To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of Andrea Robin Skinner's recent revelation that she was sexually abused as a child by her stepfather Gerald Fremlin. The story would be sadly unremarkable if not for the fact that Skinner is the youngest daughter of the late great Canadian Nobel Prize laureate author Alice Munro, and Fremlin was her husband, whom she stood by despite knowing how he had victimized her child.
I say that I don't know what to make of it because, in spite of my impulse to condemn Munro, I don't believe any of us has the right to judge or moralize about such deeply personal matters, and a public flogging is all I've been witnessing in the press and online. I can only suppose it's a consequence of dealing with a national shock.
I'm angry, on at least three levels. I'm angry at this public hit-job, this attempt to tar the reputation of a cultural icon, a symbol of Canadian excellence known around the world. I'm also angry at myself for feeling this way, my naivete, because everyone knows no one is perfect, and cultural icons are flawed human beings like the rest of us.
I'm also angry at Munro's daughter. Not because she went public with the story - that's her prerogative - but that she chose to do it now. The timing seems unfair. I can hazard some guesses as to why Andrea decided to wait until after her mother had died to reveal this terrible family secret. It's possible that she wanted to spare her mother the difficulty of dealing with the public repercussions. It's also possible that she herself didn't want to face the consequences of publicly attacking her literary icon mother while she was alive. Either way, it's regrettable that her mother is not here to respond.
Based on her public comments, Andrea is understandably devastated by her mother and part of making the story public is clearly an effort to frame (or taint) Munro's legacy in some way. She says as much in a Vanity Fair essay: “I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography, or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.” This strikes me as vindictive and in bad form.
The one thing that I am not, is angry at Munro. Andrea seems to want to portray her mother as selfish, which does fit the MO of most artists. But I feel sad for her. I see Munro for what she was, a woman of a certain generation (she was born in 1931) who was taught to stand by her man come what may and suffer in silence. Okay, she wasn't exactly silent, and thank goodness for that. She turned her emotional inner-conflict into the most poignant and powerful literature and is justifiably celebrated around the world for it. If the feminists who embraced and celebrated her for telling stories about the lives of women and girls are now outraged because the author was not the paragon of virtue they desired, that's not Munro's fault.
To me this heartbreaking revelation has no bearing at all on the value or importance of Munro's work, even as it will give readers and scholars something to talk about. It's essentially fodder for gossip. It can't be compared in any way to the revelation that the celebrated novelist Joseph Boyden, who claimed to be indigenous, actually isn't. Boyden sold his books and himself as indigenous, so that's at the very least a form of false advertising.
If Andrea's story, because it involves someone who is 'high-profile', helps in some way others who have suffered as she has, all for the better. I still cannot abide the fact that Alice's privacy has been violated in a manner and at a time when she isn't here to respond, although admittedly it was probably inevitable given her stature. Instead of wishing her mother would leave her stepfather, and hating her mother for not doing so, I wish that as part of the therapeutic healing process, Andrea would have had the courage to work with her mother and gone public with the story together. I'm sure Alice would have agreed, or at least she would have been fair-warned when Andrea went public with it. Now it just looks like a cheap shot.
3 comments:
From what you've written, I understand that your view is that you feel the writer was more important than the mother. As for abuser artists we have the same way of looking at things here, but the big difference is it concerns the abusers themselves and not an abuser's wife. Therefore we get the impression that this famous writer should be protected from any bad publicity, whatever she did or did not in real life, as a mother. In that respect she behaved exactly like so many mothers who preferred closing their eyes about what was actually happening to her daughter. I personally think this behaviour is to be denounced. At least she denounced her mother, not the writer, after she had died.
I agrees with your assessment of the situation ... which is unfortunate in so many ways.
Thank you for these thoughts Claudine. It’s such a difficult issue because there are so many aspects to it. Of course, the victimization of an innocent child is abhorrent and particularly by a parent. It goes against every moral fibre of our being. That’s one aspect. The other, is about the difficulties of parenting and family. As a husband for more than 30 years and a father of 4 daughters my experience teaches me how emotionally and morally complex family matters can be. Yes, the abuser has to be denounced unequivocally. The position of the ‘enabler’ is something that I think needs to be treated with more delicacy and nuance, which is why I am reluctant to pass easy judgment. It’s really a deeply personal matter between Andrea and her mother, and if Andrea’s mother was anyone else, there would not be this airing of grievance, which is why I find it regrettable. I don’t see any point to making it public except to give Andrea some sort of satisfaction through retribution, which strikes me also as unfortunate. To the extent that people will see Munro’s work differently, I guess there is no accounting for that one way or another. If they did a moral assessment before giving literary prizes, I suspect very very few authors would be prize winners.
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