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Love and Discipline in Alice Munro’s “Amundsen”

Stephen Bernstein
p. 205-219

Résumé

Les précédents commentateurs ont eu tendance à traiter “Amundsen”, nouvelle figurant dans le recueil Dear Life (2012) d’Alice Munro, comme une histoire d’amour formellement organisée à partir d’archétypes traditionnels. La présente approche se veut plus originale en mettant en évidence les spécificités géographiques et historiques du récit, qui permettent de la situer non seulement dans l’Ontario des années 1940, mais aussi dans l’histoire du traitement de la tuberculose et de ses institutions. L’analyse de plusieurs volets du récit montre que le souhait de discipliner donne lieu une obéissance presque masochiste et auto-policée. Ce que l’on pourrait lire de prime abord comme une histoire d’amour apparaît, de manière plus crédible, comme l’histoire d’un traumatisme qui laisse la narratrice vide, détachée et incapable d’apprendre quoi que ce soit de l’expérience amère qu’elle raconte.

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Alice Munro
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  • 1 “Amundsen” was originally published in the August 27, 2012 New Yorker. As is often Munro’s practic (...)

1Alice Munro’s “Amundsen” is the first-person narrative of Vivien Hyde, a young teacher embarking on her first independent situation at a school housed in an Ontario tuberculosis sanatorium during the winter of 1945. The story centers on her brief relationship with the sanatorium’s director, Dr. Fox, couching its consideration of personal feelings within a larger contest between education and medicine. Though it has been read as a love story, “Amundsen” finally brings its greatest scrutiny to bear on the damage inflicted by disciplinary processes. The story stages a gendered conflict between education and clinical medicine, one that leads to a more troubling struggle, disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense. Fox’s ultimate control over Vivien registers so deeply in her consciousness that it controls her actions and reactions even years after the story’s main events.1 The process through which this control is exercised will be observed through attention to earlier readings which see “Amundsen” as a love story, to the story’s carefully wrought sanatorium setting, and to the ways that the story’s central relationship thus unfolds within a specific episode in medical history. Viewed in this way, “Amundsen” is ultimately a story about concealing pain behind a veil of language.

2What might account for the love story reading? Like countless tales of romance, “Amundsen” makes frequent use of temperature extremes to register emotional content. Vivien arrives at the sanatorium on a “raw day” with “air like ice” (Dear Life 32); as critic Magdalena Ładuniuk comments, “The coldness in the story is overwhelming” (40). The short walk from the train to the school kitchen finds Vivien already “in need of its warmth” but she is made to leave the kitchen almost immediately to wait in an unheated cloakroom (33). Her bedroom, too, is kept very cold (42). When Dr. Fox invites Vivien to dinner, the heating of his house becomes a central concern, as does (for Fox) exposing her casual lie about having a boyfriend. “‘You know it shows when you’re lying,’” he says, “‘you get hot in the face’” (50). “If I hadn’t got hot before I did then,” Vivien reflects, “[m]y flush rose from my feet up and sweat trickled down under my arms” (50). Emotional exposure creates an unpleasant heat, one that Munro emphasizes by altering the language from the story’s magazine version (“you get red . . . If I hadn’t got red,” “Amundsen,” 64; emphasis added). After dinner Fox briefly touches Vivien’s back, the “firm pressure” creating “intensity from the little finger to the hard thumb,” which she enjoys (51). Fox offers to provide access to his home and heater while he is away, but Vivien worries that if she were in Fox’s house when he was not there “his past and future presence” would deny her “ordinary comfort,” bringing instead “a pleasure that was tight and nerve-racking rather than expansive. I would not be able to stop shivering even when it wasn’t cold” (52). Even the doctor’s imagined presence threatens to overwhelm conventional temperature boundaries.

