“The Beating of a Child Was By No Means Reprehensible”: Alice Munro, Freud, and the Long Aftermath of Crimes Against Children

A question from a student about Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (the question being whether it’s autobiographical) sent me back to her terrifying story “Royal Beatings” this morning. Then an interview that I read recently had me searching for Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.” This will become a longer critical piece. Just as a placeholder, here, a few quotations and observations.

Munro, from an interview with Lisa Dickler Awano, published in 2013 in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

Awano: In the story “Dear Life,” you explore the paradox of your relationship with your parents.

Munro: It’s love and fear and dislike. It’s all those things.

Awano: You keep coming back, in your later work, to your relationship with your father, who was an accomplished writer and an extremely sensitive person, and a reader all his life.

Munro: He was, yes.

Awano: A person who, in many of your stories, seems to be a doppelganger for you, the developing young writer. But then there’s this immovable fact, that you refuse to turn away from, which is that he hit you with a belt when you were growing up.

Munro: That’s true. And I could say, “Well, of course, this is much more common in that period–most of the people I knew got beaten occasionally.” And the beating of a child was by no means reprehensible. It was a natural way to get the child whipped into shape. Also, because of poverty, and the need for the child to contribute labor to the household, and not just be an interesting fixture of a child growing up as it seems to me that children can be now. So all this was very practical, and needed to be done. And it was also very terrifying and probably–a lot of people would say–it was destructive. I can’t think that way because I don’t . . . I still reject it and feel a kind of horror about it to myself. I feel that I was an unworthy person, and that’s what it makes you feel. [my italics] But also I realize that this is what happened at the time, and you can’t shy away from that. And you also can’t shy away from why it had to happen. There just wasn’t time or money to bring up children in a way that took account of their needs–why they’re behaving in a certain way. And also, there isn’t time for the children to be, you know, mouthy or talk back. You just can’t afford to have this going on. Because what’s going on, chiefly, is making enough to live on, where everybody has to work and be useful to the family. Because I was an extremely rebellious child, at least I had ideas that I was eager to get out of [sic], I would just sauce back anybody. And all this was counterproductive as far as the family went.

I can’t convey how sad I find this.

Munro begins with a matter-of-fact explanation, briefly lapses into traumatic memories and perhaps a gap that is the ellipsis, and provides a lucid sociological explanation for . . . beating children. Because they have ideas they want to share. So Freud, from “A Child Is Being Beaten.” Remember, it begins with Freud articulating this as a common fantasy, one with “feelings of pleasure attached to it.” Meanwhile in Munro’s “Royal Beatings”, from the 1977 version where the character is named Nadine, not Rose:

“Her father blocks her. Not an ounce of courage or of stoicism in her, it seems. She runs, she screams, she implores. Her father is after her, cracking the belt when he can, then abandoning it and using his hands. Bang over the ear, then bang over the other ear. Back and forth, her head ringing. Bang in the face. Up against the wall and bang in the face again. He shakes her, he kicks her legs. She is incoherent, insane, shrieking, ‘Forgive me! Oh, please forgive me!’”

I’ve been thinking about abuse and apologies. The wrong people often apologize; when the right people apologize, they often use the wrong words. That, in three sentences, is what I’m writing 20,000 words about. Possibly I should save myself some time and many sentences, and be more terse about my topic. But here’s a passage that comes a bit earlier in “Royal Beatings”:

“The belt is coming off, but not hastily. Now it is being grasped at the necessary point. ‘All right, you.’ He comes over to Nadine, pushes her off the table. His face, like his voice, is entirely out of character. He is like a bad actor who turns a part grotesque. It is as if he is savoring and insisting on just what is shameful and terrible about this, so that Nadine will have no doubt about it, so that he himself will have no doubt. That does not mean that he is pretending, that he is not real. He is real and he is acting. Nadine knows it; she knows everything about him.”

The intimate knowledge of the child about her abuser. The knowledge that makes a traumatized child run to the abuser, and not the other parent who doesn’t intervene, because only one of them has real power. What happens to us when we are young changes our brains and may affect epigenetics.

Alice Munro was beaten as a child. As an accomplished writer in her 80s, she was still making excuses for her abuser. And she was entirely estranged from her daughter, who had been abused in her youth by Munro’s partner, Gerald Fremlin. Events that Munro didn’t know about until the daughter was in her 20s. Or knew/didn’t know, because she seems to have intuited a number of things about Fremlin, whom she suspected at one time of being a murderer.

“Royal Beatings” was published in The New Yorker in March of 1977. A year later, it appeared as the first story in a hastily but significantly revised version of Who Do You Think You Are? Munro famously made last-minute revisions to excise most of the work’s meta-fictional frame. Instead of sets of stories about two characters–one of them a writer, Janet–the book was revised so that Rose, an actress, is the protagonist of all of the pieces.

In 1978, Munro was living in Ontario with Gerald Fremlin, and had summer and vacation time with her youngest daughter. She’d been with Fremlin since 1975, as he was a college friend, and she described him in a letter to another friend in glowing terms. “This time it’s real,” she insisted before adding that Fremlin, who was several years older than Munro, was “50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing–grown-up.”

I’m thinking of the title of an O’Connor story. I’m also thinking of a different NYer article titled, simply, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” The women writers of my past, my idols, have been critically re-assessed and found lacking. My 23-year-old has expressed qualms about Virginia Woolf. Oof. As I continue working on Munro, I feel less like I’m doing literary criticism and more like I’m compiling a crime dossier. I’m not yet certain if this is a valid project.