Quote:
Originally Posted by rousseau
Well said. I currently live along the outer periphery of "Alice Munro country," and am acquainted with several friends and neighbours over the age of sixty who could be characters in her stories. For example, one of my neighbours is a seamstress with the Festival who has never married, driven a car, or travelled much further than Kitchener in her lifetime. After years of frugal and very solitary living she has fully paid the mortgage on her own home, an Ontario cottage (an architectural style, not a cottage on a lake in Ontario), and titters at jokes or suggested ribaldry.
Titters with great enjoyment and pleasure, it should be clarified. She's more self-aware than Alice Munro's characters ever are, and I suspect she would even enjoy a discussion about how she might be an exemplar of a particular type of Southern Ontario Gothic persona. Because this is 2015, not 1935, after all.
|
I get what you mean. I'm also from the "periphery of Alice Munro country". I suspect that those of us who grew up in small town Southern Ontario and find our way on a skyscraper and urban development message board belong to this periphery. It's also interesting that you mention the word "periphery".
One thing I always identified with Alice Munro's work is the tension of being aware of a more sophisticated, urbane world that you aspire to but can't quite belong to, and being bound to a provincial world, which although stifling, is actually full of people like that lady you know who are aware of their lot in life, and acknowledge and have made peace with it - but you can't. After I read
Who do you think you are? as a young, twenty-something, I happened to visit a friend of mine who lived in Boston amongst other young Ivy League-educated professionals, and all I could think of was "these people are going to run the world one day, and I will not be among them." I spent the rest of the weekend walking around the streets of Boston as if I had learned that I was going bald.
I think being aware of existing on that periphery is a very Canadian concern. But I think it reaches a boiling point in Southern Ontario, because those two worlds are large enough to be self-sustaining. On one hand, you are closer to the magnetic pull of Toronto (which, itself, suffers from the same self doubts and aspiration to be something bigger and more worldly, even if it's already doing pretty well for itself), and the rest of the world, but at the same time, you can live a hermetically-sealed country life in the countless farming villages and market towns that pop up every dozen kilometers or so along the concession roads. Southern Ontario is the only area of the country (maybe Quebec's Beauce?) that is large and populous enough to sustain a full life within a rural bubble.