Alice Munro
p137
As the story begins, the audience is presented with the character of Mrs. Peebles, and with this description, she seems to fit the role of foil character to Edie. However, a more appropriate foil character would be that of Alice Kelling, the supposed fiance of Chris Watters.
To begin, Alice possesses a very delusional view of the world; she fails to recognize the "end" of her engagement and foolishly chases her fiance around while he seduces women in each town he visits. Her engagement ring, even, "was a tiny stone," (Munro, 139). The size of this diamond is symbolic of Watters' love that he has for her, little and almost irrelevant. Kelling also fails to answer Loretta Bird when she inquires about the length of her engagement; a common social move to avoid talking about a sore subject. To top off her disenchantment with reality, Alice wears sunglasses, representative of the film through which she sees her world.
Edie, on the other hand, is the most realistic character of the story. She has knowledge of both how the rich and the poor live, and she can easily determine the difference. Edie may not be intelligent, but she certainly knows what is going on around her unlike Alice Kelling. Even though Edie claims to have forgotten "all about Alice Kelling and her misery and her awful talk," Kelling had a lasting effect on her own character: she subconsciously realized what she did not want to be. After seeing the near pathetic life that Alice had lived, Edie decided to not live the same life, and with this subconscious decision, settled to no longer wait for the letter from Watters and marry the mailman instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment