31 pages • 1 hour read
Alice MunroHow I Met My Husband
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Class Tensions and Conflict in Rural Postwar Society
Although Munro’s story was published in the mid-1970s, it is set in the postwar period of Munro’s adolescence. Edie, a narrator who is likely Munro’s contemporary, looks back to a coming-of-age experience in an older time, when the memory of the Second World War was fresh in Canadians’ minds. While no fighting took place on Canadian soil, as British Commonwealth citizens, Canadians flew to Europe to fight on the Allied side. The country endured shortages as a result of its contribution to the war effort, something which the story documents in the comment that “cars were still in short supply then, after the war” (57), the reason given for why Mrs. Peebles does not have her own vehicle. Prior to Chris’s entry into the community, the war functions as a reminder of violence and upheaval. The characters can measure their lifestyle and progress against it, judging how much or how little their lives have changed over a generation. While Edie’s farming family still lives without electricity and embraces old-fashioned maxims such as “have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die” (54), the Peebles subsist on convenience foods and jump on the new trend of buying up a farm to live in rather than work on.
The class tensions and mistrust in the community are exacerbated when displaced veteran pilot Chris Watters arrives. Chris portrayed as a stereotypical restless young veteran, putting off marriage and settling down and instead retaining his plane and living in a tent. His conduct towards Edie, kissing her, declaring he wants to spend “a nice long time of saying good-bye to you” (70), and promising to write a letter arranging a future meeting, is similar to romantic notions of lovers headed to war. Chris treats Edie like a girl he might have met out in action and will never see again, as he sentimentalizes their leave-taking and makes the promise of writing a letter, in the style of an amorous soldier with an uncertain life-span. Chris’s entrance, in which his plane seems to nearly collide with the Peebles’ house, is itself violent and disruptive, foreshadowing his effect on the narrative. He causes further havoc, taking over the old fairgrounds and tempting people out of their grounded, peacetime existence by charging them for rides. The fairgrounds, which might normally host fun fairs and circuses, are symbolic of a temporary disorder to routine. The plane rides occupy this space, both literally and metaphorically, as the community gets carried away and forgets their religious values, flying on Sundays “in spite of it being preached against from two pulpits” (65). The pilot brings with him a secular craze for pleasure and personal distinction to a community that is largely defined by conservative, pre-war morals.
However, the pleasure-seeking restlessness that he elicits does not only evoke the disruption of the war but heralds a new era. His visit catalyzes the hunger for change experienced by sexually naive, working-class Edie and listless wealthy housewife Mrs. Peebles. While both women want to retain the veneer of morally upright postwar femininity, the pilot visit makes them think about their own desires. As Mrs. Peebles contemplates taking flying lessons and Edie wears her boss’ clothes and tries to steal the pilot from his fiancée, they indicate their dissatisfaction with the limited roles for women in peacetime and imagine something different. At the end of the story, when Edie becomes the mailman’s wife and enters a typical peacetime domestic arrangement, she retains the story of her romance with the pilot as evidence of an independent sexuality that aligns with that of Munro’s contemporary readers.
A Woman In Her Own Company
Edie allows Carmichael his fantasy and keeps quiet about the full truth of how she met her husband because she wants to retain something for herself. Throughout the story, Edie consistently prefers to spend time in her own company. She loves being in the Peebles’ home alone, where she can explore their amenities to her satisfaction. As she compares elements such as prominent lighting fixtures and double sinks with her coal-oil lamp-lit home of origin, Edie experiments with being the kind of person who has greater expectations for her life. Indeed, she finds the pink and mirrored bathroom almost too pleasurable and limits her baths to once a week because “it seemed like asking too much, or maybe [risked] making it less wonderful” (57). Here, Edie shows awareness that limitations and restrictions can make pleasure more acute; a realization that reoccurs after visiting Chris in his tent and finding that although she enjoys the kisses, she cannot wait to get away from him because “she couldn’t get the pleasure” of his metaphorical “presents” until she can consider them alone (71). Alone, Edie is able to narrativize her experience and replay and refashion it in her imagination to her own satisfaction. Although there are no direct references to masturbation, the omissions that follow the details of Edie’s desire to contemplate Chris’s metaphorical gifts alone, or her admiration of herself naked in the bathroom mirror, provide space for such an act. While other love stories might feature a confidante or best-friend character to illuminate the topic of the heroine’s sexuality, Edie’s friend, Muriel Lowe, is left at home on the farm. Instead of exchanging views and comparing herself to other women, for Edie pleasure stems from reflecting on and taking ownership of her experiences.
