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GARDENS OF His MAKING: THREE STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO works as a chambermaid cleaning after other people). She wanders aimlessly through her life, and to her own surprise, she starts to visit her husband in the asylum for the criminally insane because “[w]hat other use could she have in the world ... why is she here if not to at least listen to Lloyd?” (Munro, “Dimensions”) It is here that he comes up with a seductive story that the children are living happily in another dimension. Although Doree/Fleur is intrigued by the possibility that her children do not have to be dead, that they can continue to live in another dimension, she eventually moves on, however promising this other, alternate reality may be. Yet, she acknowledges their children’s death not as a result of the temptation by a friendly community of women (Maggie and Mrs Sand) but as that of an accident she witnesses. At the centre of all three narratives there is a heroine trapped in an abusive relationship, who deliberately ignores or avoids information, signs, memories that might suggest negative or disturbing possibilities about the enigmatic hero of the stories. In these stories, Munro’s Adams are dark romantic heroes, stern, secretive, unpredictable, always ready for controversy, men who live by their own rules. Bea thinks of life with Ladner as learning to live inside a man’s insanity. She had a couple of friends then, to whom she wrote and actually sent letters that tried to investigate and explain this turn in her life. She wrote that she would hate to think she had gone after Ladner because he was rude and testy and slightly savage [...] She would hate to think so, because wasn’t that the way in all the dreary romances—some brute gets the woman tingling and then it’s goodbye to Mr. Fineand-Decent? No, she wrote, but what she did think—and she knew that this was very regressive and bad form—what she did think was that some women, women like herself, might be always on the lookout for an insanity that could contain them. For what was living with a man if it wasn’t living inside his insanity? A man could have a very ordinary, a very unremarkable, insanity, such as his devotion to a ball team. But that might not be enough, not big enough—and an insanity that was not big enough simply made a woman mean and discontented. Peter Parr, for instance, displayed kindness and hopefulness to a fairly fanatical degree. But in the end, for me, Bea wrote, that was not a suitable insanity. (Munro, “Vandals” 268-269) In “Runaway” Clark is introduced as follows: “Clark had fights not just with the people he owed money to. His friendliness, compelling at first, could suddenly turn sour. There were places he would not go into, where he always made Carla go, because of some row.” “‘You flare up,’ said Carla. “That’s what men do’ [responds Clark]” (Munro). Likewise, in “Dimensions” Lloyd is introduced as a person who holds strong opinions and judgements about others. For him, people are either enemies or «49 «
