“Marooned on Islands of Their Own Choosing”

Abstract

Faithful readers of Munro’s fiction will encounter familiar material in Too Much Happiness. For a start, the reader might recognize a few images and collocations from previous stories: the narrator’s memory, in “Some Women,” of a summer so hot “the streets of the town… were sprinkled with water to lay the dust”¹ recalls the scene Louisa, from “Carried Away,” captures in a letter to soldier Jack Agnew, in the summer of 1917, when she tells of the watering tank dousing the “streets every day, trying to lay the dust” (Open Secrets, p. 8). The startling image for blood loss Munro uses in “The Love of a Good Woman,” in Jeanette Quinn’s dramatic account of Mr. Willens’s death is retrieved in “Dimensions,” at the scene of the accident involving Doree’s bus. Mrs. Quinn tells Enid, with relish, of how the blood from Willens’s head looked like “pink stuff… like when the froth comes up when you’re boiling strawberries to make jam” (The Love of a Good Woman, p. 58). In the later story, the narrator describes the young truck driver lying at the side of the road, bleeding, the “trickle of pink” oozing from under his head “like the stuff you skim off from strawberries when you’re making jam” (Too Much Happiness, p. 30). The graphic image is in keeping with the idiolect of both narrator and focalizer, for it is an ordinary, domestic analogy that working-class women like Doree and Jeanette Quinn would readily use.