By Mridula Koshy
I wrote a short story immediately after reading this one by Alice Munro. When I say immediately I mean to say immediately. I did not breathe, I was on fire, I wrote to put the fire out. Those who know me know I am never on fire. Later, I taught this story in a creative writing class as an example of how to read as a writer, i.e. to read for craft and technique, i.e. to read to imitate.
‘The View from Castle Rock’ confirmed for me that short stories were what I wanted to write. In Munro’s writing, generations live and breathe and die in the span of a few pages. Her short stories are celebrated for achieving what novels are charged with achieving and yet rarely do. They are celebrated for lighting up the landscape of our minds and our times. The contemporary novel – that unbearably bloated creation which confuses its desires with its ideas (think Franzen and Freedom) – has nothing on Munro or her form.
Her feather-stroke creations render the half of the world many novels ignore, the half that is the purview of women. While the world may yet belong to men and while we may yet wait to see what the world would look like if women were to take their seat at the table of power, we can read in Munro’s fiction that women carry on just the same, living and loving in trajectories of their own making. Without the approval of and freedom granted to men, they value themselves and their experiences and emotions as men do theirs. Not only in the content of her stories, i.e. in their focus on the domestic scene, but in the very matter-of-fact tone of her stories, and the due diligence with which she steers away from abstraction, she lets us know how truly independent of the larger world is the world of women. Her feather-stroke style, far from being slight, achieves exactitude in detail, which is again an argument for the importance of what is otherwise passed over in literature.
Here then is the brown dress in ‘Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage’:
‘A brown wool dress, lined, with a full skirt gracefully gathered, three-quarter sleeves and a plain round neckline. About as plain as you could get, except for a narrow gold belt.’
When the plain Johanna enters a dress shop for the first time in her life, tries on this brown dress and looks in the mirror, she sees her eyes ‘looked to be a deep brown, soft and shining.’ The dress, she tells the shopkeeper, will ‘likely be what I get married in.’ The ‘likely’ is because never having met the man with whom she has been exchanging letters, Johanna does not know if he is ‘some miserable farmer’ in need of a ‘workhorse’ or a ‘wheezy old half-cripple looking for a nurse,’ and in any case there has been no mention of marriage in his letters. The dress with its ‘noble swirl around her legs’ is the reason she can set off on this adventure. Johanna leaves her old life and the plot moves toward the unknown future powered by this brown dress, and more exactly by what every woman will understand is the exceptional experience of a dress that fits.
My story, written after reading ‘The View from Castle Rock,’ travels decades in the lives of three generations of one family. But here similarities between the stories end. My story about iron mongers and men who work with plaster of Paris has its own reason for being.
In fact, my excitement reading Munro that day had only a little to do with reading as a writer and so much more to do with reading as a reader. Quiet conviction in writing will always stir this reader as it seems to have members of the Nobel Committee. They have selected well in honouring this writer of short stories with the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Mridula Koshy is the author of the award-winning collection of short stories If It Is Sweet and a brand new novel Not Only The Things That Have Happened.