Engagement via Emotional Heightening in “Passion”: On the Grammatical Texture of Emotionally-Immersive Passages in Short Fiction

Abstract

as we find out in Alice Munro’s story, “Passion.” Grace descends upon them: an intelligent, frustrated young woman, with a touch of the young Alice Munro about her no doubt (just as the older Grace may echo the older Alice, who could herself get onto Highway 7 to visit the Ottawa Valley, driving from Clinton to Stratford, in under an hour). Maury courts her, and assumes they will marry, but really what attract Grace are the space and creativity and scope for fulfillment that the family—especially Mrs. Travers at its center—seems to nurture and ratify in her. The Traverses are helping her to “get across” the socioeconomic gulf that separates working stiffs (caning chairs) from a life of thinking, possibility, leisure, and pleasure: life with a taste to it (to rewrite the sentiments of her stand-in parents and her high-school principal, who sanction her going off to get “a taste of life”—but always on the assumption that thereafter of that apple she will eat no more). Into this familiar configuration, on Canadian Thanksgiving eve, swerves the restless and dangerous Dr. Neil, in his wine-colored convertible, and there is an immediate mutual attraction and some borrowing (his surname is Borrow): her from Maury, him from Mavis. Still nothing might have eventuated, but for a nice convergence of Darwinian random conditions, where the chief uncertainty concerns how far back to trace these. But for Thanksgiving, there would have been no expedition to buy cranberries; but for Wat being out in the boat, Maury would not have had to drive away to get said cranberries; but for the insistence of Janey and Dana, Grace would have