SOURCE: Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. “Recasting the Orpheus Myth: Alice Munro's ‘The Children Stay’ and Jean Anouilh's Eurydice.” In The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro, edited by Robert Thacker, pp. 191-203. Toronto: ECW Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Carrington considers the role of Anouilh's play Eurydice in Alice Munro's short story “The Children Stay.”]

The classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice tells the story of the young lovers' marriage, Eurydice's accidental death, and Orpheus's grief-stricken descent into the underworld to bring his beloved wife back into the world of the living. A poet and a musician, Orpheus sings so beautifully that he charms Hades into allowing him to take her back. But the Lord of the Dead imposes one condition: Orpheus must not look at her until they have completed their ascent to the upper world. Just as they reach it, however, he turns to see whether she is following him, and she is lost to him again and forever (Graves 111-12).

Alice Munro's first reference to this myth is a brief but climactic musical allusion to Orfeo ed Euridice, Christoph Gluck's eighteenth-century opera, in the title story of Dance of the Happy Shades (211-24), her first collection. When a handicapped girl, an unexpected performer in a children's piano recital, plays “The Dance of the Happy Shades,” “something fragile, courtly and gay, that carries with it the freedom of a great unemotional happiness,” the snobbish mothers in the audience do not know how to react to her indisputable talent (222). Although the piano teacher mentions the French title of the piece, Danse des ombres heureuses, nobody recognizes it as part of the opera based on the Orpheus myth (223). But through the contrast between the mothers' world and Gluck's otherworldly music, Munro emphasizes the unexpected effect of art on life.

In her second use of the Orpheus myth, Munro devotes an entire story to developing this powerful effect in an ironic intertextualization of Jean Anouilh's Eurydice (Legend of Lovers), a dramatic retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in modern France.¹ In “The Children Stay,” one of Munro's revised New Yorker stories in The Love of a Good Woman (181-214), her latest collection, Pauline Keating is a disturbingly beautiful young mother rehearsing for the title role in an amateur Canadian production of Anouilh's play. With her husband, Brian, and his parents, Pauline discusses Anouilh's plot, quoting and paraphrasing the dialogue and analysing both the characters and the director's unexpected casting of the various roles. “What he sees in us is something only he can see,” Pauline explains (196). But she carefully conceals the central fact: after the weekly Sunday rehearsal in downtown Victoria, British Columbia, she and the director, Jeffrey Toom, make love in the locked rehearsal room. When the Keatings' summer vacation on Vancouver Island in 1967 interrupts this exciting secret schedule, Jeffrey pursues Pauline out of the city, takes her to a motel in Campbell River, and forces her to phone Brian to announce that she and her lover are going to Washington State, where he has “a one-year appointment” in a college drama department (185). In response to this announcement, Brian imposes a condition: “The children stay” (212). Pauline's painfully reluctant acceptance of this condition not only gives Munro the title of her story but also structures her ironic intertextualization of Anouilh's drama.

In discussing Anouilh's use of the Orpheus myth in Eurydice, Leonard Cabell Pronko defines “[o]ne kind of aesthetic pleasure afforded … by any modern treatment of a well-known tale” as the process of “discovering the parallels that the author establishes with his sources” (199). Applied to Munro's use of Anouilh's play, this process of discovery not only reveals many parallels between his drama and her story but also, much more importantly, highlights the differences against the background of these parallels. In the original New Yorker version of the story, Pauline's comment on the director's casting, “What he sees in us is something different from the obvious,” is Munro's clearly self-reflexive comment on her own casting (95). Munro thus indicates that she is using ironic intertextuality for the double purpose defined by Linda Hutcheon: to “mark … a rupture with, or at least a subversion or critique of, the [original] text” and, at the same time, to “establish … a community of discourse among readers and thus [to] mark … a kind of interpretive continuity” (96). The continuity results in “the elitist pleasure of irony,” closely parallel to the aesthetic pleasure that Pronko defines, because both depend on recognizing the parallels (96), but the irony subverts the legend of the French lovers. By recasting the roles of the Anouilh characters, complicating, combining, and multiplying them into “something different from the obvious,” Munro makes these differences dramatically physical in order to define the multiple meanings of her title and to reject Anouilh's conception of love.

