A potentially dangerous intruder fails to appear. A woman dreams of a long dead man from her past. A child hopes to make two teenage girls believe she is a ghost. A reminder that the King of France is bald. These are just a few of the obscure scenes that loosely constitute the ending of Alice Munro's A Good Wife's Love. In its final scene, each story resists conclusion, sometimes with the unexpected and delayed introduction of new characters, like the teenage girls in "My Mother's Dream," other times with the continued suspension of information, like the obscured image of Cortes Island. not visible to the narrator, even in her dreams, and again at other times in a seemingly incongruous anticlimax, when the gruesome conclusion promised by the eerie tension throughout "Save the Reaper" ultimately fails to materialize. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay It is this tendency toward inconclusive conclusions – “virtually no conclusions at all” – that, according to John Gerlach, “poses unusual problems for readers” (146). Focusing primarily on the collection's title story, Gerlach presents Gary Saul Morson's concept of literary sideshadowing as the best approach to dealing with Munro's often abortive endings. Gerlach's application of Morson's side shadow can be extended to the collection's final story, with the argument that Munro's tendency to evade or obscure endings is given a full thematic explanation through the ideas of death and consumption in “My Mother’s Dream”. The collection's final story surfaces in response to Gerlach's misgivings about the opening story. Although “My Mother's Dream” flirts with a familiarly coy ending as the collection's cornerstone, the story provides a satisfying thematic explanation for the inconclusive trend it also employs. Gerlach, of course, is not the first to notice this trend. of elusive conclusions in Munro's work. Noting that closure in Munro avoids even the traditional binary inherent in most open endings, resisting an "either/or" interpretation, Gerlach calls on Catherine Sheldrick Ross and her analysis of this tendency: This long-standing feature in Munro's work of resisting closure seems to be linked to his own deepest feelings about the enterprise of writing itself: on the one hand, there is infinite value in trying to understand everything, establish links, take care of messages; on the other hand, the patterns may be wrong, the connections wrong, and the attempt itself may be a kind of betrayal. (quoted in Gerlach 150). Ross's understanding of this feature as "long-standing" is not unfounded, in that her vaguely biographical analysis seems to evoke fears expressed not directly by Munro herself, but rather indirectly through the one of his characters in a much older collection. The final story from The Beggar Maid, "Who Do You Think You Are?" " contains a passage that expresses anxieties similar to those Ross attributes to Munro: The thing she was ashamed of, in acting, was that she might have been paying attention to the wrong things, reporting antics, while there always had something more, a tone, a depth, a light that she couldn't get and wouldn't get. And it wasn't just because of his acting that she suspected it. Everything she had done could sometimes be consideredlike an error. She had never felt this more intensely than when she spoke to Ralph Gillespie. (Munro 209). This mention of Ralph Gillespie, of course, is significant in that he is the main character responsible for moving The Beggar Maid away from a tidy conclusion. Not introduced until the collection's final story, Ralph Gillespie is inexplicably and unceremoniously thrust into the very heart of the narrative, undoing much of the reader's understanding of Rose's identity that had been constructed up to that point. The story, and the entire collection, then stumbles awkwardly toward a vague and unsatisfying conclusion, weighed down by the obscure but weighty implications of the completely unannounced suggestion that Rose had always "felt [Ralph's] life, close, closer close as the lives of the men she had loved, one crack from the other. his” (Munro, “Who” 210). Other earlier commentators on Munro have also taken note of this phenomenon. As early as 1978, Harvard Dahlie noted: "Worlds are always qualitatively altered at the end of Munro's stories, and although the causal changes have contributed to the destabilization of his protagonists, they characteristically indicate an expansion of possibilities rather than a restriction » (67). This sudden opening, rather than the expected narrowing of possibilities at the end of Munro's stories, fits well, as Gerlach argues, with Morson's notion of sideshadowing. “A narrative strategy that leaves time and choice open,” Morson's understanding of sideshadowing emphasizes that “to understand a moment is to understand not only what happened but also what could have happened else” (quoted in Gerlach 151). Although Munro's "obscured" conclusions certainly invite speculation, it is questionable whether they provide Morson's decidedly optimistic "understanding" of all the possibilities suggested. Nevertheless, although this sudden uncertainty at the end of Munro's stories is often shocking in fiction, this lack of conclusion actually reflects the real world's experience of time and events much more closely. As Gerlach points out, the ending of "A Good Wife's Love" leaves the reader "on the brink of an expanding future—not what we usually expect from the conclusion of a story, but it’s exactly where we usually find ourselves at any given time in life.” our lives” (154). In this way, the unwavering dedication to an unwavering representation of the absolute but uncertain present that leads to one of the "most haunting and unsettling qualities" of Munro's fiction is perhaps its most realistic manifestation of verisimilitude (Dahlie 61 ). From here, Gerlach arrives at the recommendation to "engage in Morson's side shadow, experiencing history as we experience the present moment of our lives" (154). While Gerlach's reading is primarily concerned with the definition and application of Morson's side shadow to Munro's fiction, it invites speculation as to why Munro uses this technique in the first place. Although Ross sees Munro's tendency to "resist closure" as a reflection of his own fears about his ability to accurately capture and report reality, this tendency does not necessarily reflect such a biographical approach. Instead, a theme of preservation through the unfinished or unconsummated in Munro's fiction, particularly throughout A Good Wife's Love and to some extent its chronological successor, Hatred , Friendship, Courtship, Love, Marriage, arises in response to this question, emphasizing that Munro's resistance to closure reflects the faith of these storiesin the powers of the unconsumed. This notion of the unconsummated in Munro is not without precedent. Once again, Dahlie highlights this “recurring failure to achieve a satisfying or lasting