Wenlock ridge
Wenlock's ridge (originally Wenlock Edge , 2005 and 2009) is a story by Alice Munro . The story deals, among other things, with dealing with sex and eroticism in dependency relationships between men who have an income and women who are economically not in this situation, as well as scheming. The differences between the two published versions, which are 4 years apart, are significant.
action
The first-person narrator is a student when Nina is assigned to her as a roommate, and she tells her something about her life and about Gemma, the youngest of her three children, whose life she was unable to save. When Nina falls ill one day and cannot keep a Saturday evening appointment with Mr. Purvis, a rich old man who sent her to study and who has her shadowed by a Mrs. Winner, her roommate steps in for her. The first-person narrator is in the mood for a good meal because she knows invitations from a cousin of her mother, Ernest Botts, who takes her to a good restaurant every other Sunday. The price of this invitation is to have her appear naked, both at mealtimes and afterwards in the rich man's library, where he can be read before he goes to bed and dismisses her. On the way home, when she imagines how she would talk to Nina, she finds out on arrival that Nina is not there. Some of her belongings are gone too. Nina first appears on the phone as Ernie Botts' new lover. After a short time Nina disappeared there too and it remains to be seen where to go. Ernie tells the narrator something from Nina's previous life about Mr. Purvis, which contradicts the version the narrator heard from Nina. The plot ends with the first-person narrator sending an envelope containing an anonymous note with which she wants to reveal Ernest Botts' address to Mr. Purvis.
Interpretations
In Wenlock's ridge , the first-person narrator describes a humiliation, says Werner Schuster in his review of the volume. This is about ritual humiliation in shady urban spaces, writes Isla Duncan in her analysis in 2011. It is only in old age that the narrator understands how deeply her own agreement to the Saturday evening arrangement has hurt her, says Sylvia Staude. The first-person narrator felt confident and cool that evening with the idea that “everyone in the world was in a certain way naked” and only later painfully realized that she felt shame about what had happened because she consented says Martin Ebel. He describes Nina as "an externally determined, life-torkler". Duncan thinks that Nina's kind of extreme is that of calm passivity. Lorna Bradbury has reviewed the volume for the British Telegraph and points out that it is not just about one, but several relationships: that of the first-person narrator to her mother's strange cousin, the one between the two roommates, of whom the someone has already had a marriage and three births behind them that exploited them and in return had to endure a brutal act of revenge. This work is perhaps the most disturbing story in Too Much Luck, and the strange reading scene is one of the most brilliant in the volume.
Narrative technique
In terms of narrative technique, Wenlock Edge is constructed in interlocking containers (emboîtement), as Joanna Luft worked out in her literary analysis from 2010 based on the magazine version of the work (2005). The construction as well as the course of the plot are closely related to the Middle English work Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , for which the first-person narrator is writing a term paper for her studies. The narrator is similar to Gawain, because he too misjudges the situation in which he finds himself, makes compromises and is ashamed when he finds out the truth. Similar to Sir Gawain , the emboîtement in Wenlock Edge reveals both treachery and complicity in relation to the relationship arrangements in which the main character himself got involved. There are two types of emboîtement: once that of space and once that of events.
Emboîtement of the room : There is a double frame made up of two rooms. And in the middle, Joanna Luft sees the two rooms in Mr. Purvis' house. This central square is framed by the visit to the city library before and the one in the college library after the visit to Mr. Purvis; and in the extreme through the guest room in the Old Chelsea restaurant, where the narrator meets with Ernie at the beginning and end of the story.
Emboîtement of events : This is similar in the outermost framework and in the center to the previous emboîtement. In between, according to Joanna Luft's analysis, there is not just one other frame, but three, namely, viewed from the inside out: immediately to the left and right of the dinner at Mr. Purvis, before the illness of Nina, then Nina's absence; in the next outer frame in front of that the scene in which Mrs. Winner is outwitted for the first time and after Nina's absence the second outwitting of Mrs. Winner. In the second outermost frame is the influence of Mr. Purvis on Nina on the left and his influence on the narrator on the right. And the outermost framework is, as with the emboîtement of the room, eating with Ernie.
According to Luft, the version from 2009 deviates significantly from the original. As a result, references that generate irony through Munro's redesign have disappeared. In addition, the similarities with Sir Gawain are less clear in the later version. Luft regrets these changes and finds the first version more successful and, above all, more edgy.
Editions and versions
Wenlock Edge in Alice Munro's thirteenth volume of short stories, To Much Happiness (2009), comprises around 30 pages in English. In German, “Der Grat von Wenlock” is included in the volume Too much luck (2011).
The first version of Wenlock Edge was published in the December 5, 2005 issue of The New Yorker . This magazine version has the same number of sections as the later book version, namely 14, but the sections are divided differently because some section changes are in different places.
For the second version, something was deleted in many places, several wording were replaced by different ones, and there are passages in which half or whole sentences have been added. This is the case, for example, between the previous sections 5 and 6, which make up the fifth section in the second version. Nina and the narrator have cheated on the spy and Mrs. Winner calls to find out if everything is ok. The following was added (the new insert in italics): "" ... I'm fine. Absolutely. Night-night. " She came swaying and smiling up the stairs. "Mrs. Winner's got herself in hot water tonight." Then she made a little leap and started to tickle me, as she did every once in a while, without the lease warning, having discovered that I was extraordinarily ticklish. One morning Nina did not get out of bed. She said she had a sore throat, a fever. "
The version from 2009 has a different ending than the original. From "people passing me on their way to classes, on their way to have a smoke and maybe a game of bridge in the Common Room.", The 2005 version continues like this: "Most of them on a course, as I what, of getting to know the ways of their own wickedness. I kept on learning things. I learned that Uricon, the Roman Camp, is now Wroxeter, a town on the Severn River. ”[End of the 2005 version] In comparison, the later version from“ in the Common Room. ”Says:“ On their way to deeds they didn't know they had in them. ”[end of 2009 version].
Research literature
- Joanna Luft, Boxed In: Alice Munro's “Wenlock Edge” and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 35, Number 1 (2010).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Werner Schuster, Munro, Alice: Too much luck 1–5 , eselsohren.at , June 7, 2011
- ↑ a b Isla Duncan, Alice Munro's Narrative Art , Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2011, pp. 18, 159.
- ↑ Sylvia Staude, Alice Munro's Masterful New Stories. The double triumph of storytelling , fr-online.de , May 31, 2011
- ↑ Martin Ebel, Mrs. Chekhov. Alice Munro's masterful tales are called "Too Much Luck". They ensure movement and restlessness well beyond reading - and happy readers , tagesanzeiger.ch , June 16, 2011
- ↑ Lorna Bradbury, Alice Munro. Lorna Bradbury finds Alice Munro's stories strange and shimmering , telegraph.co.uk , August 15, 2009
- ↑ Joanna Luft, Boxed In: Alice Munro's “Wenlock Edge” and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 35, Number 1 (2010).
- ↑ Alice Munro: Wenlock Edge , The New Yorker , December 5, 2005, free to read on the web.