{"id":10259,"date":"2013-11-29T03:50:27","date_gmt":"2013-11-29T07:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=10259"},"modified":"2017-08-03T22:52:24","modified_gmt":"2017-08-04T02:52:24","slug":"alice-munro-princess-ida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2013\/11\/29\/alice-munro-princess-ida\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice Munro: “Princess Ida”"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/span><\/div>

“Princess Ida”<\/strong><\/span>
\nby Alice Munro
\nfrom\u00a0Lives of Girls and Women<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/h3><\/div>

\"Lives-of-Girls-and-Women\"Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n

A<\/span>ccording to her Paris Review<\/em> interview (here<\/a>), Alice Munro began writing “Princess Ida” on a Sunday in January, and it was the start of what would become Lives of Girls and Women<\/em>. It is about her mother and came first because “material about my mother is my central material in life, and it always comes the most readily to me. If I just relax, that’s what will come up. So, once I started to write that, I was off.”<\/p>\n

It’s true that many of Munro’s stories go back to her mother or her relationship with her mother. Indeed, I believe Alice Munro became the author she is today (probably I feel that way because Munro herself has expressed something similar) when she wrote “The Peace of Utrecht,” an early story in which Munro confronts her mother’s death by Parkinson’s Disease in 1959 (see here<\/a> our post about “The Peace of Utrect”).<\/p>\n

In “Princess Ida,” Munro steps back a bit further to present a picture of a disappointed, middle-aged mother who is watching the promise of her life slip away. Del, an adolescent in this story, is writing this story from later in life, probably about the time she realizes just how sad her mother was.<\/p>\n

Del and her mother — who is named, we find out here, Addie — have moved away from the house on Flats Road to rent a house in town. It’s not necessarily Addie’s attempt to get away from her husband, who has stayed on at the Flats Road and who, unless there’s snow, comes to town each night; rather, it’s that she had to get away from that house on the fringe, and her husband simply wasn’t enough to keep her there any longer.<\/p>\n

It’s not Addie’s only attempt to get out and try to get ahead. She now goes out on the road selling encyclopedias — well, trying to. At first Del was fine going along with her mother. She loved that her mother could use Del’s own love for learning as a selling point. Del learns quickly, though, that showing her love for learning is strange: “I saw that to some people, maybe to most people, knowledge was just oddity; it stuck out like warts.” In fact, Del realizes something she’s always felt: her mother is a strange woman. At this early point in Del’s life, she doesn’t want to admit how much she’s like her mother.<\/p>\n

\n

I felt the weight of my mother’s eccentricities, of something absurd and embarrassing about her — the aunts would just show me a little at a time — land on my own coward’s shoulders. I did want to repudiate her, crawl into favor, orphaned, abandoned in wrinkled sleeves. At the same time I wanted to shield her.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On the surface, this is a story about a woman’s attempts, born of desperation, to take some control of her life that is running out of possibilities. But it’s so much more than that.<\/p>\n

I truly feel that most writers would stop there, and I’d probably like it just fine, especially in a novel about a young girl’s coming of age. But in “Princess Ida” Munro shows her own struggle to bring to life the very life that seems to have been wasted, mostly through the writer’s imagination.<\/p>\n

At first, we see that Del’s perception of her mother’s youth is naive. Like most of us, she is simply unable to comprehend all of the seconds her mother has spent alive and developing, suffering.<\/p>\n

\n

And my mother, just a little girl then named Addie Morrison, spindly I should think, with cropped hair because her mother guarded her against vanity, would walk home from school up the long anxious lane, banging against her legs the lard pail that had held her lunch. Wasn’t it always November, the ground hard, ice splintered on the puddles, dead grass floating from the wires? Yes, and the bush near and spooky, with the curious unconnected winds that lift the branches one by one. She would go into the house and find the fire out, the stove cold, the grease from the men’s dinner thickened on the plates and pans.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Del realizes that this is, in some way, false. It also leaves holes that will never be filled in, like this:<\/p>\n

\n

She became engaged to a young man who remained a shadow — no clear-cut villain, certainly, like her brother, or Grandma Seeley’s nephew, but not luminous and loved, either, not like Miss Rush.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

“Princess Ida” is a story of intimations, of the glimpses we get into someone’s secrets, of the realization that we cannot comprehend the life of another.<\/p>\n

Much of this comes to the forefront when we meet one of the “clear-cut villains,” Addie’s brother Billy. Successful now, Billy comes to visit, and Del’s sense of embarrassment of her mother and her desire to shield her mother couldn’t be stronger. Del does not remember ever meeting Billy, though she has heard about him for years. What she’s heard is disturbing.<\/p>\n