The lovers in Eurydice meet in a provincial railway-station restaurant, each accompanied by an embarrassing parent. Because both Orphée and Eurydice are very young, their love affair is part of their struggle to achieve individualization and disconnection by freeing themselves from their parents and their pasts. Orphée and his father are poor travelling musicians, but, unlike Orphée, his clingingly dependent and “rather ridiculous” old father plays so “abominably” that he would starve without his son (Anouilh 80, 58). Eurydice, her vain mother, and her mother's posturing lover are all members of a “tenth-rate [touring] company that plays in flea-pits” (79). Instantly falling in love and just as instantly agreeing that Eurydice's mother and her lover are “[h]orrible and stupid” (68), Orphée and Eurydice go off together to consummate their love in a dirty, badly furnished hotel room in Marseilles where, a waiter informs them, many other disgusting guests have done the same in the same bed, “All using their saliva to say ‘our love’” (89). In contrast to these guests' repellent behaviour, the young couple's lovemaking is a confusing mixture of nervous fright, shame, and awkward tenderness.

Eurydice's shame is a reaction against her past, which contains not only a mother but also two recent lovers, Mathias, so desperately in love with Eurydice that he throws himself under a train as soon as she rejects him for Orphée, and Alfredo Dulac, the middle-aged impresario of the touring company. When Dulac, who for a year has been forcing Eurydice to submit to him, follows her and sends her a note at the hotel, she is so ashamed of her past that just before he arrives she runs away. Taking a bus out of the city, she dies when the bus crashes into a truck.

Orphée's attempt to get Eurydice back is engineered by a symbolic character, a young man who plays a double role in the drama. When Mathias commits suicide, the mysterious young man, in the background until this moment, calmly assures the appalled lovers that “It never hurts to die” (82). Then, just as Eurydice leaves the hotel, he reappears, introduces himself to Orphée as M. Henri, and makes a significant comment about the lovers' first meeting in the station: “These moments when we catch a glimpse of Fate laying her snares are very exciting, aren't they?” (95). After Eurydice's death, M. Henri returns a grief-stricken and completely disoriented Orphée to the same dreamlike station at night. When Orphée insists, “I want to know where we are,” M. Henri identifies the place as “the doors of death” (101, 103). On the platform, a living Eurydice is “standing on the same spot where [Orphée] saw her … for the first time” (104). Like Hades, M. Henri has the power to return Eurydice to Orphée but imposes the same condition: to keep her alive, Orphée must not look at her until dawn. This power, coupled with an excited awareness of the snares of fate, makes M. Henri not only the messenger of death but also the director of the play. “To a large extent, he is pulling the strings of the drama” (Pronko 189).

However, because Orphée has not actually entered “the doors of death” and because Eurydice is already alive again, his violation of M. Henri's condition shows that his youth makes him incapable of accepting reality. This inability is revealed by his obsession with male hands and their defiling touch. In the first act of Eurydice, when his questions force Eurydice to admit not only that she and Mathias have been lovers but also that she has had an earlier lover, Orphée replies, “I'll try never to think of … their hands touching you” (Anouilh 74). In the hotel room in the second act, he reveals the belief behind this obsession. Insisting that every experience, “good” or “evil,” leaves a permanent mark on the remembering body, he convinces Eurydice, who has concealed her relationship with Dulac, that “all the hands that have ever touched you are still sticking to your flesh …” (86, 87). It is this conviction, confirmed by Dulac's note, that shames her into running away. When Dulac arrives at the hotel to tell Orphée that Eurydice, whom he calls “the child,” has been his mistress for a year, Orphée accuses him of lying. Dulac's calmly patronizing reply, “You're a child, too, my boy,” dismisses Orphée's insistence—“I love Eurydice and she loves me”—as irrelevant and immature (97). The man is talking about sex, the boy, about a young love that is frightened and disgusted by his beloved's sexuality. In the third act, when Eurydice is restored to Orphée and pleads, “Don't look at me. Let me live,” he deliberately looks at her to force her to confess the truth: “Did he touch you with those hands all covered with rings?” (109). Begging forgiveness, she admits that he has, and Orphée recoils in horror: “I shall always see you with that man's hands on you” (111). Pronko emphasizes that, by altering the Greek myth, Anouilh