3The combination of hot and cold is echoed during the second dinner; as Vivien watches Fox cook she feels “a procession of sparks and chills” (53). The coldness of the outer landscape and even the inner institutional world gives way to the warmth of the romantic encounter, a warmth that can incorporate the effects of cold without the danger. This warmth may be “nerve-racking,” but is nevertheless welcome. As the story moves toward springtime and the climactic, failed wedding, a cold clarity returns. The dichotomy is aptly summed up, years before “Amundsen,” by Del Jordan, the narrator of Lives of Girls and Women, as she speaks of high school romances:

It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place . . . Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were. (154)

4It is April when Vivien and Fox make their wedding trip. The room they eat lunch in is “chilly,” and the “cold air” in the ladies’ room is “even more discouraging than that of the front room” (60). Fox leaves Vivien in a “nice and warm” (63) waiting room at the train station, but this is an impersonal, institutional warmth like that of the sanatorium kitchen. Her experience in the kitchen takes place shortly before she meets Fox for the first time; that in the station’s waiting room occurs immediately upon his departure. Anything like real heat, authentic emotional warmth, has only been experienced between these places, at Fox’s home.

5Unfolding over only a few months, and with very few encounters between Vivien and Fox, “Amundsen” may not seem the most obvious love story, but critics have treated as such. Charles May’s analysis, for example, concludes:

Perhaps it’s about the mysterious nature of the dichotomy of the physical and the spiritual, the male and the female, the romantic and the realistic. The attraction between male and female, what brings people together and keeps them apart, is always a mystery. Love stories never change; they always end in separation and thus perennially exist in the world of the imagination. (“Alice Munro’s ‘Amundsen’”)

6Similarly, in Ładuniuk’s “Missions and Explorers,”

the most important lesson comes many years later, when Vivien accidently meets Dr. Fox on the street in Toronto. Then she is suddenly struck by a feeling . . . that she still loves this complicated man. Nevertheless, despite this crucial discovery, Vivien’s mission remains a failure. . . . The information about permanence of her love is only a burden for Vivien, who, although many years have passed since she left Amundsen, still feels exactly the same as on that depressing day when she was rejected by the love of her life. (44)

7For both May and Ładuniuk “Amundsen”’s narrative unspools within an established love story formula. For May it is one formed with an armature of traditional binary oppositions: “Vivien’s attraction to Fox can be attributed to her romantic, fiction-based fascination with his mysterious maleness. His decision not to marry her derives from his desire to maintain his own fictional concept of maleness inviolate from any female involvement” (“Living” 55). Ładuniuk, pursuing her reading of the story as an archetypal quest, claims that “Vivien hopes that she will find fulfillment in love and marriage” (42). For either critic, “Amundsen” leaves its reader with a “lesson”: “attraction is always a mystery . . . love stories never change” (May, “Alice Munro’s ‘Amundsen’”), “Vivien . . . still feels exactly the same as on that depressing day” (Ładuniuk 44). Alternately, Cristiana Pugliese suggests that, Vivien “has learned nothing from her experience, nothing about ‘love’” (130 n.2), but her analysis focuses on the role of food in the story and spends much of its space reading Fox as an archetypal Janus figure. Such readings hardly seem to tell the whole story. As a love story “Amundsen” is surprisingly unconvincing and the lack of a place for the overarching presence of the sanatorium and classroom in such analyses is puzzling.

8May states that “Amundsen” “may be misunderstood, and thus unappreciated, by some readers if they read it as if it were a simple realistic story about a particular woman who has a brief affair with a particular man” (“Alice Munro’s ‘Amundsen’”), saying too that “The questions – Why does Vivien agree to marry Dr. Fox . . . and why does Fox decide at the last minute not to marry her – cannot be answered by appealing to any simple psychology of the two characters as if they were particular people in the world” (“Living” 55). May echoes these points in a discussion of “Corrie,” another story from Dear Life:

The complexity of Munro’s short story is nothing like the complexity of a novel. In a novel, we are interested in particular people in a particular situation at a particular time and place. We make judgments on those people as if they were real people. But “Corrie” does not lead us to make those kinds of judgments; instead, it asks us to contemplate not a particular affair but the quintessential meaning of affair. (“On Alice Munro” 7)

9Must a narrative’s mode of “complexity” shift simply as a result of its length? Must a short story be denied “particularity” simply because it is not a novel? To follow such dicta is to force short fiction into a procrustean bed from which only one kind of interpretation may arise: according to May, Munro’s characters do what they do because “they are enthralled by the formal demands of the story” (“Living” 53).

