here<\/a>).<\/p>\nIrving defines sentimentality as \u201cwishful thinking.\u201d He discusses the conundrum of Dickens\u2019 A Christmas Carol<\/em>, which is both wishful thinking and brilliant at the same time. To me, what tames the sentimentality is the magical realism of the ghosts of Christmas. For Irving, the taming factor is Dickens\u2019 comic voice. For both of us, the sentiment is in praise of selflessness and the success of the sentiment is that the structure makes it clear that selflessness is, while needed, rare and only wakened with the rarest of stimuli.<\/p>\nMillicent\u2019s sentimental belief that she can eliminate sex from her marriage and her life through hard work and steadfast sweetness is realistically impossible. Sex will out. And yet, paradoxically, \u201cA Real Life\u201d places shrewdness, practicality, sentimentality, and sweetness within a narrative that is undercut with ambiguity. Balancing stubborn sweetness against ambiguous truth, the story forces us to realize, Dickens-like, how desperately we are all in need of Millicent\u2019s determined hard work, love and sweetness.<\/p>\n
Irving concludes his 1979 essay, (somewhat in support of Munro) by remarking:<\/p>\n
[W]hen we writers — in our own work — escape the slur of sentimentality, we should ask ourselves if what we are doing matters.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo what is Alice Munro up to in \u201cA Real Life\u201d? She has posed sentimentality as the central hurdle she must overcome, and she has simultaneously undercut Millicent\u2019s wishful thinking about the power of \u201cthe sweetness of affection\u201d with the revelation that Millicent thinks she can keep sex at arms\u2019 length through the power of her sweetness. This would be a tragic stance if it were not also comic.<\/p>\n
The reader is thinking that it is a rather open secret that in general men and women like, and indeed require, sex. So how does Millicent\u2019s husband deal with Millicent\u2019s sweet frigidity? Later in the story we learn that Millicent has exacted a promise of sobriety from Porter, but it is accepted that while he doesn\u2019t drink in the house, he keeps a bottle in the barn. We wonder if sex is the same, that it is forbidden in the house, but who knows what goes on in the barn?<\/p>\n
But Munro has taken a Dickensian turn, here. Not only does she appear to be fond of her characters and touched by Millicent\u2019s sweetness, she also intends, like Dickens, to distract and entertain us with detail and comedy. The story opens this way:<\/p>\n
A man came along and fell in love with Dorrie Beck. At least, he wanted to marry her. It was true.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWe know right from the first paragraph that the story is about \u201clove,\u201d or at the very least, marriage. Again, the narrator appears to trip a little: is it love? Is it marriage? Or, as the title suggests, is it real life? Again, there is the trademark Munro ellipse. Something makes Millicent say to herself, \u201cIt was true.\u201d The reader deduces, right from the start, that not everything Millicent says or believes is exactly true, but is precisely true in the aggregate. Marriage has to do with love in all its varieties and absences and that is real life.<\/p>\n
\u201cA Real Life\u201d is also an argument about whether sentimentalism can be \u201ctrue.\u201d Somehow, I think it boils down to the issue regarding the power of hard work and sweetness. In many of Munro\u2019s stories, sweetness, while misguided, still has the power of salvation (think of Violet in \u201cA Queer Streak,\u201d or the aunt in \u201cThe Ticket,\u201d and the singer\/undertaker\/comfortor in \u201cComfort\u201d).\u00a0 So \u201cA Real Life\u201d is a comic entertainment and a love story, both of which require a happy ending, and it is also a story about real life, and as such carries a dose of the underbelly and uncertainty.<\/p>\n
From the opening, the plot immediately turns its attentions away from Millicent and concentrates on Dorrie Beck, Millicent\u2019s neighbor.<\/p>\n
She glowed with resolution. She was a big, firm woman with heavy legs, chestnut brown hair, a broad bashful face, and dark freckles like dots of velvet. A man in the area had named a horse after her.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWorthy of Dickens, this is. You have to love a girl who could strike a man so powerfully (despite her lack of delicacy) that he would name a horse after her. This delighted me. And with Dorrie\u2019s entrance, I have forgotten all about the problem with Millicent\u2019s wishful thinking and Porter\u2019s sweet but cold bed.<\/p>\n