changes the entire meaning of this crucial point in the myth. … Orphée's inability to see Eurydice is no longer a problem of ideality or a dream taking place in the underworld or the subconscious, lying in the realm of the eternal. It is reduced to a definite temporal reality, … on this side of death. And his breaking of the condition imposed upon him … is not so much an indication that Orphée could have lived with Eurydice had he not looked at her as it is a demonstration of Orphée's inability to make the compromise demanded by love on earth … [and by] the ugliness of life.

(197-98)

When Eurydice is thus killed a second time, Orphée is left alone with M. Henri and his father, suddenly back and full of gratitude that his son has not deserted him. In their debate about life and death, they offer Orphée two sharply contrasted choices. In long, pompous, digressive speeches, his father keeps insisting on how wonderful life is, in spite of all that he has suffered, and how through “will power” one can accept life with all its imperfections (Anouilh 117). Cynically capitalizing on the bumbling banality with which this paternal advice is delivered, M. Henri offers Orphée the immaculate perfection of death. “You heard your father talking about life just now. It was grotesque, wasn't it, but that's what it is like” (116). In life Eurydice would be soiled, “covered with finger marks,” but in death Orphée can possess the “Eurydice of [his] first meeting, eternally pure and young, eternally herself” (116). Because this untouched ideal is what Orphée wants, he decides to join Eurydice in death. Thus, he leaves his father twice, initially to consummate his love for Eurydice and finally to possess her forever. The child does not stay.

In Munro's “The Children Stay,” Brian, commenting on Orphée's decision to die, recognizes his death as a rejection of both his father and his father's philosophy and admits, “Logically I can see killing yourself so you won't turn into your parents. … I just don't believe anybody would do it” (198). His comment is significant because, in contrast to the parent-child relationships in Anouilh's play, those in Munro's story are much more complicated: they involve not two generations but three. Pauline and Brian are the parents of two girls, a five year old and a toddler.

But even though Brian is a father, he cannot detach himself from his parents. Unlike Anouilh's Orphée, he wants to maintain intergenerational connection. An “only son” (193), he needs “to have his wife and his parents and his children bound together, … to involve Pauline in his life with his parents,” and to connect her and their children “to his own childhood” (195). To satisfy this need, the younger Keatings and the senior Keatings always vacation together on Vancouver Island. Brian cannot “imagine a summer without this shared holiday,” even though Pauline is unhappy because they cannot “do anything by themselves” (194). She is also unhappy when the principal of the school where Brian teaches refers to her husband as “[y]our boy” (194), a reference that echoes Dulac's patronizingly addressing Orphée as “my boy.” Brian's physical appearance, his body “still almost as skinny as a teenager's,” is another sign that in spite of fatherhood he is not so much a parent as a son (195).

As the difficulties of Brian's family roles demonstrate, another way in which Munro's casting complicates Anouilh's is that Munro assigns her characters multiple functions that combine the roles of the French characters. Jeffrey is a paradoxical combination of M. Henri and Orphée because his sexual power over Pauline permanently changes her life. Although she mentions M. Henri a few times, she never identifies his role in the play. But Brian, by teasingly referring to Jeffrey as “Monsieur le Directeur,” establishes the parallel between the symbolic French director and the Canadian drama teacher (196). Like M. Henri, Jeffrey is powerful, both intellectually and physically. Intensely opinionated, he loves to argue and challenge opposition, and his sexual potency imbues him with an astonishing “live energy” (190). Even when he falls asleep after vigorous intercourse, “[c]onviction and contentiousness seem … to radiate” from his “warm” body (208). But like M. Henri's direction of the fated drama of Orphée and Eurydice, Jeffrey's role as the director of Eurydice is inseparable from the idea of death. His first name echoes that of Henri, and when Jeffrey and Pauline are introduced he jokes that his last name, Toom, is “Without the b” (184). The word tomb is initially associated with the “sordid” hotel where Jeffrey works as a summer night clerk: a prostitute has been murdered there, and guests “check … in to O. D. or bump themselves off” (184, 185). But the “dusty” rehearsal room in the old Victoria building in which Jeffrey and Pauline secretly make love also acquires tomblike qualities when he bolts the door before intercourse (188): “The sound of the bolt being pushed into place, the ominous or fatalistic sound of metal hitting metal, gave her a localized shock of capitulation” (190).