10Again writing about “Corrie,” Isla Duncan is persuasive in her rejection of May’s prescriptivism:

I do not accept, first of all, his insistence on the distinctions between short and long fiction, nor do I wish to be discouraged from regarding the character of Ritchie as a deceiving “cad” (May’s term) or the character of Corrie as misguided and needy. I find it difficult to think of either in terms of abstract paradigms, representative components of some “classic phenomenon.” (64)

11This disagreement is important since the genesis of the love story reading of “Amundsen” is in the non-particularized “types” that May and Ładuniuk see there. May claims that “Munro’s fictions build toward a tightly unified thematic pattern, not the construction of a mirror in the roadway” (“Living” 45). Yet, as do those texts likened by Stendhal to a mirror, her stories take place in specific historical and geographical settings. Their length alone cannot tell us not to treat them as examples of realism.

12May alludes to Munro’s remarks in the essay “What is Real?” to argue that holistic, symbolic reading is the (literally) authorized interpretive strategy for her work. In a frequently quoted passage Munro outlines a spatial, rather than linear, approach to both reading and writing short fiction. She compares a story to a house rather than a road, preferring to “go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while” (224). Munro’s practice as a reader and writer may provide illumination for critics, but it need not constrain them. In an interview with New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman, Munro says “In ‘Amundsen,’ the girl has her first experience with a helplessly selfish man – that’s the type that interests her. A prize worth getting, always, though she ends up somewhat more realistic, stores him away in fantasy. That’s how I see it” (“On Dear Life”). This account should not constrain a critic either, but it at least allows one to consider the story in its particulars. “Amundsen” can tell us very different things if its world is retrieved from the sphere of symbolic patterning and returned to its specific materiality.

13Consider the story’s sanatorium as not simply the fungible background to an archetypal love narrative, but rather the bounded physical form within which the discrete and gendered disciplines of medicine and education intersect. Dr. Fox practices the former and Vivien, as awkwardly isolated as Jane Eyre at Thornfield, the latter. Dr. Fox’s directions for running the school thus become a central example of emerging conflict between the discursive fields of the two disciplines. As I have shown elsewhere (Bernstein), character-authored documents are a favorite textual feature of Munro’s, and in “Amundsen” Fox alludes to one early on: “I’ve got some things I’ve written out about the kids and what I was thinking you might try to do with them. Sometimes I’d rather express myself in writing” (37). Later, when Vivien refers to the document as “instructions,” Fox counters: “What instructions? Oh, that was just some bits and pieces that went through my head. I never meant them to be set in stone” (41). Though Fox had left Vivien an out (“what you might try to do” [emphasis added]), his later disclaimer, characterizing the document as nothing more than fragmentary thought, is disingenuous, particularly as the paper has been introduced with an emphasis on the special status of writing.

14These considerations do not yet touch on the document’s contents. In only 135 words, Fox launches a salvo meant to ensure that Vivien’s pedagogy will bear little resemblance to what prevails at schools for healthy children. The first sentence, “Usual notions of pedagogy out of place here” (39), amounts to a blanket dismissal of whatever disciplinary knowledge Vivien might bring to her work, its lack of a verb giving the pronouncement durable solidity. By the end of the first paragraph Fox dismisses other aspects of conventional pedagogy—“testing memorizing classifying”—as “nonsense” (39). To intensify this disapproval, Munro strengthened Fox’s prohibition of special attention to “Superior Children so-called” for book publication, so that the line “If they are smart in academic way, they can easily catch up” became “smart in questionable academic way” (“Amundsen” 60; Life 39; emphasis added in the italicized fragments). With the change, academics as a whole is called into dispute by Fox. Throughout his document features of standard mid-century Canadian educational practice and content are cast out: the “whole grade business,” “rivers of South America,” the “Magna Carta” (39). In their place Fox requests an unexciting environment that will find a middle-ground between “stress and boredom” (39). “Drawing Music Stories” are permitted, and games if they are not too exciting or competitive. Though the story goes on to show that Fox is acutely aware of pharmaceutical developments that will soon put his rest and surgery treatment for tuberculosis “‘out of business’” (51), the approach he recommends to Vivien resembles nothing so much as the model of female education in favor a century earlier. It is hardly figurative to say that Fox has given Vivien a prescription meant to preserve not only his patients, but the equilibrium of the institution as well.

