Re-reading Alice

The professor was "nothing to write home about", as my darling late mother used to say about a lot of things, but the course material was excellent.  Three years ago, I took an on-line short-story course -- not to brag, but I probably could have given it, so mediocre was the teacher.  Sorry, but I do not subscribe to the vanity of false modesty. 

One of the books I read was 'The Art of Short Fiction, An International Anthology'.  It featured excellent writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar All Poe, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Anne Porter, Doris Lessing, Mavis Gallant, Flannery O'Connor, Margaret Laurence, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, Bharati Mukherjee, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Neil Bissoondath...............and Alice Munro.  If you wanted to learn how to write, these were the authors you read.  I devoured them. 

This afternoon I pulled the book from a shelf and re-read Alice Munro's 'Lives of Girls and Women'.  Yes, she certainly deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature.  This was an excellent story, beautifully written.  Composed in 1971, it so very accurately depicted the shifting mores and morals of women in both my mother's generation and mine.  In the former, nothing sexual ever happened; in mine young girls were subjected to sexual abuse, but did not recognize it as such.

Basically, the plot revolves around a young teen, who lives with her mother and vicariously explores sexuality in secret with her school chum -- both of whom get no information from their mothers about the perils that surround them.  Needless to say, one of the girls is assaulted by a grown man, but feels nothing but curiosity about the bizarre encounter. 

Linking the generations, Munro's "mother" character says to her daughter at the end of the story:

"There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and woman.  Yes.  But it is up to us to make it come.  All women have had up till now has been their connection with men....No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals.  He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.  Tennyson wrote that.  It's true.  Was true. 

"But I hope you will -- use your brains.  Use your brains.  Don't be distracted over a man, your life will never be your own.  You will get the burden, a woman always does.....It is self-respect I am really speaking of.  Self-respect."

How perfect was that in 1971.  How perfect is it today.