That Jeffrey's power is dangerous to Pauline emphasizes his second function: as her lover, Jeffrey also plays the role of Orphée. When they first meet, he looks “directly into Pauline's eyes—impertinently and searchingly” (185-86). Remembering this meeting, she rehearses her lines from the last act of Eurydice: “‘Don't look at me. Don't look. Let me live’” (186). Her quoting Eurydice's plea at this point clearly labels his act as symbolic of the decision that he later forces on her. But, unlike Orphée, Jeffrey does not operate alone. Brian also compels Pauline to choose, not only between her lover and her husband but also between two kinds of living death.

Jeffrey, however, is hardly aware of the difficulty of her choice because, although he combines the roles of M. Henri as director and Orphée as lover, there is a crucial role that he does not play: he is not a parent. His total obliviousness to what being a parent means is initially indicated by his suggestion that Pauline bring Mara, her toddler, to his mother's house for an afternoon tryst. Seizing the opportunity presented by the absence of his mother for the day, Jeffrey phones Pauline with an invitation into his bed, but she refuses. When she explains that she has to take care of Mara, at first he does not even recognize her name, and then he suggests bringing her along. He sees his mother as a supervisor to get rid of, but Pauline cannot get rid of her maternal responsibility to supervise her child. She fears not only the possibility of physical danger for Mara in a house that has not been toddler-proofed but also the potentiality of psychological trauma: “Mara might be storing up time bombs—memories of a strange house where she was strangely disregarded, of a closed door, noises on the other side of it” (201). Jeffrey's reply to Pauline's refusal, “I just wanted you in my bed,” shows that in his “urgency” Jeffrey is thinking only of his own hands on her body (201, 202). Unlike Orphée, obsessed with the other hands sticking to Eurydice, he is almost totally unaware of the other hands clinging to Pauline.

She is covered, not by the symbolically defiling fingerprints of lustful men, but by the literally sticky, sandy handprints and footprints of two children playing on a saltwater beach. This difference is introduced by the name that Mara calls her, not Mommy, but Paw, Paw, for Pauline. Mara's childish mispronunciation suggests not only “Papa,” with the implication that Pauline is more of an adult authority figure than the child's father, but also “paw,” colloquial for “hand.” The children's hands and feet and Pauline's own hands acquire increased significance when Jeffrey, who has pursued Pauline, telephones her again, just as oblivious to her situation as before, and she is summoned to the public phone in the hallway of the lodge at the beach. While she talks, she shifts the squirming, sand-caked toddler, who weighs “a ton,” from one hip to another, but then Mara begins “bumping and scrambling against Pauline's side, anxious to get down” (203, 204). Simultaneously, five-year-old Caitlin goes into the lodge store, “leaving wet sandy footprints” (204). As Pauline tries to watch both children and to talk to Jeffrey, she reads the bulletin board signs beside the phone: “No Person Under Fourteen Years of Age Not Accompanied by Adult Allowed in Boats or Canoes,” and an advertisement for palm reading, “Your Life is in Your Hands” (205). Because she has just been holding her child, the phone conversation that initiates the permanent change in her life and the lives of her children makes the metaphor painfully literal as well as figurative. The definition of children as persons under fourteen, however, is ironic: by being only literal and not figurative, it is insufficiently inclusive.

Munro structures the long penultimate section of her story to withhold the figurative and fully inclusive definition until the climax. The next morning, in a motel room where Pauline and Jeffrey have repeatedly made love, she recalls her second telephone conversation the day before, her announcement to Brian that she is leaving and the “impossible” condition that he imposes: “The children stay” (206, 212). Although Munro does not specify this condition the first time that Pauline recalls the second conversation, its psychological effect emerges from the subtle intertextualization of a scene in the last act of Eurydice.