15The sequel to Fox’s presentation of directions is his surprise visit to Vivien’s class. She has discovered that avoiding information, stress, and competition results in “a pretend school” where a “docile and dreamy” mood overtakes the students and “a shadow of defeat” casts its pall (40). In other words, running a classroom according to the precepts of Fox’s rest cure reduces it to an extension of the porches on which the sanatorium’s patients statically take the dry winter air. Unwilling to settle for the “pretend,” Vivien decides “to take the doctor at his word. Or some of his words” and starts teaching geography. Organizing the lesson into a game one day she is surprised to see Fox enter the room, confiding “I was caught” (40). Fox quickly commandeers the class, making a joke out of the game and eventually dismissing the students early. He does not apologize or otherwise explain this assertion of authority, and when Vivien attempts to defend her efforts Fox discounts her suggestions. She later learns one of Fox’s patients had died in surgery that morning, so Vivien lets him off the hook, deciding “my anger did not turn out to be justified, and for that reason I had to feel more of a fool” (42). This is a statement of confusion more than understanding, since Vivien nullifies her own reaction through a near-reflexive sympathy for Fox. The entire scene brings to mind an observation Vivien makes about him during their first conversation, after she experiences an initial put-down. “He was evidently the sort of person,” she reflects then, “who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into” (36). When Vivien feels “caught” once Fox enters the classroom, she registers both the air of superiority with which he conducts himself and her now-learned uneasiness regarding his disapproval. That she later dismisses authentic reactions due to Fox’s equivalent of a bad day at the office demonstrates amply her stereotypical submission to a male counterpart.

16Ładuniuk judges that Vivien “failed as a teacher” (42), but it seems more accurate to say that if she fails in anything, it is as a strong opponent to Fox. This is their only showdown about teaching. Once Fox has impressed upon Vivien the importance of following his directions (while denying that that is what he is doing) there seems little need to return to the issue, and his medically-based view triumphs. Though the scene in which Fox intrudes takes place only a third of the way through “Amundsen,” it is the last to show the classroom in any detail. The single remaining reference is a very brief one concerned with communicating the surprising number of student deaths during the month of March (58). With Vivien pedagogically vanquished, the narrative moves instead to the dinner scenes at Fox’s house, during which the doctor exerts a different kind of disciplinary control.

17Before considering the dinners it is worth thinking a little more about the sanatorium as a setting. Not only is it the site of disciplinary conflict, but a monument to a specific era in the history of tuberculosis treatment. As Robert Thacker points out, “complex and detailed, Alice Munro’s stories proclaim her ‘connection’ to Ontario as both a place remembered and one she has lived in and knows well” (104). Thus it should surprise no one to find that the fictional town of Amundsen is modeled on a real place. Gravenhurst, 85 miles due north of Toronto (and 120 northeast of Munro’s native Wingham), became, in 1897, the site of Canada’s first sanatorium (Adams and Burke 431). Like Amundsen’s, Gravenhurst’s sanatorium (and its successors) were built just outside of town near a lake, and like Amundsen, Gravenhurst is on the rail line between Huntsville and Toronto. As she relates in “Working for a Living,” Munro herself was in the area in the early-1940s when her mother sold furs “at the Pine Tree Hotel” north of town (Castle Rock 141).

