It has been said of Anton Chekhov, the renown Russian short-story writer, that in all of his “work, there is never exactly a point. Rather we see into someone’s hear – in just a few pages, the curtain concealing these lives has been drawn back, revealing them in all their helplessness and rage and rancor.” Alice Munro, too, falls into this category. Many of her short-stories, such as “Royal Beatings” focus more on character revelation rather than plot.
That is not to say that nothing happens in Munro’s short-stories. Instead, multiple scenes take place in “Royal Beatings.” The narrator, Rose, tells us of her life as a child growing up in Hanratty, Ontario; of her stepmother, Flo’s, stories and work in the store the family owned, of her father’s habit of isolating himself in his furniture shed, of being beaten and then indulged. However, the plot is secondary to the story. The scenes created by Munro are not based in action, but emotion and character revelation.
“Royal Beatings” begins in the imperfect tense with Rose telling us what her life was like. Her attitude and her circumstances are immediately revealed. Her mother had died when she was still a baby, and so she grew up with “only Flo for a mother.” Her father was not readily available and somewhat scared Rose. Rose loves her family but is not like them; she is clumsy instead of clever and had a need to “pursue absurdities.” Characters are revealed and emotions are discovered but the story does not become about action until nine pages into the story. Then, the reader is thrust into present tense action. Rose vividly describes a Saturday of which she and Flo argue and irritate one another. Rose’s father is called in from his shed by Flo and so he gives Rose what the r...
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...e. She connects both aspects of Hat, though she was never able to connect her father, the man who occasionally beat her, with the man who spoke of literature and philosophy when alone in his shed.
The story “Royal Beatings” is a beautiful representation of a young girl’s view of the world around her. Munro uses vivid details to create a story and characters that feel real. She draws the reader in and allows the reader to understand Rose through her poignant words about her life. Then, in the end, enables the reader to make the connections that Rose perhaps misses. “Royal Beatings” is not about any particular moment in Rose’s life or any certain action related to the reader. The story is, in fact, not about plot at all. It is instead about creating characters with a sense of verisimilitude and humanity while revealing “all their helplessness and rage and rancor.”
Frances Piper’s change in nature can be seen the day of Materia’s, her mother, funeral. She cannot control the laughter that escapes her while the funeral proceeding is happening. However she is amazed when James and Mercedes, her sister, think that she is crying. In that moment of her life, Frances learns something “. . . that will allow her to survive and function for the rest of her life. She finds out that one thing can look like another . . . Some would simply say Frances learned how to lie” (142)...
Last but not least, O’Connor confirms that even a short story is a multi-layer compound that on the surface may deter even the most enthusiastic reader, but when handled with more care, it conveys universal truths by means of straightforward or violent situations. She herself wished her message to appeal to the readers who, if careful enough, “(…)will come to see it as something more than an account of a family murdered on the way to Florida.”
Another factor that clearly brings out the theme is the fact that she claims that orderliness of family roses is her pride. However she may not necessarily be that orderly as depicted in the development of that story. The author of the story Shirley Jackson uses the author and her ambiguous cha...
“Short Stories." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Vol. 127. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010. 125-388. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. VALE - Mercer County Community College. 28 February 2014
She begins talking about her childhood and who raised her until she was three years old. The woman who raised her was Thrupkaew’s “auntie”, a distant relative of the family. The speaker remembers “the thick, straight hair, and how it would come around [her] like a curtain when she bent to pick [her] up” (Thrupkaew). She remembers her soft Thai accent, the way she would cling to her auntie even if she just needed to go to the bathroom. But she also remembers that her auntie would be “beaten and slapped by another member of my family. [She] remembers screaming hysterically and wanting it to stop, as [she] did every single time it happened, for things as minor as…being a little late” (Thrupkaew). She couldn’t bear to see her beloved family member in so much pain, so she fought with the only tool she had: her voice. Instead of ceasing, her auntie was just beaten behind closed doors. It’s so heart-breaking for experiencing this as a little girl, her innocence stolen at such a young age. For those who have close family, how would it make you feel if someone you loved was beaten right in front of you? By sharing her story, Thrupkaew uses emotion to convey her feelings about human
Short stories are temporary portals to another world; there is a plethora of knowledge to learn from the scenario, and lies on top of that knowledge are simple morals. Langston Hughes writes in “Thank You Ma’m” the timeline of a single night in a slum neighborhood of an anonymous city. This “timeline” tells of the unfolding generosities that begin when a teenage boy fails an attempted robbery of Mrs. Jones. An annoyed bachelor on a British train listens to three children their aunt converse rather obnoxiously in Saki’s tale, “The Storyteller”. After a failed story attempt, the bachelor tries his hand at storytelling and gives a wonderfully satisfying, inappropriate story. These stories are laden with humor, but have, like all other stories, an underlying theme. Both themes of these stories are “implied,” and provide an excellent stage to compare and contrast a story on.