Munro shows how spending time alone is important for a woman’s subjectivity. Away from others and her relationships and responsibilities to them, Edie can contemplate who she is becoming and experiment with new ways of being. Who women are for themselves, is a key component of Munro’s storytelling. Edie is a watershed figure, who keeps a strong sense of her personal experiences while she maintains the compliant front of a wife and mother. She sets a precedent for future generations of women who will let their inner sense of self inform how they present themselves to the outside world.
Solidarity and Mistrust Between Women
Munro presents a world in which women are extremely opinionated, with strong views on morality, social class, and domestic matters. Interestingly, none of the women in the story belong to the same social class and all are mistrustful of each other, even as they form alliances.
When the Peebles arrive, they are confident enough in their middle-class status that they class all the parochial residents as countrywomen without searching for distinctions between them. Edie, who considers her hardworking farming family superior to that of the chaotic Birds is annoyed that Mrs. Peebles does not seem to know “the difference” (54). The perceived difference between herself and someone like meddling, dialect-speaking Loretta gives Edie a sense of dignity. Were someone to consider her similar to Loretta, Edie’s social position and self-esteem would be threatened. She wants the Peebles with their superior lifestyle to give her credit for being above Loretta and also to maintain class distinction by discouraging Loretta’s visits to the house.
Regardless of the Peebles’ attitude, Edie brushes off any attempts of intimacy from Loretta by pretending that she has no idea what she is talking about when she enquires as to whether the Peebles use contraceptives. Interestingly, Loretta takes her revenge by positioning herself as superior to Edie during the conflict about Chris by claiming sexual maturity and moral distinction. Loretta classes Edie as one of “these girls,” meaning a species of “ignorant” country girl who is so deficient that she does not have a moral compass (73). Here, Loretta who makes herself an irresistible companion owing to her love of gossip and tries to ingratiate herself with her social superiors against the girl who has shunned her. Thus, instead of standing up for each other as working-class women, Edie and Loretta find that they have a better chance of personal improvement by pitting themselves against each other.
The working-class women’s attitude toward Mrs. Peebles is more complicated. While they envy her big house, nice clothes, and relative ease in being a housewife with hired help, they also find her seeming disinterest in the pursuits they take pride in threatening. Loretta, for example, who frequently compares her seven children to Mrs. Peebles’s two, continually makes snide comments to Edie about Mrs. Peebles’s easy life and the sinful methods used to procure it.
Edie is an accomplished cook and housekeeper who judges Mrs. Peebles as deficient for her inability to bake. Edie’s employer seems to defy everything her mother has taught her about being a valuable woman. While Mrs. Peebles has enough social standing to be indifferent to how her social inferiors think of her, there is a hint of insecurity when Edie notices how Mrs. Peebles prefers to think that Edie does not notice things about her. This is an attitude consonant with generations of middle-class employers, who retain a sense of power from the illusion that their private lives are unknown to the people who work for them.
While Mrs. Peebles permits a degree of social intimacy with Alice, an educated nurse from the city, Munro shows how each woman serves her own interests at the time of the confrontation in the kitchen. The confrontation, between Alice and Edie for the same man, indicates how women are pitted against each other in a patriarchal society where they must compete for the scarce resources that can improve their lives. The basis of the conflict is the assumption that there can only be one victor of Chris’s heart and only one woman who can occupy the moral high ground. Although Alice would like Mrs. Peebles to stand with her as a middle-class moral arbiter against lower-class Edie, Mrs. Peebles instead regrets the “awful scene” in her household and acts to restore peace and the illusion that nothing has happened. Stating that she does not believe Alice’s charges against Edie, Mrs. Peebles sends Edie to her room rather than subjecting her to Alice’s proposed virginity test. Still, any illusion that Mrs. Peebles is fighting on Edie’s behalf rather than her own desire for status quo is dispelled by her subsequent coldness towards Edie. Mrs. Peebles resents her new awareness of Edie as a vital, desiring young woman and not just someone who carries out chores.
While older Edie considers that “women should stick together” (72), in the story’s main narrative, her experience is the opposite. Edie finds that her solitary ventures empower her, rather than any non-existent solidarity with other women occupying different social and economic classes.
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By Alice Munro