18The tuberculosis treatments practiced at Amundsen’s sanatorium accord with those of Gravenhurst as well. Before the introduction of effective drugs in the mid-1940s, “Treatment consisted of conservative medical measures—rest, good nutrition, and fresh air—and, increasingly popular in the interwar period, surgical ‘collapse therapy,’ ranging from artificial pneumothorax . . . to disfiguring and often dangerous chest-wall and lung resections” (McCuaig 4). These are the procedures Vivien discusses with Dr. Fox at their first dinner (50-51). When Vivien says “my room was cold—every part of the building seemed cold” (42), she describes a centerpiece of early twentieth-century sanatorium treatment, exposure to cold, dry air. Writing from the site of the first North American sanatorium, Saranac Lake, New York, in 1910, Dr. Hugh Kinghorn attested to “the great curative value of pure cold air for pulmonary tuberculosis,” recommending that “the patient should . . . be in the air in all weathers, provided he has suitable shelter from rain, snow, or wind, and has suitable clothing” (73, 75). Fox’s sanatorium follows this advice; from her bedroom Vivien hears “the rumble of bed-carts being wheeled to the open porches for the icy afternoon exposure” (42). Indeed, so efficient was the regimen at Gravenhurst that a 1932 account stated the wards could be brought “from zero to 70 in a few minutes” (Wodehouse 24). Though Vivien’s classroom does not go so far, the open air approach even influenced the creation of preventoria, schools in which tubercular children “studied their lessons in unheated rooms with all the windows open, regardless of the weather” (McCuaig 163-64). Vivien’s sole description of the sanatorium’s exterior, “with its deliberate rows of windows, and its glassed-in porches at either end” (32), is a partial yet accurate description of the Gage Pavilion, the final sanatorium built in Gravenhurst, in 1923. Now called the Muskoka Regional Centre, the building yet survives. These details of mid-century tuberculosis treatment make the hot/cold dynamic of “Amundsen” more complicated than a simple matter of ardent hearts. Fox clearly feels that cold will help his patients, and details of the story suggest he sees it as a benefit in other settings as well.

19As the two dinners and the sexual experience which follows the second demonstrates, “Amundsen” is less concerned with how Vivien runs her classroom than with how she negotiates a series of increasingly intimate encounters—the classroom scene among them—with Dr. Fox. That the encounters now move to a domestic setting—Fox’s house in town—signals a deepening of relations as the pair observe each other within in a new set of behaviors. On one level these scenes suggest the courtship narrative which has appealed to earlier critics. The first dinner provides the setting for Vivien’s lies to Fox about having a boyfriend and, when she is trapped once again, getting “hot in the face” over the exposure (50). The remainder of the meal does not pass without more of the doctor’s “teasing” and “superiority,” which Vivien thinks are “possibly his notion of flirtation” (50). Helping her with an apron during dishwashing Fox touches Vivien’s back (“he might almost have been taking stock of my body in a professional way” [51]). Finally, as they part, he gives her “a dry-lipped kiss, brief and formal, set upon me with hasty authority” (51). Both descriptions point to Fox’s inability to treat Vivien with anything but cool professional interest.

20Authority, professionalism: before dining with Fox, Vivien has thought the house looked like the domain of “a regulated lone man” (43), and during the dinner, when he asks her if she thinks him rude in his inquisitiveness, she answers: “‘That depends. If you are interviewing me as an employer, no’”; to which he replies: “‘So I’ll go on’” (50). Though this exchange passes as banter, the reference to the sanatorium’s employment hierarchy still carries weight. After the meal, at Vivien’s prompting, Fox discusses the surgeries he performs and the new drug therapy on the way. Virtually the entire conversation, in other words, is either Fox quizzing Vivien “as an employer” or describing his own employment. Medical discourse has swept the field within the sanatorium and now extends its reach outward. Fox’s house is littered with books, and most of the few that Vivien names (concerning the Franklin Expedition, the Donner Party, and the Shackleton Expedition), have to do with polar exploration or death in the cold (48). The town itself is likely named after the famous Norwegian explorer, the first to reach both poles. Yet against such frosty forebears, Fox preserves the civilized veneer of the institutional man, going so far as to announce “I do intend to marry you” immediately following their first (and apparently only) sexual encounter (57).

21The engagement comes with a new set of rules having a common focus on secrecy. Since Fox makes excuses for not buying a ring and prohibits Vivien from informing her grandparents of the match, it seems possible that he never intends to go through with the marriage. As with his pedagogical instructions, Fox depicts himself as outside of convention; earlier his target had been conventional educational content, here, with reference to the ring, Fox congratulates Vivien on not being “that idiotic conventional sort of girl” who would care about such a thing (57). Similarly, the wedding is to be “bare-bones,” so that Fox does not have to be around people “whose ideas he did not respect” (57). Whatever his true designs, Fox seems eager to play Rochester to Vivien’s Jane, moving the couple toward a small, secluded wedding without guests who might create inconvenient conflict.

