Alice Munro’s Red Dress---1946

Alice Munro’s Red Dress---1946.
http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/stories-week-2012-2013/story-week/red-dress-1946-alice-munro

From Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories (Vintage, 1998)

What I love about Alice Munro’s fiction, especially when the narrator writes in the first person about her mother, is that we never really know if this is Munro writing autobiographically, or if she is making up the material out of whole cloth (so to speak.) No matter. It’s a sign of terrific writing when the reader thinks the story you’re writing HAS to be true, it reads so authentically, even if it’s not. 

(Is this story autobiographical? Who knows. Probably. Munro did have a conflicted, sometimes bitter relationship with her mother and her mother did sew and for a while, made a living at it.)

In this story, Munro embraces what we have spoken so often of in class: Elevating the object. In this story, the object is the red dress. The whole story revolves around the making of it, the wearing of it, and the consequences of wearing it, with wonderful backstories about the relationships between mothers and daughters, and the relationships between teenage girls and boys, woven in. It’s a coming of age story, really, with an ending that is ambiguous and not (in my opinion) completely successful, but the story itself is quite compelling and while we’re reading it, we see Munro’s mastery at work. 

To wit: God is in the sewing details here. As we’ve discussed in class, process is always interesting. Note the wonderful details about the making of the red dress: “My mother was making me a red dress. All through the month of December I would come home from school and find her in the kitchen, surrounded by cut-up red velvet and scraps of tissue paper pattern. She worked at an old treadle machine pushed up the window to get the light, and also to let her look out, past the stubble fields and bare vegetable garden, to see who went by on the road. There was seldom anybody to see.

     The red velvet material was hard to work with, it pulled, and the style mother had chosen was not easy either. She was not really a good sewer. She liked to make things; that is different.

    Whenever she could she trip to skip basting and pressing and she took no pride in the fine points of tailoring, the finishing of buttonholes and the overacting of seams as, for instance ,my aunt and my grandmother did. Unlike them she started off with an inspiration, a brave and dazzling idea; from that moment on, her pleasure ran downhill. In the first place, she could never find a pattern to suit her. It was no wonder; there were no patterns made to match the ideas that blossomed in her head. She had me made me at various times when I was younger, a flowered organdy dress with a high Victorian neckline edged scratchy lace, with a poke bonnet to match; a Scottish plaid outfit with a velvet jacket and tam; an embroidered peanut blouse worn with a full red skirt and black laced bodice...

This all sounds quite lovely. Then the narrator sums up her mother and herself:
“I was embarrassed by the way my mother crept around me, her knees creaking, her breath coming heavily. She muttered to herself. Around the house she wore no corset or stockings, she wore wedge-heeled shoes and ankle socks; her legs were marked with lumps of blue-green veins. I thought her squatting position shameless, even obscene…My head was muffled in velvet, my body exposed, in an old cotton school slip. I felt like a great raw lump, clumsy and goose-pimpled….” These descriptions aren’t pretty. However, they are vivid and detailed and we can see the mother and daughter in all their miserable glory.

The narrator is 13. Her good friend Lonnie comes over to watch the making and trying on of the dress: While Lonnie is “there,” the narrator makes her confession to us (p.3): “We made a pact to tell each other everything. But one thing I did not tell was about this dance, the high school Christmas Dance for which my mother was making me a dress. It was that I did not want to go.”

The narrator’s dress is making her a dress to wear to the high school Christmas Dance, a party that the narrator tells us she doesn’t want to go to. Does this answer the question: Why is the writer writing about today? I think so. Teenage discomfort, and a fear of socializing, is a universal problem, one that almost any reader can relate to. Does the admission that the narrator doesn’t want to go to a party signal that this is going to be a profound and memorable story? Not necessarily, but as in all stories, it’s all in the telling. In Munro’s stories, small, almost minute things happen but they almost always have enormous consequences.

The narrator makes much out of her chronic discomfort and stress: “At high school, I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling. When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure---even at the time fo the month when this could not be true---that I had blod on my skirt. My hands became slippery with sweat when they were required to work the blackboard compass. I could not hit the ball in volleyball…I hated Business Practice because you had to rule pages for an account book, using a straight pen, and when the teacher looked over my shoulder all the delicate lines wobbled and ran together (page 4)… The details of her discomfort are so finely wrought that even though they might make us squirm in recognition, we understand exactly how she is feeling and sympathize with her.

All of the other women in the story seem acutely uncomfortable too: “I hated Englsih because the boys played bingo at the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she stated to read again they took up rapt postures made swooning faces, crossed their eyes, flung their hands over their hearts. Sometimes she would burst into tears, there was no help for it ,she had to run out into the hall. Then the boys made loud mooing noises; our hungry laughter---oh, mine too---pursued her. There was a carnival atmosphere of brutality in the room at such times, scaring weak and suspect people like me.”

Everyone in the school sounds completely stressed out---but there is great tension here, and even though it sounds like a miserable place to be, it’s a great place to set a coming of age story.

So, we wonder, how will our heroine get out of going to the party? She tries, on pages 4-5, to get herself sick, and fails. “Every morning, including the day of the dance, I rose defeated, and in perfect health.” (page 5.)

