To Close or Not to Close: Alice Munro's "The Love of a Good Woman"

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“The Love of a Good Woman” poses unusual problems for the reader at its conclusion—which is virtually no conclusion at all. Many of the best analyses of closure in short fiction, particularly those of Susan Lohafer, have dealt with very short stories; here I examine closure in a difficult case at the opposite end of the scale. Munro’s story has already gained considerable attention, recent as it is; it first appeared in The New Yorker in 1996, and later as the title story in a 1999 collection. It has been the focus of several fine articles, in particular those by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Mark Nunes, Ildiko de Papp Carrington, Dennis Duffy, and Judith McCombs, but the implications of the ending have broad implications for how open endings in stories of different length might work and for the reader’s desire for closure in any narrative. The story centers on Enid, a practical nurse, caring for the dying Mrs. Quinn, a relatively young woman with two small daughters. It happens that Enid, a woman in her mid-thirties, still single, has known, as one might expect in a rural Ontario town, Mrs. Quinn’s husband Rupert since childhood. In grade school she had been part of a group of girls who enjoyed teasing him. Later in high school, her desk in front of his, she tried in small ways to make up for that mistreatment. Rupert Quinn seems to have taken no notice of her, not when she teased him, not in high school,