Open Secrets
by Alice Munro
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0679755624
Publisher: Vintage
The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are
intended to enhance your group's reading of Alice Munro's Open Secrets.
Alice Munro is an acknowledged master of the short story, and her newest
collection has garnered the very highest praise. Most of the eight stories
in Open Secrets take place in Munro's native Canada and particularly
in the small Ontario town of Carstairs. Munro's exploration of her characters'
varied lives reveals entire worlds of passion, joy, despair--even exoticism
and adventure--beneath exteriors that are often deceptively mundane.
The central characters in the stories are all women: an emotionally adventurous librarian; a young
woman kidnapped by Albanian tribesmen in the 1920s; a farmer's wife who
yearns for gentility; a young born-again Christian whose unresolved feelings
of love and anger cause her to vandalize a house; a spurned middle-aged
woman who follows the man who rejected her to Australia and spies on him;
a young frontier wife in the wilderness with her abusive husband. Munro
explores female themes with great depth and power, but the range of her
vision is not exclusively female: through the eyes of her fictional women
she examines the culture and values of her world while weaving complex,
luminous, and poetic apprehensions of the milieu she has made so intensely
her own.
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Topics for discussion of each story
"Carried Away"
1. What techniques does Munro
use in this story to evoke the sense of time passing? What does the
difference in character between Arthur Doud and his father say about
the differing mores of the periods they live in?
2. What does Louisa's taste
in reading say about her character? What about Jack Agnew? And Arthur
Doud? How do books, and the act of reading, help to shape the story?
3. What is the best way to
describe Louisa's one and only meeting with Jack? As a vision? A dream?
A privileged look into an alternate life, a life that might have been?
Which of the Agnews' lives--the one in which they lost Jack or the one
described by Louisa's vision--is the more "real" to Louisa? Why do you
think Jack--or Jack as imagined by Louisa--says "Love never dies"? What
is Louisa's understanding of "a normal life"?
"A Real Life"
1. What does marriage mean
to Millicent, and in what ways does her idealized image of it differ
from her own experience? Why does she become so personally concerned
in Dorrie's marriage? Why is she so determined that Dorrie will go through
with the wedding?
2. Why does Millicent believe
that she has sent Dorrie away at "greater cost" to herself "than she
had understood" [p. 77]?
3. What do the situations of
the story's three women--Millicent, Dorrie, and Muriel--say about the
importance of marriage in that culture at that time? Have Dorrie and
Muriel had better lives than they would have had they remained single?
What about Millicent? To these characters, is love an indispensable
part of marriage? Can you deduce Munro's own feelings about the importance
of marriage as a social institution, and the role love plays within
it, from this story?
"The Albanian Virgin"
1. What does Munro accomplish
with this story's unconventional method of narration? Does she use it
to enhance the sense of reality, to evoke a dreamlike quality, to create
a mystery? Is it possible to relate Lottar's journey, and her sexual
awakening, to Claire's?
2. Lottar wonders: "Wouldn't
we rather have a destiny to submit to..., anything, instead of such
flimsy choices, arbitrary days?" [p. 127] Does she imply that the traditional
customs of the Ghegs, which provide us with a socially sanctioned destiny,
are preferable to the arbitrariness of life in modern Canada? Or does
the question have a wider, less specific meaning?
3. Munro leaves us in some
doubt as to whether Charlotte is inventing the story of Lottar or telling
about her own experiences. What is the purpose of such ambiguity? Do
you yourself believe that Charlotte is telling the truth?
4. Why does Munro choose "The
Albanian Virgin" as the title for this story? How is the status of women
among the Ghegs made to reflect on the lives of women back in Canada?
Why do so few of the Gheg women decide to become "Virgins"?
"Open Secrets"
1. "Open Secrets" is in one
sense a mystery story. Is it solved for us at the end? Does Munro mean
to imply that Lawyer Stephens has killed Heather Bell? That Theo Slater
did? What about Mr. Siddicup?
