Alfrida. My father called her Freddie.

Alice Munro's Family Furnishings

Alex

Joe

Patricia

Nico

Martinez

Sweeney

Andersen

Jan

Alice Munro

• Female Canadian writer born in Wingham, Ontario in 1931
• three-time winner of Canada's Governor General Award
• First Canadian and 13th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature

Personal Life

• 1950: published first story while studying at UWO
• left school two years later to marry
• opened Munro Books
• 1972: divorced and moved back to Ontario
• received honorary LLD from UWO

Writing

• non-linear quality
• "human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style"
• develops female characters
• "everyman"
• confronts family customs and traditions

Family Furnishings

• Alfrida: first cousin of the narrator's father
• Father and Mother of the narrator
• Father: later remarried to stepmother of narrator
• Grandma of narrator: mother of narrator's father; raised Alfrida
• Bill: Alfrida's lover
• Woman at the end of the story: Alfrida's biological daughter

Main Characters

What is Inherited?

Narrator's Inheritance of Societal and Familial Norms

• positions in society: Alfrida's vs. the inherited belief of the narrator
• influence of Alfrida:
  • narrator's negotiation of acceptable marriage and personal choices
  • narrator's identity of a writer

Inherited Furnishings: Alfrida 

• Alfrida's relationship with Mother
  • Alfrida's daughter
• inheritance of the caretaker role

Valverde: Inheritance of Patriarchal Governance

Ontario Premier Mitchell Hepburn with the Dionne Quintuplets

three of the winners of the Toronto Stork Derby

Michael Bliss

• describes books that were early forms of sex education

• attempted to contain non-normative sexualities

• however, sex manuals also brought sexuality into being

• sexuality is something that children also engage in:

  • Freud’s notion of polymorphous perversity

Alice Munro

• the narrator, at age 15 or 16, smoked a cigarette that Alfrida offered her

  • “They (the narrator’s parents) pretended that it was a great joke”

  • “Ordinarily [her] mother would say that she did not like to see a woman smoke”

  • Freud: cigarette considered a phallic symbol

Alfrida

• Names: Freddie, Alfrida, Flora Simpson (Horse Henry & Alfrida)
• Appearance: at narrator’s home
  • back bare, lipstick, flat chest
  • Teeth: different colours, unique

Having guests over...

• Family (aunts, husbands, etc.): conventional

  • at the table: conversation food related

  • after dinner: division of public and private spheres

    • women: inside home, gossip, clean

    • men: outside home (on the porch), money investments and work

Having only Alfrida over...

• conversation at the table:

  • food (secondary, agreeable thing)

  • talk about public sphere (politics, humour, express opinions)

• conversation with narrator in kitchen:

  • “she mentioned queers, man-made bosoms, household triangles”

Sex and the Family

But it's my parents' stuff. It's family furnishings, and I couldn't let them go.

Family Furnishings

Sex and the Family

But the biggest difference was that she had gotten false teeth, of a uniform color, slightly overfilling her mouth and giving an anxious edge to her old expression of slapdash eagerness.

Aftereffects

Sex and the Nation

My parents would have been united in this. My mother had a horror of irregular sex or flaunted sex—of any sex, you might say, for the proper married kind was not acknowledged at all—and my father too judged these matters strictly at the time in his life.

Family Values

Sex and the Nation

It was kept one hundred percent secret that she had me.

Taboo Behaviour

Alfrida and the Narrator

I began to feel happy. Such happiness, to be alone.

Discussion

One day, they were out in the fields of stubble playing with my father's dog, whose name was Mack. That day the sun shone, but did not melt the ice in the furrows. They stomped on the ice and enjoyed its crackle underfoot.

You know Alfrida told me that your dad and her were walking home from school one day, this was in high school. They couldn't walk all the way together because, you know, in those days, a boy and a girl, they would just get teased something terrible.

Do you think that there is significance in Alice Munro writing Alfrida as not growing up with a mother? Could there be a correlation with not growing up with her biological mother and her non-conformity?

What is the purpose of Alfrida?

This was what I wanted, this was what I thoug'ht I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.