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Munro no ‘feminist icon’

Some have called author Alice Munro a “feminist icon.” The devastating revelations about how she stuck by her second husband who sexually abused her daughter Andrea certainly show otherwise. Again, this does not surprise me. I consider myself a feminist and yet even so-called ones, presumably evolved beyond misogynistic values and role rigidity, can reflect patriarchal attitudes. Munro ultimately chose the role of wife over mother, as Rebecca Sullivan describes in The Conversation (see link below). She saw her own daughter as sexual competition, rather than a vulnerable soul desperately in need of maternal support and validation. Cue a resounding chorus of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.”

I discovered such divide-and-conquer attitudes towards my own incest story when circulating my memoir manuscript. (I describe these in No Letter in Your Pocket.) Responses from feminists that sexual assaults experienced in India must have somehow been my fault showed to me that the blame-the-victim attitude is far more entrenched in our society than I thought, even among supposed allies. This realization shocked me.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Andrea’s stepfather Gerald Fremlin had accused the young girl, aged nine, of seducing him. This is a familiar pedophile trope that sadly, even our courts reflect in some of their judgments. British Columbia had a case in which a judge determined that a four-year-old girl had been flirtatious with an adult male and hence, basically invited the sexual abuse she got. Around the world, we still have the so-called “Lolita defense,” with judges ruling that children from ages four to sixteen have “seduced” their adult sex partner.

Such decisions completely ignore the power disparity between an adult and child and the inability of a young girl to consent in full awareness to an adult sexual act. They remove accountability from the man since the underlying assumption is that any male can’t avoid sexual temptation. Therefore, under this skewed equation, responsibility for “good behaviour” lies with the stereotypical female temptress (at any age!) – not with her abuser. Is it any wonder that women’s groups have been trying for years to provide trauma-informed training to lawyers and judges?

Another literary case of blaming the female victim lies with the media response to J.D. Salinger’s involvement with almost a dozen much-younger girls. (Of course, none of this appeared in the 2020 Hollywood film My Salinger Year.) I outline this story in my memoir, as follows:

“[M]ost societies have maintained a cultural norm of much older men pursuing, and often preying on, much younger women. For instance, Joyce Maynard revealed in her memoir how J. D. Salinger, beloved author of The Catcher in the Rye, wrote her letters when she was eighteen and he fifty-three, saying she was his soul mate and they would ‘live out their days together.’ The two did live together and discussed having a child. Yet, Salinger supporters and media outlets condemned Maynard for writing publicly about their relationship. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times even called her a ‘predator.’ Maynard writes: ‘I might as well have murdered Holden Caulfield. Many have never forgiven me.’ Since then, more than a dozen women have contacted her, saying that they, too, as teenagers, received similar letters from Salinger.

“Maynard reminds us: ‘It’s not simply about how our culture continues to shame, dismiss, humiliate, devalue, and demonize women. It’s the injury — sometimes overt counterattack, often gaslighting — that an abused woman is virtually certain to endure when she breaks her silence to tell what happened to her. Call it a one-two punch’.”

Sadly, Andrea received the one-two punch from her own mother, her father, her stepfather, and through the silence of her family and the media. But thankfully, she has received support from many sources, including Munro’s Books in Victoria, BC and The Gatehouse in Toronto, Ont.

Read “The Gothic Horror of Alice Munro” in The Conversation

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