I don’t normally quote myself, but this is a bit of a placeholder for work that I’ve done, am in the process of completing, and anticipate doing in the future.
“In a more subtle example in the title story of Open Secrets, cooking a particular food functions as a culinary mnemonic device for traumatic knowledge that can only surface indirectly. Maureen is married to a man whose stroke precipitated a desire for violent sex that she feels obligated to conceal in order to protect the privacy of the domestic sphere from the gossip of outsiders. During one of his assaults, Maureen removes herself by thinking about the custard she planned to make later that day. This violence becomes metonymically linked to a parallel marital conspiracy of silence. Maureen’s self-protective compartmentalization has distanced her from her own experience of violation as well as from her recollection of a telling gesture that she witnesses and that suggests the likely culprit in the disappearance of a young girl. But when she is making custard, her forbidden knowledge of male violence surfaces. Maureen has a fleeting image of pressing a hand against a hot stove element, ‘just long enough to scorch the flesh . . . to scorch but not to maim. In silence this is done, and by agreement–a brief and barbaric and necessary act’ of punishment.[i] The crime remains unsolved but will resurface throughout Maureen’s life when she makes custard: ‘In kitchens hundreds and thousands of miles away, she’ll watch the soft skin form on the back of a wooden spoon and her memory will twitch, but it will not quite reveal to her this moment when she seems to be looking into an open secret, something not startling until you think of trying to tell it.’[ii] Again, then, we return to the skin, the surface concealing what lies beneath.”
This is from an essay on Alice Munro and Mary Pratt that I published in a collection of essays, which had their origin in a truly fabulous academic conference. One of the best I’ve ever attended, it was organized by Dorothy Barenscott and Shelley Boyd at Kwantlen Polytechnic U., back in 2015 or so. The essay volume, Canadian Culinary Imaginations, has received less attention than I think some of the outstanding contributions deserve. Interdisciplinary work can be tricky, and the volume is unwieldy in size, shape, and scope. But it’s worth a look, because there are some brilliant pieces.
I’m not counting mine among those. I wrote and revised and edited while dealing with a 4/4 teaching load, and navigating an academic harassment complaint that I initiated and that taught me a great deal about how power works in universities; tenure protects much more than freedom of expression. That complaint process ultimately took me out of the university entirely for some time, and it wasn’t clear, even as I finished this piece, if it would ever “count” in the way that academic publications are supposed to.
This isn’t intended as special pleading but as context, because there was much more I could have done to push my argument about how Munro’s writing and Pratt’s paintings have key parallels.
And now here’s another one: both women tolerated the men in their lives pursuing (at best) and sexually abusing (at worst) much younger women. Pratt’s husband, a celebrated painter in his own right, had a penchant for his young artists’ models who were in their late teens and early twenties, typically. Moral blameworthiness here is different than in the instance of Munro’s long-time partner Gerald Fremlin, with his predilection for what he terms “nymphets,” borrowing Nabokov’s stomach-churning (and meant to be ironic!) phrase to describe his attraction to children.
Last year I drafted the first act of a play about Mary Pratt’s relationship to one of her husband’s models, Donna Meaney, who became a key figure in her own figurative paintings. And then I met Donna at a Toronto art gallery and my perspective shifted a bit. I’m still thinking through the play, and how dynamics of class and geography complicate relationships of power/gender/sexuality.
But now I’m back to “Open Secrets,” which I discuss in my passage quoted at length above. What I’m thinking is that Munro kept telling on herself. And literary critics, trained to carefully distinguish between biography and literature, kept ignoring her hints. We didn’t ask the right questions in our criticism, or in the rare interviews that Munro consented to, and we need to think about how we can do better as we address representations of power and violence in writing.
My own resolutions are to grapple with complexity and nuance, but maintain a moral compass.
Here’s what’s coming next for this site regarding Munro:
Some writing on “A Wilderness Station” and “Cortes Island,” both murder mysteries with historical crimes.
More writing on “Open Secrets” and the Lynne Harper/Steven Truscott case, and Munro’s astonishing fear that Fremlin might have been Harper’s murderer.
Returning to a piece I published on intellectual disabilities and violence/stigma/shame, in which I discuss yet another Munro murder story, “Child’s Play.”
And so on. It’s going to be a long winter. Thanks for reading.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 