In this intertextualization, Munro combines the roles of Orphée and Eurydice in Pauline. The disoriented Orphée does not know where M. Henri has taken him until he sees a living Eurydice “standing on the same spot where … [he] saw her … for the first time” (Anouilh 104). Similarly, in “The Children Stay,” as Pauline speaks to Brian at the lodge, she can clearly hear that he is standing “where she stood not so long before, in the public hallway of the lodge,” where she read the fateful sign about her life in her hands (205). As Pauline recalls standing there, she, like Orphée, is so shaken and disoriented that she hardly knows which phone she is calling from now: at the end of their strange and stunningly short conversation, she comes “out of the phone booth beside a row of gas pumps in Campbell River” (206), where Jeffrey has taken her to the motel. Her disorientation suggests that like Eurydice she has crossed some kind of boundary between life and death, but unlike Eurydice she has incurred a permanent pain, losing her children. Because she chooses to give up the life that she has literally held in her hands, it is not Jeffrey but Pauline who is Orphée.

But she experiences a terrible dilemma, a choice between her lover and her children. The motel room, in which she is painfully aware of where she is before opening her eyes the next morning, resembles the miserable hotel room in Eurydice, with junky, “broken” furniture, a “noisy air-conditioner,” and a cheap, torn bedspread (206). “[H]ard-used between the legs,” Pauline tells herself that her adultery is not so much a question of love as of sex (210). Although she reaches for romantic literary parallels in Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, she tries to be totally honest: “None of this would happen if it wasn't for sex” (209). In sharp contrast to Orphée's disgust with Eurydice and Eurydice's own shame, Pauline argues earlier that Eurydice “probably … enjoyed” sex, even with Dulac, “because after a certain point she couldn't help enjoying it” (197). Based only on Dulac's conceited opinion, this argument emphasizes that Pauline fully enjoys her own sexuality. Although she is orgasmic with both her husband and her lover, “she believes” that it is only under Jeffrey's “weight … on her” that she is fortunate enough to experience “the inevitable flight, the feelings she doesn't have to strive for but only to give in to like breathing or dying” (210). Like Jeffrey's casting, however, what she sees in him is something that only she can see. Munro's repeated use of the word believe signals a characteristic passage of narratorial disparity, longer and more emphatic in the following revised version than in the original New Yorker version (102), in which Munro distances herself from her protagonist to qualify Pauline's conviction that Jeffrey is her fated lover.

That was what Pauline must believe now—that there was this major difference in lives or in marriages or unions between people. That some of them had a necessity, a fatefulness, about them that others did not have. Of course she would have said the same thing a year ago. People did say that, they seemed to believe that, and to believe that their own cases were all of the first, the special kind, even when anybody could see that they were not and that these people did not know what they were talking about. Pauline would not have known what she was talking about.

(Love 208)

But even though Pauline admits that “There's a lot she doesn't know” about her lover, including his widowed mother's “mysterious but important … role” in his life (210), she is convinced that, if she were to give Jeffrey up, she would suffocate: it “would be like tying a sack over her head” (209). Giving up her children, however, is also tantamount to dying.

When Pauline goes out into the motel parking lot, once again she recalls her phone conversation with her husband. In another subtle intertextualization of a scene in Eurydice, she alludes to Eurydice's death in the crash of the bus and the truck. As a truck on the highway comes toward Pauline, she thinks of “a large bleak fact coming at her,” Brian's insistence that the children stay (211). After furiously asking “what about the kids?” (211), he answered his own question: “‘The children,’ he said, in [a] … shivering and vindictive voice. Changing the word ‘kids’ to ‘children’ was like slamming a board down on her—a heavy, formal, righteous threat. ‘The children stay,’ Brian said” (212).