The day of the dance, the narrator/author, returns to our elevated object, the red dress: “My mother, never satisfied, was sewing a white lace collar on the dress; she had decided it was too grown-up looking.” Oh no! What will happen?  This little sentence is quite anxiety-producing. But a few sentences later, we learn tat the dress is actually quite successful: “Then she zipped up the dress and turned me around to the mirror. The dress was princess style, very tight in the midriff. I saw how my breasts in their new stiff brassiere, jutted out surprisingly, with mature authority, under the childish frills of the collar.”

Then Lonnie shows up, in a much prettier dress: “She had on a pale blue crepe dress, with a peplum and bow; it was much more grown-up than mine even without the collar. Her hair had come out as sleek as the girl’s on the bobby-pin card. I had always thought secretly that Lonnie could not be pretty because she had crooked teeth, but now I saw that crooked teeth or not, her stylish dress and smooth hair made me look a little like a golliwog, stuffed into red velvet, wide-eyed, wild-haired, with a suggestion of delirium” (page 6.)

We are now on page 6 of a 13-page story, at the end of the first act (there is a space between the first and second act), almost smack in the middle of a three-act story. More has to happen, now that we see the has not found a way to avoid going to the party. Now, problems must arise at the party in order to keep us reading. And they do.

What happens at the dance? A boy names Mason Williams asks the narrator to dance because he has to, then walks away. “’See you,’ he said. He walked away. It took me a a minute or two to realize what had happened and that he was not coming back. I went and stood by the wall alone.”

Things get worse. The band begins to play again (page 8) and more boys came over to ask the girls to ask. The narrator’s friend Lonnie is asked. The narrator is not. “Why them and not me?” she asks. “Why take them and not me? Why everybody else and not me? I have a red velvet dress, I did my hair in curlers, I used a deodorant and put on cologne. Pray, I thought…It did not work. What I had been afraid of was true. I was going to be left. ”

Then a strong, independent girl named Mary Fortune finds the narrator in the bathroom and tries to persuade the narrator to leave the dance with her and go have a cigarette and a chat, harkening what could be the beginning of a deep friendship between two intelligent young women who know themselves to be outsiders, and (we hope) better for it. Mary Fortune, like all the other female characters in the story, has her own set of disfigurements: “In the light the high window, I could see her narrow, scornful face, her dark skin pitted with acne, her teeth pushed together at the front, making her look adult and commanding.” But Mary is astute and thoughtful: She calls the dance, “The greatest collection of boy0craz girls you could imagine is right here in this school…” The narrator is glad to be acknowledge by her: “I was grateful for her attention, her company and her cigarette…” Hurray! We think. The narrator is coming of age and maturing! She has made a new, mature friends /What a wonderful, heartening story!

But no. That would be too conventional an ending for Munro. The narrator follows Mary and comes of age while doing so, but in her own, awkward, fierce, unexpected way: “I found that I was not so frightened, now that I had made up my mind to leave the dance behind. I was not waiting for anybody to choose me.  I had my own plans. I did not have to smile or make signs for luck. It did not matter to me. I was on my way to have a hot chocolate, with my friend.”

Just as she is about to leave the dance with Mary, a boy approaches her. They begin to dance. She considers telling him that she is about to leave: “But I did not say anything…” When Mary looks at the narrator, “I made a weak waving motion with the hand that lay on the boy’s shoulder, indicating that I apologized that I didn’t know what had happened and also that it was no use waiting for me. Then I turned my head away and when I looked again she was gone.”

The boy (Raymond Bolting) takes her home. He is not happy that she lives so far away. This is not a budding romance. Munro gives us more specific, authentic gestures of the narrators’ discomfort: “The cold was making y nose run a little too, and I worked my fingers through the candy wrappers in my coat pocked until I found a shabby Kleenex.” She shares it with Raymond. He kisses her briefly, “with the air of one who knew his job when he saw it, on the corner of the mouth. Then he turned back to town, never knowing that he had been my rescuer, that he had brought me from Mary Fortune’s territory into the ordinary world.”

This is hardly a feminist tract, and this 13-year old narrator does not behave admirably, ditches the possibility of new friendship. Then she spies her mother in the kitchen window, and reveals to us that her feelings for her mother haven’t improved either, and that what she has learned from the evening’s event is that she was unlikely to be as happy as her mother wanted her to be, but her mother would likely never realize it. The last paragraph is heartbreaking, but beautifully written, revealing that the narrator has matured, but it’s a maturity that allows her to see her own and her mother’s limitations, not a maturity that brings her a romance or a new, healthy teenage friendship. As hard as the mother tried to get her daughter ready for the dancing by making her a red dress, she has no idea what her daughter is capable of, or even feeling: “I went around the house to the back door, thinking, I have been to a dance and a boy has walked me home and kissed me. It was all true. My life was possible. I went past the kitchen window and I saw my mother. She was sitting with her feet on the open oven door, drinking tea out of a cup without a saucer. She was just sitting and waiting for me to come home and tell her everything that had happened. And I would not do it, I never would. But when I saw the waiting kitchen, and my mother in her faded, fuzzy Paisley kimono, with her sleepy but doggedly expectant face, I understood what a mysterious and oppressive obligation I had, to be happy, and how I had almost failed it, and would likely to fail it, every time, and she would not know.”

The making of the red dress set all this in motion.