The narrator, Twyla, begins by recalling the time she spent with her friend, Roberta, at the St. Bonaventure orphanage. From the beginning of the story, the only fact that is confirmed by the author is that Twyla and Roberta are of a different race, saying, “they looked like salt and pepper” (Morrison, 2254). They were eight-years old. In the beginning of the story, Twyla says, “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick.” This line sets the tone of the story from the start. This quote begins to separate the two girls i...
Pike, Gerald. “Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers.” Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas Votteler. Vol. 6. Detroit: Gale Research International Limited, 1990. 90. Print.
Munro, C. Lynn. "The Revolt Of “Mother”." Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition (2004): 1-2. Literary Reference Center. Web. 2 Jan. 2014.
Furthermore, Mary’s father was abusive in the family home to both Mary and her mother. A lifelong criminal, who was known to commit violent armed robberies, was not a good influence for Mary. Billy was often out of work, depending on earnings form Betty to sustain the house. It must be noted that there is some question if Billy is actually Mary’s father, given Betty’s profession; chances are great that Billy was just another victimizer in Mary’s lif...
The Bloody Chamber is a remake of the original fairytale Bluebeard; however Angela Carter rewrites the fairy tale using her feminist views to raise issues concerning roles in relationships and marriage, sexuality and corruption. Carter challenges the classic role of the male protagonist and the female victim; she does this by changing the stereotypes of the traditional fairy tale’s males as the saviours and females as the victims. She challenges the fairy tale’s traditional sex roles when she replaces the brother of the bride for the mother as the rescuer, “one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my fathers service revolver” this demonstrates to the reader that women are as strong as men, even stronger and can take on a expected man’s role and make it their own therefore challenging the stereotypical gender roles of Men. In addition to this as a feminist, Carter uses anti-essentialism to present that time, power and position are the details that makes a man act like he does and a woman like she does. This is revealed through the setting, France 1790’s, were men and women were not equal. The Marquis in this story is presented as a wealthy older man who has the ability to seduce and retrieve what he wants, “his world” this emphasizes the power he maintains and it gives him ownership not only of his wealth but the young bride and even possibly the...
Martha Nussbaum introduces her essay “The Romantic Ascent” by reminding the reader of the first hint of romance in the book, Lockwood’s crush on Cathy, with the claim that “the entire story is made possible because Lockwood is afraid and ashamed of love” (398). This statement contains multiple faults. To start, it is a logical fallacy that oversimplifies the entire plot of Wuthering Heights. It explains the book by relying on one causal factor that is insufficient to account for the occurring of the entire and overemphasizes the role of that factor.
Rose’s weakness and Waverly’s past wounding manifest problems in their marriages; however, addressing the root of their issues alongside their mothers, both women are able to solve their problems. Sharing a lack of sturdy fiber, or wood, with her mother, Rose has been told from a young age to stand beside An-mei or she will “grow crooked and weak” (191). Her rejection of this simple wisdom causes the forewarned weaknesses to bleed into her marriage where being a ‘pushover’ is a primary cause for her divorce. Lacking decision making experience, she is a child trying to make sense of the murky waters she has been thrown into - for the first time - without guidance. Comparatively, Waverly was a chess champion as a child who - after quitting in
In her introduction to Alice Munro’s 1998 volume The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt notes that “Munro is fluidly inventive in her use of time and tense, as she is in her point of view. She makes long, looping strings of events between birth and death, recomposing events as memory does, but also with shocking artifice” (xv). Indeed, Love’s opening and title story presents the reader with these confusions of time and tense so thoroughly that, since its first publication, Robert Thacker has described it as “a central Munro text,” while Dennis Duffy has lauded it as a “pivotal work in the structure of [Munro’s] fiction” (qtd. in Ross 786). Catherine Sheldrick Ross, meanwhile, asserts that it “challenge[s the reader] to make sense of a text that
In the past two centuries, western mainstream cultures have subscribed to the belief that crying is commonly associated with femininity, regardless of one’s gender (Warhol 182). A considerable amount of literature, including Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, has been considered by critics as effectively using “narrative techniques” to make readers cry (Warhol 183). Emphasizing on these matters, Robyn R. Warhol, the author of “Narration Produces Gender: Femininity as Affect and Effect in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple”, analyzes the usefulness of the novel’s narration approaches, focusing on the meaning of Nettie’s letters to Celie and especially the fairy-tale unity in Celie’s last letter. Using The Color Purple as illustrated example, refusing to consider the accounts of gender and sexuality, the author suggests that the applications of culture’s “feminine mythologies” in the novel give readers chances to experience the physical (openly weeping) and emotional (identify self with the character) effects of femininity (Warhol 186). Although Warhol’s interpretations have successfully carried out the novel’s sentimentality within the context of culture and other novels, there is still a general lack of comprehensive examples that illustrated after each of her arguments. In order to corroborate and extend on Warhol’s central argument, the surprising factors of the novel’s ending combines with the elements of foreshadowing in Celie’s first confrontation with Albert about Nettie’s letters, Celie’s relationship with Shug, and the ugly truths about racism and sexism showing through Nettie’s and Celie’s letters should be considered as significant in creating the novel’s sentimentality.