22The Jane Eyre echoes themselves work to expose a significant gap in “Amundsen.” While Charlotte Brontë devotes attention to Rochester’s charisma, his brooding, his confessions, and the affectionate raillery between him and Jane, Munro offers nothing to suggest a true, emotional connection between her characters. Instead, the story shows increasing manipulation on Fox’s part as he attempts to form Vivien into the feminine object he apparently wishes she were. He all but requires her acquiescence in administering the conventions of a Victorian female education. As they try to set a date for their first dinner, Fox tells Vivien not to attend a Gilbert & Sullivan performance for which Mary, a little girl who lives at the sanatorium, has sold her a ticket: “I did as he told me,” she recounts (47; emphasis added). When he picks her up she is “where he had instructed me to be,” and as he prepares their meal she leaves his kitchen for the front room, “feeling as if I had more or less been ordered to” (47, 48; emphasis added). During the meal he interrogates her in a way that suggests he is trying to confirm her virginity. Later he demands her complete accession to—and docility with—his terms for the engagement period and wedding, and after he suddenly and unilaterally backs out of that wedding he retains his control, putting her on the first train back to Toronto. Even as Vivien, during a Bluebeard-like moment, asks “if he has put girls on the train before,” Fox uses the imperative to urge her obedience at an existential level, telling her “‘Don’t be like that’” (63). Given the confusion between employer and lover that has characterized Fox’s and Vivien’s exchanges, it is perfectly consonant that as he dumps Vivien he also fires her. “‘I’ll write you a reference. You’ve done a good job,’” he tells her, adding, “‘You wouldn’t have finished out a term anyway—I hadn’t told you yet but the children are going to be moved’” (62). That he had concealed this news so central to Vivien’s future is in keeping, too, with his deception in even taking her to Huntsville in the first place.

23As noted earlier, Vivien does speak of Fox-inspired “sparks and chills” and expects a potential “tight and nerve-racking” pleasure should she be alone in his house (53, 52). Though the story does not present an account of the couple in bed, Vivien allows afterward that her “passion could have been the surprise to us both,” and still later says that Fox spoke to her from a “deep place . . . when he was in bed with me” (56, 61). She feels simultaneously “flattered” and “ashamed” of that feeling when Fox removes Mary during their second dinner (56). In their absence Vivien eats several of Mary’s heart-shaped cookies, but on his return Fox tosses the rest of them into the snow (57). These scenes are the closest the story comes to conventional representations of love; far more plentiful are the details of Fox’s disciplining, controlling, Vivien.

24Far from tangential, Mary’s appearance during that dinner, and indeed throughout the story, provides an intriguing complement to Vivien’s experience, further demonstrating the degree to which Fox attempts to form her as the object of his affection. Mary’s mother runs the sanatorium kitchen; that Fox is her unacknowledged father seems likely enough. She is of high school age and appears four times at roughly equal intervals in “Amundsen.” On each occasion but the last her presence works to further or sharpen Vivien’s involvement with Fox, in part through his objections to Mary.

25Vivien first encounters her shortly after arriving at the sanatorium. Sitting cold and hungry in the cloakroom, feeling (prophetically, as it turns out) “like being punished at school,” Vivien does not dare to eat the contraband figs she has discovered, reasoning that they “would catch in my teeth, to betray me” (33, 34). Against this early demonstration of Vivien’s dutiful self-policing, Mary’s appearance is as chaotic as it is abrupt. Vivien, who has been told to remove her boots, and has had to balance awkwardly to do so, notices immediately that Mary kicks hers across the cloakroom. Mary is loud, overly familiar, and given to coarsely colloquial speech. Yet she also functions as a native informant in this strange place: “‘I know where everything is, I’ve lived here practically since I was born’” (34-35). During their conversation she establishes Vivien’s formal identity, first through her occupation and then, as a result of that occupation (“‘If you are a teacher shouldn’t it be Miss?’” [35]), her name. Vivien’s last name, Hyde, causes Mary to blurt out “Tan your hide,” apologizing immediately afterward (35). Though Pugliese suggests that “one cannot help thinking of Dr. Jekyll . . . after all, they are Dr. Fox and Miss Hyde” (134), it is Mary whom Vivien seems nearly to manifest as an opposing force, an alter ego. Mary serves as a symbolic vessel for the behaviors that Vivien must purge herself of to survive respectably in Amundsen, making Mary a truer Hyde to Vivien’s Jekyll.