This simile completes Munro's analepsis in two ways. First, it derives its fatal force from her perhaps unconsciously self-reflexive repetition of a scene at the end of “The Peace of Utrecht” (Dance 190-210), in which the narrator is told a terrible fact about her mother's last days. When her dying mother tried to escape from the hospital, she was brought back and coffined alive. To prevent another escape, “They nailed a board across her bed,” thus literally nailing her into her deathbed as if into her coffin (208). Second, the sound of the figuratively slamming board echoes “[t]he sound of the bolt being pushed into place” when, near the beginning of “The Children Stay,” Jeffrey locks the rehearsal room before he makes love to Pauline (190). By placing these sounds at the beginning and at the climax of her story and by making them so similar to each other, Munro combines the roles of Jeffrey and Brian in the triangle. Like Orphée, neither man will let Pauline live. But when they box her in by forcing her to choose, once again she becomes both of Anouilh's lovers at the same time. Unlike Eurydice, however, who is passive because she is simply killed a second time, Pauline is active because, like Orphée, she chooses to “die.”

After an intensely traumatic conflict that transforms the philosophical debate between M. Henri and Orphée's father into counterpoised but contrasting pressures on her remembering body, Jeffrey's “weight … on her” hips and Mara's “weight … on her hip,” Pauline chooses to give up her children (210, 212). But giving them up is an “acute pain” that she knows “will become chronic”: “You won't get free of it, but you won't die of it,” she tells herself, realizing that she must “carry [it] along and get used to [it] until it's only the past she's grieving for and not any possible present” because her children have grown up (213).

The first meaning of the story's title, therefore, is painfully and paradoxically double. Because the children stay with their father, they also stay with their mother: they are a permanent burden of guilt and grief for the parent who does not stay. The title's second meaning is the most obvious. Although all children grow up physically and most eventually leave their parents, some may nevertheless remain children emotionally and stay with their parents. This figurative definition of children excludes Pauline but includes both Jeffrey and Brian, who keeps “hang[ing] around” his parents (213). In the adulterous triangle, Pauline, unlike the “child” Eurydice, is the only grown-up because she makes her terrible compromise without blaming either her husband or her lover. She realizes that nobody will blame Brian because he tried to “make her see what she was doing” (212). Jeffrey, on the other hand, cannot see what he is doing to Pauline. After her phone conversation with Brian, which Jeffrey naïvely considers easier than Pauline expected, he clumsily articulates what she has been thinking, that perhaps Brian was “subconsciously” expecting her to leave him. When her silence begs Jeffrey “not to say any more,” he apologizes (206). But just as he fails to see the impossibility of their making love when a toddler is in the next room, so too he is unable to comprehend the emotional price of her choice. Pauline realizes that “It isn't his fault. He's still an innocent or a savage, who doesn't know there's a pain so durable in the world” (213). The Anouilh sauvage is a character who is innocent, incorruptible, and intransigent, even though deeply scarred by pain and suffering (della Fazia 63, 49-52). Jeffrey is clearly not a savage in this sense. By making him a stranger to suffering, Munro argues that such innocence can come only from emotional inexperience. Although he shares this childishness with Orphée, he is not Orphée, because he does not have to die—that is, to give anything up to possess his Eurydice.

In the story's typical Munro epilogue in the present, Pauline's adult daughters, who neither “hate” nor “forgive” their mother, refer to her going “away with Orphée” (Love 213), but she repeatedly corrects them: “It wasn't Orphée” (214). Because their father has jokingly told them that their “mother ran away with Orphée,” they confuse Jeffrey with the actor who played Orphée (214). Pauline's corrections, however, are also a metafictional comment on Munro's subversive recasting of Anouilh's characters.

Because it is Pauline who actively chooses as both Orphée and Eurydice, her comments on Anouilh's lovers constitute Munro's self-reflexive analysis of her story and her rejection of Anouilh's conception of love. Comparing the lovers, Pauline argues that “Eurydice is more realistic” than Orphée and “loves him better in a way than he loves her” (197). Pauline is also more realistic than Jeffrey because, although she is only a year older than he is, she is an adult and he is still a naïve child, unaware of how much better she loves him. Both explicitly and implicitly, Anouilh's conception of an intransigent, pure, and fated love is also presented as childish for several reasons. Pauline tells Brian, “It's a beautiful play in one way but in another it is so silly,” because its adolescent insistence on perfection and its refusal of compromise reject the tough decisions that facing reality daily demands (198).