Dorrie and her brother Albert have an unconventional compact with Millicent and Porter. Dorrie\u2019s family, once well off, has gone belly up. The house and furniture have all been sold at auction. But then, Porter buys back the empty house for Dorrie and Albert to live in. Albert was \u201cnot very well\u201d when he came back from WWI, so he had given up any aspiration to the kind of job a college educated man would seek. Physical work was what he needed, and he became the delivery man for the local grocery store. Dorrie and Albert did not pay Porter rent. What they did was pay him in kind. Albert played the role of hired man, and Dorrie helped Millicent with the kids and housework.<\/p>\n
It all seems rather amicable and pleasant. But were you to read the story again, you might catch a whiff of the plantation, with Albert being owned, so to speak. And that is not the only whiff of possession. Albert always told his sister that \u201cpeople living alone are to be pitied,\u201d a wisdom he gleaned from his rounds delivering groceries, a wisdom he appears to use to keep Dorrie in his house. Dorrie herself, when she was telling about her dreams of an expedition to the Arctic Circle, revealed that she could not go because:<\/p>\n
I had my brother. I couldn\u2019t leave my brother.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo in addition to this story\u2019s interest in the possession of other people, there\u2019s a associated whiff of incest, which, if not physical, is surely emotional. After probably twenty years, Albert dies, and Dorrie is lost. Munro says she \u201cmay have become a little unhinged.\u201d This somehow embodies the idea of an incestuous relationship.<\/p>\n
Albert having died, Dorrie is now living alone in the house: the house is a mess, and Dorrie lives and dreams hunting and trapping. She is not your ordinary blind date, and yet fate intervenes in the form of a traveling Australian, and his blind date is exactly what Dorrie becomes.<\/p>\n
A visitor in town is the occasion for Millicent (who has always had unfulfilled social aspirations) to give a dinner party. She invites Dorrie. What a visitor! What a party! What salvation in the form of a meal!<\/p>\n
Millicent pulls out all the stops. Out on the lawn the table holds four salads (potato, carrot, jellied, and cabbage), three proteins (devilled eggs, cold chicken, and salmon loaf), delicacies (the warm biscuits and relishes) and desserts (the angel food cake and the Bavarian cream). All of this is prepared in a day and without a refrigerator, and the preparation includes the pressed damask table-cloth, the polished silver, and the silver serving spoon. Thus Munro demonstrates Millicent\u2019s formidable power, and her own as well. We have forgotten all about Albert, and we have forgotten all about Porter, as well.<\/p>\n
An epistolary romance ensues between Wilkie, the Australian, and Dorrie, the Canadian. A proposal of marriage arrives. Once again all-capable, Millicent organizes Dorrie\u2019s wedding: the dresses, the hats, the food, the service at the church. Once again, the reader is diverted with Millicent\u2019s determined, loving and energetic generosity.<\/p>\n
On the big day, Dorrie does not turn up. Millicent goes to see her, and Dorrie says she \u201ccan\u2019t leave here,\u201d and Millicent, desperate to have all her work in service of saving Dorrie succeed, is reduced to lying. Dorrie has to leave, says Millicent, they\u2019ve sold the house. Dorrie and Millicent have an argument about that. And in the midst of the rush and the emotion, Millicent wonders if it\u2019s sex that\u2019s bothering Dorrie. Dorrie says:<\/p>\n
Oh, it isn\u2019t that! I know all about that.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nMillicent wonders how . . . and the second time through, the reader wonders how as well. Was it Albert? Was it Porter? Was it the man who named the horse after her? Or all three? Does salvation come in different forms?<\/p>\n
But Millicent can\u2019t dwell on this question — she has work to do. She has to get Dorrie to her wedding. So Millicent cries. And promises to \u201clook after Albert\u201d in the graveyard. Besides — Millicent has really gone to a lot of trouble to carry this wedding off. In truth, Millicent will miss Dorrie. It has not been easy for Millicent to make friends in town, the prosperous town women not being able to accept a prosperous farm wife as an equal. But she knows Dorrie has to have \u201ca real life.\u201d Dorrie does finally arrive at her own wedding, and off she and Wilkie go to Australia.<\/p>\n
