Caretakers Caregivers: Economies of Affection in Alice Munro

Abstract

For many critics, care represents a welcome alternative to prescriptive patriarchal ethics, which tend to involve abstract principles and rules that have little relevance to the day-to-day lives of individual subjects. Indeed, the ethics of care is largely a rebuttal to Kantian ethics, an ethos of autonomy and independence that provides rules for interaction that risk transforming human relations into mathematical equations. early work of Carol Gilligan responds to the masculine bias in ethical theory by presenting an alternative discourse of care and that regards human dependence--not independence--as fundamental and inevitable. As Martha Fineman explains, our society mythologizes concepts such as 'independence' and 'autonomy' despite the concrete indications surrounding us that these ideals are, in fact, unrealizable and unrealistic (215). Despite misleading illusions of autonomy, care is a central concern for all human beings, though its definition and parameters are fluid: Caring is thus experienced as an unspecific and unspecifiable kind of labour, the contours of which shift constantly. ... It is only visible when it is not done (Graham 26). Most theorists agree that care is always relational and interactive, necessarily involving an entanglement of motive, intention, performance, and effect. With its focus on relationships, the ethics of care makes room for context and particulars; it accounts for individuality and specificity and emphasizes responsibility, relationships, and context. However, such flexibility also leads to theoretical instability, to an aporia at the heart of the ethics of care: care is both universal and inscrutable; it demands definition and evaluation, yet constantly eludes such fixity. attention to context can make it difficult to discuss care outside of particular scenarios and Peta Bowden goes so far as to suggest that caring highlights the ways in which ethical practices outrun the theories that attempt to explain them (2). In essence, at the heart of the ethics of care is a resistance to abstraction that can inhibit its own philosophical theorization. But this potential theoretical impediment makes narrative fiction an ideal form for the study of care. In fact, one could argue that fiction has the most to contribute to ethics of care debates in its representation of particular scenarios of dependence. responsibility, compassion, and care. Alice Munro, who turned eighty in 2011, has a writing career spanning six decades with much to offer the theorization of care. Her early works, particularly the connected short story collections Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), have garnered much critical attention as feminist explorations of identity that provocatively explore the politics of gender and art. Critics have stressed her commitment to the everyday lives of women, her unflinching investigations into the by turns suffocating and satisfying world of the domestic. (1) This preoccupation with gender, power, and has revealed itself in stories that depict women confronting ethical dilemmas in which the needs of the self come into conflict with the needs of the other. A number of critics have examined the ethical implications of Munro's work, in particular what the stories suggest about a writer's to her material, both the work of fiction itself and the actual world that has inspired it. (2) Robert McGill's work considers the crises of in her stories, teasing out the relationship between ethical writing and ethical living in Material (Daringly Out) and the meaning of fidelity in The Bear Came Over the Mountain (No Nation). Tracy Ware and Dennis Duffy examine another aspect of fidelity in their respective analyses of Munro's Meneseteung, a story that, unsettling the historical fiction genre, raises questions about the fiction writer's responsibility to history (Ware, And They May 68). …