A woman's love (narrative)

Alice Munro , Nobel Prize in Literature 2013

The Love of a Woman (originally The Love of a Good Woman , 1996/1998) is a short story by Alice Munro that was first published in The New Yorker with the subtitle "A Murder, a Mystery, a Romance". The story is about people from different generations who live in the same place, about their cohesion, about memory, about love and calling and about a possible murder.

The work is one of the author's longest stories. The version from 1998 comprises approx. 75 pages and consists of a preamble of one page and parts "I" - "IV" with a total of 27 sections. The third part has only a single section 6 pages long. It depicts a murder.

• (Opening credits)
• I. Jutland
• II. Heart Failure
• III. Mistake
• IV. Read

action

In 1951, the optician drowned in the river, it says in the opening credits, where the text of a plaque is reproduced that was attached to his medical instruments in a regional museum: It was probably found by the anonymous donor. Part I describes the social background of three boys and how they one day see a car stuck in the river and the optician in the car, what they initially want to keep quiet at home and then report to the police the next day when a prank occurs. Part III is a flashback and is framed by parts II and IV, which deal with the life and work of the nurse Enid, who is hardly with herself before being ready for action and occasionally even has to involve her mother in order to get by with work . Enid has a sexual dream and a physical interest in his ex-classmate, Rupert, but there are obstacles that become clearer and less clear as the story progresses. The ending, which takes place on a river, is open.

Interpretative approaches

Judith McCombs thinks that Munro is reworking much older archetypes with the stories associated with the characters. Torn apart elements from Grimm's fairy tales would be brought back to life, turned and recombined. Dennis Duffy sees three points in this work at which Munro brings up the paradox of experience. In terms of content, this is the ambiguity of the end and the enigmatic beginning of the narrative. On the level of the narrative structure, there is an elaboration of the paradox in the role that the three boys assume when they find the optician in the river and soon afterwards disappear from the narrative. The physical is thematized in a way and a tone that is reminiscent of the first letter to the Corinthians . It's about unwashed bodies and nicotine vapors, spoiled food, the smells of the dead and dying, etc. Alone the elegant Enid and the splashing little daughters of a dying woman and the optician, who is already dead, don't need a bath, says Duffy. In addition, as the end of the story suggests, water is not only a danger, it is also sexy.

Munro writes: "The sudden shift from sex to murder to cooperation between married couples struck me as one of those marvelous, improbable and acrobatic demonstrations of human behavior."

Editions and versions

"The Love of a Woman" is the cover story of Munro's ninth collection of short stories (1998), which appeared in German in 2000. The long work was first published on December 23, 1996 in The New Yorker . The later version was again included in Munro's English-language selection volumes in 2003 and 2011.

The 1996 magazine version and the 1998 book version differ in that the book version is without subtitles. Furthermore, in the fact that at the beginning of the third section a word repetition was omitted ( marked in italics ): “It was their first time out this year. First , they had come across the bridge over the Peregrine River ... "and in the fourth section has been shortened by one word:" They had something close in front of them, a picture in front of their eyes that came between them and the world, which was exactly the thing most adults seemed to have. "At the end of the tenth section, the two sentences are missing in the book version ( marked in italics ):" 'Your fly's undone', he said. Then they all whooped an ran away. The jolt of freedom, the joy of outrage, the uttermost trespass . ”In the sixteenth section a description was shortened by one adjective (“ her dark thick hair ”), in the eighteenth the following words were replaced:“ But there / this was a good house still, that scrubbing and painting could restore. But / Though what could you do about the ugly brown paint that had been recently and sloppily applied to the frontroom floor? "

literature

• John Gerlach, To Close or Not To Close: Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman , in: Journal of Narrative Theory , 2007 Winter; 37 (1): 146-58.
• Dennis Duffy, 'That Rubbish about Love': Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman and Indeterminacy, in: Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction , 2006 Spring; 6 (2): 36-41.
• Catherine Sheldrick Ross, 'Too Many Things': Reading Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman , in: University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities , 2002 Summer; 71 (3): 786-810.
• Judith McCombs, "Searching Bluebeard's Chambers: Grimm, Gothic, and Bible Mysteries in Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman, " in: American Review of Canadian Studies , 2000 Autumn; 30 (3): 327-48.
• Mary Condé, The Ambiguities of History in Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman , in: Etudes Canadiennes / Canadian Studies: Revue Interdisciplinaire des Etudes Canadiennes en France , 1999; 46: 123-130.
• Dennis Duffy, "A Dark Sort of Mirror": The Love of a Good Woman as Pauline Poetic, in: The Rest of the Story. Critical Essays on Alice Munro . Edited by Robert Thacker, Toronto: ECW Press, 1999, pp. 169-190. ISBN 1-55022-392-5
• Ildikó de Papp Carrington, 'Don't Tell (on) Daddy': Narrative Complexity in Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman , in: Studies in Short Fiction , 1997 Spring; 34 (2): 159-170.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John Gerlach, To Close or Not To Close: Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman , in: Journal of Narrative Theory , 2007 Winter; 37 (1): 146-58, 147.
2. ↑ McCombs, Judith. “Searching Bluebeard's Chambers: Grimm, Gothic, and Bible Mysteries in Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman ”, in: The American Review of Canadian Studies . 30.3 (2000): 327-48. 17 April 2008, p. 330. Referenced in: Footnote 4 in: 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).
3. ^ Dennis Duffy, "A Dark Sort of Mirror": The Love of a Good Woman as Pauline Poetic, in: The Rest of the Story. Critical Essays on Alice Munro . Edited by Robert Thacker, Toronto: ECW Press, 1999, pp. 169-190. ISBN 1-55022-392-5
4. ↑ In the original: "The sudden switch from sex to murder to marital cooperation seemed to me one of those marvelous, unlikely, acrobatic pieces of human behavior", quoted in Duffy 1999 from: "Contributors' notes." Prize Stories 1997: The O Henry Awards. Ed. Larry Dark. New York: Anchor / Doubleday, 1997, pp. 442-443.
5. ↑ See also the detailed list of Munro's works in the English language Wikipedia.