The story is comically romantic and touchingly sentimental. After all, Millicent, at some cost to herself, saves<\/em> Dorrie from being alone in a dirty, empty house. What is the cost? Millicent loves Dorrie and loses Dorrie. Millicent, after the wedding, tells Dorrie that Wilkie has the power to change everything, to give her adventures, to make her \u201ca queen.\u201d The reader wonders about that: whether Porter has, in real life, made Millicent a queen. (Maybe yes, maybe no.)<\/p>\nSome years later Dorrie writes to Millicent that she\u2019s been happy. The Queen of Tonga, she says. After Wilkie dies, Dorrie reports that she:<\/p>\n
stayed on, in Queensland, where she grew sugarcane and pineapples, cotton, peanuts, tobacco. She rode horses in spite of her size, and she had learned to fly an airplane. She took up travels on her own in that part of the world. She had shot crocodiles. She had died in the fifties, climbing up to look at a volcano.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThis is all possible. It is true that all this goes on in Queensland, where Wilkie has made Dorrie a queen. Dorrie has the unusual grit required to do all this. So the reader is left with two endings. One is the sentimental ending we require (because we too love Dorrie), and one is the \u201creal life\u201d ending — that possibly, out of love, Dorrie has made it all up to make Millicent happy.<\/p>\n
Somehow, the story is written so that it is possible for the reader to hold the two endings in mind simultaneously, the one where there was no hanky panky in the barn and Wilkie really was rich, and another where the irregularities of Dorrie\u2019s life may have included incest or Porter or more, and where Wilkie wasn\u2019t rich, and did not make Dorrie a queen, but Dorrie made the story up to make Millicent happy.<\/p>\n
Munro makes clear that we revise life to make it fit. Millicent eliminates sex. Dorrie assumes activities normally only available to men. Porter drinks in the barn. Millicent\u2019s friend Muriel, after quite a few years of numerous questionable affairs with married men, reforms and marries a minister.<\/p>\n
When Muriel and Millicent are making the wedding clothes, they refashion old straw sunhats with satin. Muriel re-designs an old evening blue evening dress for Millicent to wear as maid of honor (how appropriate, given Millicent\u2019s essential virginity). Some of the revisions involve stubborn sentimentality. Millicent is stubbornly oblivious to the fact that Muriel or even Dorrie may have been Porter\u2019s source of sex. As for Munro, although the story purports to be about an Australian falling in love with Dorrie, the reader realizes, as in other Munro stories, \u00a0that the real life and the true love are between the women, between what Millicent shares with Dorrie.<\/p>\n
Irving asks, if a writer isn\u2019t striving to address what we wish for, does the writing matter? Here, Munro proposes one love story and substitutes for it another; she proposes one ending and hints at another. And yet throughout, there is the sentimentalism that Irving urges upon the modern writer, the human yearning for the possibility of true love — what we all wish for.<\/p>\n
Munro is able to get away with deep sentiment because it is always undercut with the underbelly; sometimes Irving\u2019s longed for \u201cwishful thinking\u201d is laced with a loving, Dickensian comedy.<\/p>\n
As for \u201ca real life\u201d? A real life in Munro is understanding that you never have a complete understanding of people\u2019s statements, intentions, actions, or motivations. The whole thing (a real life) is a stab in the dark. Sometimes you don\u2019t see what is going on because of someone else\u2019s reserve, short-sightedness, obfuscation, outright lying, or emotional or mental defect. And sometimes those faults are your own. So making the best of it is the most you can hope for. You give a shape to things, you give a story to life, and you go with that. If you\u2019re Millicent, you can do pretty well because you have a streak of sweetness and the capacity for hard work.<\/p>\n
\u201cA Real Life\u201d is shot through with the weft of sentimentality and the warp of the comic-gothic, and taken as a shimmering whole, like Dickens, it succeeds. Mightily. Magisterially.<\/p>\n
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Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n