26Where Vivien is obedient to Fox, Mary is cruelly upbraided by him (“‘Enough out of you for one day,’” “‘You’re on the way to getting as plump as a young pig’” [35, 55]); he also speaks disrespectfully of her in her absence. Vivien registers Fox’s treatment of Mary during the second dinner as shockingly “brutal” (56). Though Mary, whom Pugliese likens to “the character of the helper in fairy tales” (133), can be a physical guide, as she is through the institution’s hallways during her first appearance, or pointing out a shortcut from town to the sanatorium during her second, the rest of her behavior is instructive only by negative example.

27This is especially true during her final appearance, when she boards the train on which Vivien is returning to Toronto after the failed wedding. Mary’s boisterous partial attention reins Vivien in, keeping her from “jumping up and leaving the train and running to his house and demanding to know why, why” (65). During the drive to the wedding Vivien has entertained degrading erotic fantasies (“I believe I could lie down for him in any bog or mucky hole, or feel my spine crushed against any roadside rock, should he require an upright encounter” [59]), “aroused by [Fox’s] male unawareness of me” and excited, too, that he is a surgeon. “I would never admit that,” she says about her feelings about his job, and “I know too that I must keep these feelings to myself” she remarks about the fantasies (59). If her fantasies are effectively under erasure (if Hyde hides them) before the wedding, the reverse fantasy, of passionately appealing to Fox’s sense of justice, is also effectively rooted out, this time by Mary’s presence. Mary helps Vivien keep her cool.

28In his page of teaching advice, Fox writes: “Some of these children will reenter the world or system and some will not,” later adding “very simple skills . . . necessary for Going into the World” (39). His courtship of Vivien is itself an education meant to prepare her for Fox’s personal system, entry into his world, where her subordination and obedience are central. Love is a peculiar term for a relationship that relies on instruction and supervision. Fox’s system is rather the cold and unfeeling discipline formed by a “regulated” man enamored of reading about perilous and icy death.

29The fourteenth section of “Amundsen” is one of the time-compressing codas so frequent in Munro’s work. Though the section’s date is unclear, Vivien recounts that “For years” she expected to see Fox again; the reader is also informed that she is married and that her husband has children old enough to have debts. She refers to her and Fox’s faces as “time-damaged” (65). Whether the date is the 1960s or 70s or later is undiscoverable. The magazine version says “more than a decade later” (69), but even had the phrase survived Munro’s revision it would hardly be more specific than what remains. Seeing Fox in a crowded Toronto crosswalk Vivien has a final conversation with him: “He called out, ‘How are you?’ and I answered, ‘Fine.’ Then added for good measure, ‘Happy.’ . . . He called back to me once more: ‘Good for you’” (65-66).The story’s final paragraphs follow quickly on this thoroughly detached exchange. In its original magazine publication the lines read, “That was all. I went on home. Feeling the same as when I’d left Amundsen. The train dragging me, disbelieving. Nothing changes, apparently, about love” (“Amundsen” 69). The Dear Life ending contains several alterations: “For me, I was feeling something the same as when I left Amundsen, the train carrying me still dazed and full of disbelief. Nothing changes really about love” (66). These are interesting changes, as they mix greater certainty in some areas with less in others. In the later version Vivien adds “dazed” to the account of her condition when leaving Amundsen, but qualifies her later feeling as only “something the same” as the earlier episode rather than identical. Perhaps most importantly, while the earlier version suggests that love’s permanence is apparent, we are now told it is real. Vivien does not contend that she feels exactly the same at this distance of years, but her confidence in the reality of love is increased. It is a puzzling assurance, especially as it comprises the only instance of the word “love” in the entire text.

