Alice Munro on Fanaticism: the Juliet Stories in Runaway

In this week when two young  Canadian men killed two other ones because, it seems, of misguided ideas about Islam, my thoughts have turned to Alice Munro's compelling stories in Runaway. As it happens, I've re-read it twice this fall and will probably read it at least two times more as my book discussion groups talk about it. 

Three of the stories in the collection tell of Juliet's progress from being the smartest girl in a rural Ontario town to teaching classics in British Columbia, meeting and falling in love with a man on the train, building a life with him that is free of the constraints she felt in her own childhood, and then being sorely disappointed when, after raising their daughter alone after his death, the girl is seduced by a cult.

My bookies have been particularly troubled by these stories.  How can Juliet bear having her daugher run away like that?  they ask.  What a tragedy that the girl doesn't appreciate what her mother has done!  Why would she choose to follow the strict tenets of the group she joins?

That there are no simple answers to these questions is a hallmark of Munro's writing.  She makes us think, after she's led us deeper and deeper into her story, but never tells us what to think.

And what I think is that Juliet was mistaken in depriving her daughter of any contact with traditional spiritual or religious throught.  Her daughter wants to escape this kind of thought control just as Juliet wanted to escape the closed world she was born into.  Better to have allowed a certain amount of that other paradigm into her daughter's life.  Doing that might have made the inevitable separation of parent and child less irrevocable.

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