Differently: Alice Munro and the North American 1960s

Abstract

For Alice Munro, “the 1960s” extended in spirit a few years past the end of the decade and centred not upon racial conflict, riots in the cities, or protests against the Vietnam War but, rather, upon the situation of women of her generation as they came to terms with the social and sexual upheavals of the period. In returning to the 1960s decades later, Munro was exploring two related questions: how they were experienced by people like herself at the time and how, provisionally, they and fictionalized versions of herself as actors in them appear with distance. Although apolitical as a writer, Munro could not avoid politics in the home as sympathy with the women’s movement merged with that for other forms of contemporary protest, laying bare deep divisions between herself and her husband that found their way into themes in the fiction. Omniscient but non-committal in “Differently” (1989) and related stories set in the 1960s, and sympathetic toward her women but ironic about their missteps and confusions, Munro establishes a distance from fictionalized versions of her younger self without inscribing a moral viewpoint of her own. As she looks back on her characters, on the 1960s as a cultural phenomenon, and vicariously on herself as she felt and behaved at the time, Munro, too, seems to say, with wry aloofness, “Differently.”