A Life in Transit: Spatial Biographies of Alice Munro’s Artist Figures

Every story is a travel story— a spatial practice.

Michel de Certeau

Wrote the self-proclaimed genius Gertrude Stein, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing” (289). These seem to be the essential ingredients for producing any writing, never mind the work of genius. You have to sit around in a private room and, for a long expanse of undisturbed time, allow yourself to enter into the nowhere space of the imagination; to be “really doing nothing” you have to have something that few women writers—those who are also caretakers and unwaged workers—possess: an urgent sense of entitlement to your privacy, idleness, and time.

Yet, what if these resources—privacy, idleness, and time—are not available? How then do these spatial and temporal constraints change the development of genius? How do they alter the form of its output? Investigating the relationship between space and conditions for female genius led me to Alice Munro, a writer whose journey from the laundry room (where Munro did much of her early writing) to the centre of the global literary canon has been well documented. For a housewife and mother with literary aspirations, as Alice Munro was during the 1950s and 1960s, marriage and a move to the suburbs presented a unique double bind: it afforded the upward mobility that secured the financial support to write, but it also meant the loss of a private life—that is, privacy from the private sphere. For Munro, as many writer/mothers of her generation, the problem of interrupted time, affective labour, and maternal guilt remained a critical factor in her development as a writer, especially since, as Munro has acknowledged, the essential ingredients for her writing practice were “a long period of aimless time […] with nobody to notice” (quoted in Knelman 22). Yet, the constraints on her time and privacy, and the search for a space free of these constraints, are also what have shaped Munro’s genius.

This essay examines Munro’s stories of nascent or frustrated female artist figures to think about how the search for creative space and community shapes storytelling. Although many of the stories I examine do reflect aspects of Munro’s own journey to writing, I do not read them as being strictly autobiographical. Indeed, Munro has often complained of readers’ persistent hunt for the “real” in her fictional worlds—one that threatens to dismiss or misrecognize the art of her fiction (“What is Real?”). Moreover, female writers and writers of colour have historically been beleaguered by the limiting expectation—from readers and critics—that their work is based purely on the facts of their own lives (Clark). As such, I read the following stories as being, in Munro’s words, “autobiographical in feeling” in order to think about how a work might trace the emotional, formal, and spatial contours of a life, rather than its facts and, in doing so, might offer a narrative that is both shared and unique.¹

Indeed, although Munro’s fiction does acknowledge the restrictive social structures women faced and continue to face, her stories are more interested in how such scripts are formed and how they are altered, internally, intimately, and publicly. Munro’s stories of domestic suspension and artistic pursuit, I argue, use the trope of the trip and the affair—the temporary escape from the conventions of the neighbourhood, office parties, and the marriage—to speak directly to the conditions of narrative production, both the production of social scripts and of storytelling. In doing so they address the embarrassment and guilt the narrators feel around their sense of intellectual and creative ambition (read as “egotism”) and the way in which they navigate the ambivalent public intimacies facilitated by the temporary dislocation from the home and the marriage.

The following stories of cross-country train journeys or road trips outline an important difference between the notion of “privacy” and the private sphere, tracing how semi-public spaces, such as the train carriage...