30Vivien also comments on Fox’s eyes during this section. Noting that Fox indulges in no strong reaction to the meeting, “No breathless cry, no hand on my shoulder,” she only observes “that flash . . . when one of his eyes opened wider. It was the left eye, always the left, as I remembered. And it always looked so strange, alert and wondering, as if some whole impossibility had occurred to him, one that almost made him laugh” (66). The description refers back to Vivien’s first encounter with Fox, when he patronizes her about her college reading. “One eyebrow had risen, like a little peaked cap,” she recounts, going on to register the intimidating power of “that eyebrow, and his amused . . . expression” (36). It is just after this passage that Vivien first mentions Fox’s habit of setting conversational “traps” (36). Fox raises his eyebrow to Vivien again during the first dinner when she faces him down about her reading, but he follows with “‘Pardon me’” (49). All three of these accounts remain private to Vivien.

31Predictably it is Mary who actually mentions Fox’s eyes to him. During the second dinner Fox attempts to shame her about her weight (55). Mary engages his caustic language, responding “‘Look who’s talking. You got one eye crooked to the other’” (55). The metaphoric implication that Fox cannot “see” straight is a dire warning for a doctor whose work depends on accurate observation and whose correction of Vivien hinges on reliable surveillance. Fox is a practitioner of, among other things, the clinical gaze, under which “disease becomes exhaustively legible, open without remainder to the sovereign dissection of language and of the gaze” (Foucault 196). Vivien is the one who records Mary’s insult, of course, and it is Vivien who brings Fox’s eyes up again at the story’s close. The eye references thus complete one more thematic chain pointing away from reading “Amundsen” as a love story. Whether his eyes are literally crooked or simply reflect his smug and patronizing personality, they hardly speak of love in the way that Vivien finally describes them. Instead they are reminders of Fox’s placement of Vivien into the position of the patient, “enveloped in a collective, homogeneous space” from which the clinician can engage in “showing by saying what one sees” (Foucault 196).

32Considered in this way the late description of Fox’s eyes brings to mind the numerous examples throughout “Amundsen” in which Fox seeks to regulate and control Vivien. Thus it helps further characterize Vivien, who searches for a link to the past and finds it in a physical emblem of the disciplinary space she was expected to inhabit. No wonder, then, that she feels “something the same as when I left Amundsen” (66), since Amundsen, and what happened there, have so obviously not left her. Indeed, critic Christine Berthin sees in Vivien’s jilting there “the demise of the subject,” a subject who, “becomes raw, loses her symbolic armour, her protective skin and sense of self” (80). And as Ildikó de Papp Carrington pointed out many years ago, “many of [Munro’s] characters, especially her self-consciously ambivalent first-person narrators and her older protagonists, are ashamed and humiliated over and over again” (5). Years later, then, on the Toronto street, Vivien exhibits a steady gaze of her own, but she also encounters an internal nothingness where only the past, a past which Fox’s disciplinary formation has taught her to call “love,” resides. A narrator who spends the first two pages of her story describing the winter setting tells us virtually nothing about the setting at the end. Not only is the year unmentioned, but season, month, day, or time of day are all similarly omitted. Vivien has become the equivalent of the frozen adventurers of Fox’s books, but frozen in a waste of time (“For years,” she relates, “I thought I might run into him” [65]) rather than of ice. Like some of those explorers, she resorts to a kind of cannibalism, though hers is self-directed, seeking sustenance in the repellent fare of the failed Amundsen expedition.

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Notes

1 “Amundsen” was originally published in the August 27, 2012 New Yorker. As is often Munro’s practice, she made changes to the story for book publication. This article refers to the later, Dear Life version of “Amundsen” except where the New Yorker version is specifically mentioned.

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Stephen Bernstein, « Love and Discipline in Alice Munro’s “Amundsen” »Journal of the Short Story in English, 73 | 2019, 205-219.

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Stephen Bernstein, « Love and Discipline in Alice Munro’s “Amundsen” »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 73 | Autumn 2019, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2021, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/2858

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Auteur

Stephen Bernstein

Stephen Bernstein is a professor of English at the University of Michigan–Flint. He is the author of the book Alasdair Gray as well as numerous articles on a wide range of writers, including Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, and Charles Dickens.

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