human relationship” apparent in some of Munro's early fiction. Borrowing the term "unconsummated relationships" from "The Peace of Utrecht," Dahlie suggests that Munro's fiction can "benefitingly be examined in terms of themes of isolation and rejection, which manifest themselves in situations where relationships human beings are rarely cemented or consumed” (58). ). While Dahlie sees this failure as largely negative, "characterized by undercurrents of despair and hysteria", other readings of this theme – at least in Munro's later fiction – provide arguments for see it as an ultimately advantageous technique for preserving possibility, or at least the illusion of possibility, in the lives of his characters. In “My Mother’s Dream,” inconsumption mainly takes the form of premature death. In a willful shyness characteristic of Munro's fiction, the first character to benefit from the conservative powers of the unconsummated is an entirely peripheral and nameless benefit, known throughout her brief appearance only as "the girl who cried at the church and who seems to be crying again.” Imagining this girl as a potential lover of the late George, Jill notes – with little apparent bitterness – that this girl is now free to “remember that she was in love with George and to think that he was in love with her – despite everything – and never be afraid of what he may do or say to prove her wrong” (Munro 307). George's death preserves for this girl the viable idea that he might have loved her, and their unconsummated relationship—however imaginary it may be—is free to remain a perpetually unexploited but ultimately uncontested possibility. For these characters, a sudden or early death or unconsummated ending has the same effect of preserving possibilities in their lives as Munro's open-ended conclusions in the stories themselves. Just as Munro's resistance to committing to the conclusion opens up many hidden possibilities at the end of a story, premature deaths or unfinished endings "leave time and choice open" for his characters, who are free to to build and indulge in the illusions of a life that will never end. be, but could have been safely done now (Gerlach 151). Perhaps this is why George himself displays such a cavalier attitude towards the possibility of his death, casually declaring himself "gone to die a hero on the field of Passchendaele" (Munro 301). George's mild indifference, or perhaps even his vague ambition for death, is less significant in itself than in its later reappearance in his daughter, the story's narrator, whose desire to die does not reflect an attempt to preserve the possibility of a love story, but rather an independence. of which femininity will deprive her. Reflecting on her recovery from her first brush with death in childhood, the narrator remarks: It seems to me that it was only then that I became a woman. I know that the matter was decided long before I was born and was clear to everyone from the beginning of my life, but I believe that it was only when I decided to come back that I gave up the fight against my mother (which must have been a fight for something like total abandonment) and when in fact I chose survival rather than victory (death would have been victory), I took my feminine nature. (337). Here, the narrator definitively describes a connection between femininity and sacrifice that appears throughout the collection. The narrator identifies the struggle betweenher and her mother as a struggle for total abandonment. However, once she has accomplished this – Jill's abandonment and defeat symbolized by her inability to play the violin – the narrator ultimately claims to have chosen "survival over victory". By refusing the victory that the narrator would have won over Jill in death, she herself surrenders. The narrator links this abandonment not only to survival, but also to femininity. Thus, the narrator establishes a link between femininity and sacrifice, while implying that sacrifice is necessary for the woman's survival. The narrator considers death a victory because it would have spared him the need to “settle down” and sacrifice himself. In death, the narrator would have been able to preserve her independence and unfractured identity, rather than surrender to the obligatory sacrifice and compromise required of her gender. Although the narrator ultimately chooses sacrifice over victory, she maintains a fascination and perhaps vague desire for death, as the story ends around her fantasy of being mistaken for a ghost. This idea appears in a more fragmented form in the collection. Previous story “Jarkarta”. Using an intertextual discussion of DH Lawrence's "The Fox," the story illustrates an idea that connects love with female abandonment, implying that love without such sacrifice is somehow incomplete . "Jakarta" continues by exploring the main character's simultaneous reactions and anxieties regarding this notion as she, much like the narrator of "My Mother's Dream", struggles to preserve her identity against gendered ideas of femininity. which demand that she approach womanhood and motherhood as a voluntary sacrifice. Munro summarizes the story of DH Lawrence which provokes the metatextual debate: The soldier knows that he will not be truly happy until the woman gives him her life, as she has not done so far. March still struggles against him, to separate herself from him, she makes them both darkly unhappy by her efforts to cling to her female soul, to her female spirit. She has to stop this – she has to stop thinking and stop wanting and let her consciousness collapse, until it is submerged in his. (84). Kath's negative reaction to the story highlights her dislike of the traditional roles of wife and mother and their implications of self-sacrifice. However, Kath also sees marriage and motherhood as inevitable evils, "an additional set of exams to pass." She writes her married name with “a sense of relief,” knowing that she passed the test adequately (82). However, in realizing these expectations, Kath is simultaneously aware that she is inevitably sacrificing her individuality – an idea reflected in Lawrence's story. The story makes Kath "bloated and choked with incoherent protests." Hearing Sonje say that her own happiness depends on her husband, Kath is also shocked and disgusted. However, Kath cannot escape some sort of guilt in that she has not submitted as fully to her husband as Sonje or Lawrence would deem appropriate. Kath fears that this is proof that she "missed love" and worries, against her will, that Sonje considers her "a woman who has not been offered the prostration of love" ( 86). " and "My Mother's Dream" is the occurrence and thematic significance of breastfeeding, a recurring motif in Munro's later fiction. It is important to note that both stories consider breastfeeding as a form of maternal sacrifice which consecrates the mother-child relationship In an attempt to preserve their individuality by avoiding this consumption, the characters of both...