car with my parents I suffered. She must have thought my dress was ridiculous. In fact, though, I have often thought since that it was the combination of that woman and that dress that got me in. Someone else might not have found me so arresting.

But let us get back to the work at hand.

Having a conversation with her employers’ daughter, our girl finds herself being questioned about the sport she was good at. “Tennis or riding or what?” She responds with an exaggerated disquisition on the constraints of poverty.

Contempt was what I imagined to be always waiting, swinging along on live wires, just under the skin and perceptions of people like the Mountjoys.

When confronted with class in America, it is true. Contempt is the lingua franca for some people as they deal with the class below. Not everyone, though, as Munro conveys with that one word: “imagined.”

Merely existing in proximity to her employers made Alice mad, made her snippy and self-righteous. She could feel their distance. What she doesn’t consider is whether their distraction is due to something altogether having nothing to do with her, that she was, perhaps, over-reacting.

She took a couple of liberties with the proximity. Knowing perfectly well that a child of the employers had died and knowing perfectly well that the death was ghastly and the fault of the parents, Alice took it upon herself to casually bring up the child’s name and ask who she was. Told she was a daughter who had died, Alice pursued the point to ask what she already knew. How had the girl died? The employer answered honestly: that the little girl had died when the husband was moving a dresser and the dresser fell on her.

Cruelty was a thing I did not recognize in myself. I thought I was blameless here, and in any dealings with this family. All because of being young, and poor, and knowing about Nausicaa. [The island cottage was called Nausicaa, and her employer thought it was from Shakespeare.]

The reader feels it, the permission Alice gave herself to take liberties with her resentment.

As she is leaving the island at the end of the summer, the very father who accidentally killed his child gave Alice a book he’d noticed her reading. The gesture unsettles her:

. . . I didn’t feel particularly pleased, or grateful . . . I was too startled, and in some way , embarrassed. The thought of having a little corner of myself come to light, and to be truly understood, stirred up alarm, just as much as being taken no notice of stirred up resentment.

As much as this story is about class and the mistakes one makes when jumping class, it is more about not noticing, not paying attention. The child’s death is the primary thing. The father’s immense burden is the primary thing. Alice, still very young and self-centered, mostly pays attention to herself, feels quite the victim.

She has a very long way to go in life, which I think is the point of this story, and now and then she suspects it. She writes a letter to a friend in which she mocks her employers and their friends “in lurid terms.” Then: “. . . the whole thing filled me with shame and a sense of my own failure and loneliness.”

Note — Stories on a similar theme: Alice Munro has led us to believe in her Forward that she was the “Hired Girl,” but that the other characters may have been different or may have acted differently. I am struck by the similarity this story has to others also preoccupied with reactions of anger and confusion to class distinctions: in particular, ”Sunday Afternoon,” “Thanks for the Ride,” “Privilege,” and “Passion.”

But perhaps the most important theme is the inability to truly pay attention. Perhaps with compassion. That appears to be something you grow into and is a theme in many later stories.

Note: Indians:

I had noticed that when I looked out from the train on the day before—how what we called the bush turned into the more authentic looking forest, which had eliminated all lavishness and confusion and seasonal change. It seemed to me that this real forest belonged to rich people—it was their proper though sombre playground—and to Indians, who served the rich people as guides and exotic dependents, living out of sight and out of mind, somewhere that the train didn’t go. 

Munro makes clear here and in other stories that her only knowledge of Canada’s indigenous people is fragmentary and seeming.

She reports, nice or not, what she knows – that to most Canadians, Indians live “out of sight and out of mind.”

These occasional appearances of Indians feel awkward to me. Not integral to the story.

“Eskimo” and “Home” are two stories in which an Indian woman makes an in-the-flesh appearance. Both appear linked to abusive men. One appears drunk and the other has appeared drunk in the past. Again. Munro is reporting what most Canadians “know” about Native Americans. She makes no effort to have her characters understand the Native American because they don’t understand the Native American. That is, perhaps, her point.