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GARDENS OF His MAKING: THREE STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO
She chooses the painful truth of her husband’s deed and her children’s death
instead, and thus she can start to take responsibility for herself by getting off
the bus.
“Vandals,” “Runaway” and “Dimensions” delve into the intricacies of rela¬
tionships by exploring our willingness to confront truth, our reactions when
facing knowledge that could potentially distance us from a significant other,
the sacrifices we make out of loyalty, not so much out of loyalty to others but
rather to our stories about who we are in relation to others. At the core of these
stories lies the question why we resist knowledge or truth when our relation¬
ships, even if they are abusive ones, are at stake.
CONCLUSION
As demonstrated, the three stories draw upon the archetypal elements of the
biblical Fall. The female protagonists, reminiscent of Eve, are tempted to
uncover hidden truths that lie within the stories’ silences. They face a pivotal
choice: remaining blindly loyal to an enigmatic but flawed patriarchal figure
or acknowledging his sins and thus risking the termination of their relation¬
ship within a figurative Garden of Eden. These Eves struggle with the decision,
as rejecting their Adams represents not only disloyalty but also a challenge to
their own self-identity shaped by their relation to the patriarchs.
Munro stated on several occasions that she started writing as a child because
she felt the ending of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” was so
unfair. She wanted to write a happy ending to it by all means. In the process
of becoming a writer, Munro started to show her characters in their complex
relationships. So successful was she in distancing herself from happy endings,
that only few of her narratives end happily. However, after she received the
Nobel Prize and after she had twice announced that she was retiring from
writing for good, she also said that she had surprised herself again by experi¬
menting with happy endings. The conclusion of “Dimensions” can be regarded
as one such experiment.
The three short stories represent a group of stories about all-consuming
love, where the female characters give themselves over to the romantic narra¬
tive about passionate love. In these stories, the heroine’s fulfilment in love is
possible, paradoxically, at the very moment when she is completely dissolved
in it. This is the concept of love in Del’s teenage fantasies in the early volume
of Lives of Girls and Women (1971), it appears later in Who Do You Think You
Are (1978), and in the stories of Open Secrets (1994) as well. The significance
of this group of short stories lies in that it shows both continuity and change
in Munro’s vision. Throughout Munro’s work, reality and knowledge are prom¬
inent issues. Between her early and later writings, we see a change in the way
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