2. How does Maureen find the
strength to cope with her husband's brutish sexual appetites? Why does
she submit to him?
3. The story builds to the
final sentence, in which Maureen "seems to be looking into an open secret,
something not startling until you think of trying to tell it" [p. 160].
What is the secret referred to here--a concrete fact or, less specifically,
an abstract truth about a life?
"The Jack Randa Hotel"
1. How does Gail really feel
about age and infertility? What hints does Munro drop to show us that
these subjects are on her mind?
2. How does Munro convey the
feeling of obsessive love through her character Gail? How would you
describe Gail--is she pathetic? Brave? Dreadful? Heroic? Do you find
the story primarily funny, disturbing, or both?
"A Wilderness Station"
1. "It must be acknowledged,"
writes Mr. James Mullen, "that this is truly a hard country for women"
[p. 206]. In what way is this a story of personal survival? Does life
in the modern world continue to be in some way "hard" for women? How
does the life of the woman who narrates the last part of the story reflect
upon that of Annie?
"Spaceships Have Landed"
1. Do you find that this story
can be seen as a comment on social class, and on the beginnings of the
breakdown of the traditional class structure? How do the social classes
mix, and what barriers exist between the different layers of society?
What is the traditional relationship between the sexes, as demonstrated
in the opening scene at Monk's? How does that balance come to change?
2. What can you deduce about
the relationship between Billy and Wayne? Rhea tells Wayne that he doesn't
like Billy. Do you believe that to be true? How is Rhea able to deduce
Wayne's feelings for her from their momentary encounter behind Monk's?
"Vandals"
1. Liza's love for Bea is "one
of expectation" [p. 287]; she is "the woman who could rescue them--who
could make them all, keep them all, good" [p. 293]. What does Liza mean
by "good," or can she even define it to herself? Is it just Ladner she
wants controlled, or herself as well? How can you explain her decision
to join a fundamentalist church? How can you explain her marriage to
a man of Warren's character?
2. Bea feels that "some women,
women like herself, might be always on the lookout for an insanity that
could contain them" [p. 268]. Is this what she has found in her relationship
with Ladner? Does Munro imply that Ladner's particular insanity is more
than Bea can cope with? Does Bea acknowledge its full extent, or does
she deceive herself?
Topics
for discussion of Open Secrets
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1. "When you live in a small
town you hear more things, about all sorts of people," Munro has said.
"In a city you mainly hear stories about your own sort of people." What
does Munro tell the reader, throughout these stories, about the inhabitants
of Carstairs, their lives, their expectations and possibilities, their
interactions and social life, their values?
2. How do the various women
in these stories respond to sex and motherhood? Can these women, different
as they are, be said to hold certain characteristics in common? Why
do so many of the women, particularly those of the older generation,
find sex to be unpleasant, while still considering marriage their goal?
3. Munro has said that she
has always been interested in "the way women circumvented the rules,"
and all of the women in these stories function within firm limits posed
by convention, class, and gender. To what degree do such limits rule
their lives? When Munro's women take risks, do they tend to be rewarded
for it?
4. How are realism and fantasy,
the exotic and the mundane, balanced in Munro's work? Which predominates?
Can you find examples of moments when Munro's stories depart from realism?
What does Munro achieve with these moments?
5. Munro is constantly experimenting
with different narrative techniques. Why does she choose to tell each
story from its own particular, sometimes oblique point of view? Why
do you think that Munro has decided to cover entire life spans in her
stories, rather than using the "slice of life" technique that so many
short story writers favor?
6. Most of the stories in this
collection contain letters. What is Munro's purpose in using letters
so often? What particular importance do they have? How do the characters
use letters to hide their real motives or to present alternative versions
of themselves?
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"Open Secrets is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and in life."—New York Times Book Review
"One of the finest short
story writers now working...Open Secrets is a triumph."—Chicago Tribune