In dramatizing the desperately disruptive force of Pauline's sexuality, Munro shows that Orphée's rejection of Eurydice's sexuality is also adolescent. In an unpublished interview with Barbara Martineau, Munro defined sex as “the big thing,” not only the physical act itself but also “the whole thing of emotions that radiate out from good sex, which seems to me so central in adult life, and so irreplaceable” (qtd. in Ross 79). Caught up in these irreplaceable emotions, “her secret life disturb[ing] her like a radiant explosion,” Pauline is a woman whose sexuality “shockingly” outweighs her sense of maternal responsibility (Love 200, 209). In two sentences added to the revised version of the story, Pauline, discussing the play with Brian, “dreamily” tells him that “Everybody has choices” (198), but, at the moment when she finally chooses to give up her daughters, a nightmarish reality solidifies around her. “A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens [into] … its undeniable shape” (213). This metaphor, like the bolt being pushed into place and the board slamming down on Pauline, emphasizes the consequences of her choice: now she has boxed herself in. Thus, another meaning of the title perhaps implies that women who fantasize about sex without recognizing the potentially dangerous power of their sexuality remain children ignorant of reality.

The final reason behind Munro's rejection of Anouilh's conception of love is thus paradoxical. In spite of all her analytical arguments, Pauline decides to join Jeffrey because she believes that their love, like that of Orphée and Eurydice, is fated. But the epilogue's retrospective recasting of roles shows the most fundamental reason why Jeffrey was not Orphée: he was not the fated lover that Pauline had once mistakenly believed him to be. “It wasn't Orphée,” she tells her daughters, but “somebody else connected with the play,” with whom she “lived … for a while” (213). When her daughters repeat, “Not Orphée,” she insists, “No. Never him” (213). After thirty years, the disillusioned dissonance of “for a while” and “never” rejects Jeffrey as Orphée much more emphatically than does the original New Yorker ending: “It wasn't him” (103). Subverting her own argument, Pauline has miscast her lover and has finally been just as wrong about love as Anouilh. The shatteringly ironic contrast between “What we think is happening and what we understand later on …” is Munro's recurrent theme (Munro, “Interview” 90).

Note

1. For earlier examples of Munro's use of ironic intertextuality, see Carrington; and Munro, “Hired Girl” and “Wilderness Station.”

Works Cited

Anouilh, Jean. Eurydice (Legend of Lovers). Trans. Kitty Black. Five Plays. New York: Hill, 1958. 55-120.

Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. “Double-Talking Devils: Alice Munro's ‘A Wilderness Station.’” Essays on Canadian Writing 58 (1996): 71-92.

———. “Other Rooms, Other Texts, Other Selves: Alice Munro's ‘Sunday Afternoon’ and ‘Hired Girl.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 30 (1998): 33-44.

della Fazia, Alba. Jean Anouilh. Twayne's World Author Series 76. New York: Twayne, 1969.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1964. 2 vols.

Hutcheon, Linda. Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1991.

Munro, Alice. “The Children Stay.” New Yorker 22 and 29 Dec. 1997: 91-96, 98-100, 102-03.

———. “The Children Stay.” The Love of a Good Woman. Toronto: McClelland, 1998. 181-214.

———. Dance of the Happy Shades. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

———. “Hired Girl.” New Yorker 11 Apr. 1994: 82-88.

———. “An Interview with Alice Munro.” With Geoff Hancock. Canadian Fiction Magazine 43 (1982): 74-114. (Rpt. in Canadian Writers at Work: Interviews with Geoff Hancock. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987. 187-224.)

———. Unpublished interview. With Barbara Martineau. 16 Feb. 1975. The Alice Munro Papers, Special Collections Division, U of Calgary, series 37.20.20.

———. “A Wilderness Station.” Open Secrets. New York: Knopf, 1994. 190-225.

Pronko, Leonard Cabell. The World of Jean Anouilh. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.

Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life. Canadian Biography Series. Toronto: ECW, 1992.