\n

It was the younger brother she hated. What did he do? Her answers were not wholly satisfactory. He was evil, bloated, cruel. A cruel fat boy. He fed firecrackers to cats. He tied up a toad and chopped it to pieces. He drowned my mother’s kitten, named Misty, in the cow trough, though he afterwards denied it. Also he caught my mother and tied her up in the barn and tormented her. Tormented her? He\u00a0tortured<\/em> her.<\/span><\/p>\n

What with? But my mother would never go beyond that — that word,\u00a0tortured<\/em>, which she spat out like blood.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Del has her own suspicions, childish at first — “I was left to imagine her tied up in the barn, as at a stake, while her brother, a fat Indian, yelped and pranced about her” — but much darker when she grew up:<\/p>\n

\n

Nothing really accounted for her darkened face at this point in the story, for her way of saying\u00a0tortured<\/em>. I had not yet learned to recognize the gloom that overcame her in the vicinity of sex.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Munro’s story remains elusive. Any additional glimpse we get to Addie’s past is still just a glimpse. What we are stuck with is a disappointed woman, completely foreign to herself:<\/p>\n

\n

Had all her stories, after all, to end up with just her, the way she was now, just my mother in Jubilee?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cP<\/span>rincess Ida\u201d begins with Del admitting:<\/p>\n

\n

I felt the weight of my mother\u2019s eccentricities, of something absurd and embarrassing\u00a0about her [. . .]. I did want to repudiate her [. . .]. At the same time I wanted to shield her.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What Del does in the end is write about her mother, the person whom other people\u00a0seemed to think of as a \u201cwild-woman.\u201d What matters, of course, is that gradually Del\u00a0realizes she is much the same. \u201cPrincess Ida\u201d is also about how stories provide an\u00a0education about the people we know, especially when we can run several different\u00a0stories from several different people or several different times up against each other.<\/p>\n

Munro describes her mother\u2019s (Addie\u2019s) eccentricities: the way she bucketed around\u00a0Wawanash County in a thirty-seven Chevy selling encyclopedias; the way she wrote\u00a0letters to the editor about women\u2019s rights and education; the way she wrote flowery\u00a0essays with \u201clong decorative descriptions\u201d and published them in the newspaper under\u00a0the nom de plume of \u201cPrincess Ida.\u201d<\/p>\n

Del says: \u201cI hated her selling encyclopedias and making speeches and wearing that hat.\u00a0I hated her writing letters to the newspapers.\u201d But in the course of time, as she learns\u00a0more, Del moves from humiliation to curiosity to empathy.<\/p>\n

Del\u2019s aunts made fun of her mother, made fun of the mud on her boots, of the \u201cbeetles\u00a0she had on her dress\u201d the letters she wrote to the editor. The aunts and all the others\u00a0in town who did not get her mother were part of Del\u2019s repudiation. Addie insisted on\u00a0joining the Great Books discussion group, and when that disappointed, she took a\u00a0correspondence course on the Great Thinkers. With her husband\u2019s support, Addie\u00a0rented a place in town and took in a boarder so her children could go to school in\u00a0town. There\u2019s a satisfying congruence in the arc of Addie\u2019s difficult life. Poverty or not,\u00a0university or not, Addie is determined to learn. No matter what, Del and her brother\u00a0would go to school.<\/p>\n

In the second section of the story, Del reflects on Addie\u2019s stories of childhood. Addie\u00a0grew up in a house that was \u201clike one where a murder had been committed.\u201d Both\u00a0Del and the reader learn it was a house where hopes, especially the hopes of girls\u00a0and women, were ground to bits. Neglected by her parents, abused and maybe raped\u00a0by her brother, and forbidden to go to high school, Addie dreamed of school. In an\u00a0act of startling bravery, Addie ran away and worked in a boarding house to make\u00a0school possible. Her zealously religious mother, being \u201cin the last demented stages of\u00a0Christianity\u201d, had given away a bequest of $300 that could have sent Addie to college.\u00a0The woman had bought Bibles instead, to distribute to the poor. Although Addie says\u00a0this cured her of religion, what really matters is the way Addie\u2019s wisecrack covers up her\u00a0deep, deep disappointment.<\/p>\n

All that Del knows about Addie\u2019s youth comes from Addie. Del says: \u201cIn the beginning of\u00a0her story was dark captivity, suffering, then daring and defiance and escape.\u201d But Del\u00a0comments on noticing the way her mother\u2019s stories always seemed to have something\u00a0missing.<\/p>\n

The adult Del admits: \u201cI myself was not so different from my mother, but concealed it,\u00a0knowing what dangers there were.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have a premonition here of what is to come for Del. Del is for Munro what Rabbit\u00a0is for Updike \u2013 what might have been. Munro has said that she was able to \u201cprevail\u201d\u00a0over her circumstances. In this story, it is not clear, despite the brilliance of her writing,\u00a0whether Del has the moxie or pointed ambition she is going to need to \u201cprevail.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the third and final section of the story, Addie\u2019s abusive (but quite successful) older\u00a0brother makes a surprise visit from the States. No one is happy to see him. Long\u00a0absent, his visit is another assault. He re-writes the past, making the neglectful mother\u00a0a saint, making the farm a sylvan idyll, making the barn where he \u201ctortured\u201d Addie non-existent. He re-writes himself to be a benevolent man, and he makes a peculiar $300\u00a0bequest to the sister he abused in the barn, as in half-hearted atonement and sideways\u00a0recognition of what the money might have originally meant to Addie. Bill insists to Addie:\u00a0\u201cyou got your education\u201d. Not really, given that she never got to go to college, and not\u00a0really, given that some of her education was at his hands in the barn. In forcing Del\u00a0to listen to his version of things, Bill\u2019s storytelling is nothing but revision, nothing but a\u00a0mask. He re-enacts his assaults with his assaults on the truth. His story-telling is a kind\u00a0of rape of consciousness.<\/p>\n

Del puts it all together. When her mother remarks she could use the bequest to \u201csend\u00a0away for a box of bibles\u201d we hear what hurts the most. While Del knows that the uncle\u00a0was cruel, while she knows the \u201cgloom that overcame [Addie] in the vicinity of sex,\u201d\u00a0she also knows that the sharpest assault of Addie\u2019s youth was losing the chance at\u00a0university. Del sees her mother in that instant: \u201cJust before Fern came in one door and\u00a0Owen came in the other, there was something in the room like the downflash of a wing\u00a0or knife, a sense of hurt so strong, but quick and isolated, vanishing.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then Addie resumes her crossword puzzle, searching her mind for the \u201cEgyptian\u00a0god with four letters\u201d. Seth is the god of storms, disorder, and war. But Addie fights to\u00a0keep chaos at bay, even if what she has to do is forget it. At Addie\u2019s center is terrible\u00a0disappointment, neglect and abuse interwoven with a rocklike unwillingness to give in\u00a0and a life-long defiance of being denied.<\/p>\n

Addie may embarrass her children, but she doesn\u2019t destroy them, the way Amanda\u00a0Wingfield does in \u201cThe Glass Menagerie\u201d. There remains in Addie always some of the\u00a0\u201cpriestess\u201d that Del knew her to be as a child. Addie is no Amanda Wingfield, and Munro\u00a0means us to notice it.<\/p>\n

The paradoxical co-existence of opposites within one person or one relationship or one\u00a0reality is key to Munro\u2019s belief system. That Addie (or any parent) might first seem a\u00a0hero, then seem ridiculous, and then finally seem familiar and empathetic is the paradox\u00a0of learning about our parents. Another example of Munro\u2019s co-existence of opposites\u00a0is that education might be a university classroom, it might be the studied, untutored\u00a0observation of consciousness, and in addition, education might be the experience of\u00a0making sense of all the differences, inconsistencies, and incongruities in all the stories\u00a0you hear.<\/p>\n

After the abusive brother leaves, Del is with her mother and she senses something \u201cin\u00a0the room like the downflash of a wing or knife\u201d. The feeling is of both the beneficence\u00a0and threat, simultaneously. With her brother\u2019s departure, Addie feels both the chaos he\u00a0threatens, and the power she has to deny him houseroom. Addie was capable of not so\u00a0much re-writing her life as editing what didn\u2019t serve.<\/p>\n

Del talks about being a child: \u201cBy getting to a certain spot in the mirror I could make my\u00a0mother and Fern Dougherty pull out like rubber bands, all wavering and hysterical, and\u00a0I could make my own face droop disastrously down one side, as if I had had a stroke.\u201d\u00a0Writing can distort things. Part of what the Munro stories charge you to do is this: do not\u00a0distort; always look at what you at from every angle.<\/p>\n

I like Addie a lot. She believes in education, and she\u2019s willing to move to town, rent an\u00a0apartment, and take on a boarder to make sure her children can go to a good school.\u00a0My grandmother did that, too. In this story, Del calls Addie ridiculous, different, eccentric,\u00a0reckless, powerful, guileless, absurd, stately, innocent, and unassailable. Munro also has\u00a0Del call her a wild-woman, a priestess, and a princess, while also accusing her of being\u00a0humiliating. In other words, Addie\u2019s a person of paradox and complexity, just like the\u00a0rest of us. The story sutures the comic into the tragic, the philosophic into the intensely\u00a0personal. This is a sprawling story about heroism, women\u2019s rights, education, and the\u00a0childishness of children, as well as the nature of storytelling, all held together by Addie\u2019s\u00a0courage and Del\u2019s daring to write about her, provincial, homely, and female though she\u00a0is.<\/p>\n<\/div>

\"\"\n \n