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Key points
- Alice Munro's daughter recently revealed that she had been sexually abused by Munro's second husband.
- The literary community has reacted with alarm over Munro's inaction over the abuse.
- It isn't clear what Munro did or did not do, especially compared to other men who were involved.
Alice Munro, literature Nobel laureate, died last May. Less than two months later, her daughter Andrea Skinner published a letter in the Toronto Star detailing her sexual abuse by Munroe’s husband (Skinner’s stepfather) and Munro’s inaction once she learned about it. The reaction from the literary community about Munro has been shock, and a questioning of how to handle her literary legacy. The Canadian bookstore chain Indigo has removed images of Munro from their stores, and Munro’s alma mater, Western University, is putting on hold a chair position in creative writing named after her, in some early signs of the fallout of Skinner’s letter.
A deeper dive into the accounts of what happened, however, raises questions about exactly what Munro did or didn’t do, compared to other parties in the event – particularly Jim Munro, Skinner’s father and Alice Munro’s ex-husband. The Toronto Star letter and reactions to it from the literary community raise questions in particular about expectations of Alice Munro as a woman and her role as a mother.
There are two critical pieces of information that are missing in popular accounts of these events. First is a piece of misinformation: Based on the available evidence, it is not true that Alice Munro “abetted her daughter’s molestation” as one literary writer claims, nor was there a “failure to protect” Skinner, nor was there “complicity,” because Alice Munro did not know it was happening. Some headlines are misleading because they imply that Munro knew the abuse was happening at the time.
The second missing piece of information is that evidently, Munro’s ex-husband, Jim Munro, did know at the time the abuse was happening. Not only did he not tell his ex-wife Alice Munro about the sexual abuses, but he continued to allow his daughter, the victim, to visit the Munro-Fremlin household to continue to be subjected to these abuses. Granted, he may have had to under their custody agreement, but he could have told Alice Munro about the abuse or gone to court to claim full custody. Instead, all Jim Munro did was ask her older sisters to “make sure she was never alone with Fremlin.” That plan clearly failed.
Why isn’t anyone talking about Jim Munro? From Skinner’s letter, he and Andrea Skinner’s stepmother appear to be the only adults who knew about her sexual abuse at the time it was happening, and yet they did nothing. According to Canadian “duty to report” law, “Every person in Canada has the duty to report known or suspected child maltreatment by law.” Why did they not say anything?
Yet the finger of blame, from Skinner and now the literary community, is solely on Alice Munro.
Mothers are easy to blame in our society. It doesn’t help that psychology’s early theories about childhood sexual abuse often put the blame on the non-offending mother. While modern-day theories are correcting that record, popular opinion and even mental health professionals continue to put disproportionate blame on the mother. Mothers know this: They are more likely than fathers to feel judged by others about their parenting. The reason may be that women are held to a higher moral standard than men. For example, women are expected to be helpful, and are punished more than men when they are not.
There is, in fact, a simple answer to the question of why Jim Munro isn’t being talked about: He’s not famous, not a Nobel-prize-winning author. In which case, Skinner’s letter to the Toronto Star seems to be more about Alice Munro’s literary fame than anything else. That might sound obvious, but strip away Alice Munro’s fame, and the hostile reaction to her by Skinner and the public makes little sense relative to the silence over Jim Munro. If this letter then is about Alice Munro’s fame, I am left to wonder, what is the goal of this letter, especially given that Alice Munro is not around to defend herself? Is it justice? Or is it the opportunity to hold the mother responsible for anything bad that happens to the children, no matter what?
Many people don’t like successful women, particularly in male-dominated fields (at the time Munro was the thirteenth female Nobel laureate in fiction out of 106 total). It signals a lack of nurturing that people expect from women far more than men. Skinner’s letter includes claims that Munro wasn’t there for her: “My mother was busy,” “I was alone,” “My mother said nothing,” “my mother had no similar feelings for me,” “I couldn’t feel it [Munro’s empathy],” “it would be inconvenient for her to visit,” “she was erasing me,” “the silence continued,” “I was estranged,” “the pain of abandonment.” Skinner says almost nothing about her father.
To be clear, I am not questioning Skinner’s account. People dismiss sexual abuse and harassment claims by women all too often. The abuse that Skinner endured from her stepfather is awful and his indictment and punishment were too little, too late. In no way do I mean to detract from those facts.
Instead, this is about her mother. Alice Munro predicted the present-day reaction to Skinner’s letter. She said, in Skinner’s words, that our misogynistic culture was to blame if Skinner “expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men.” Unfortunately, that’s all we will know about what Alice Munro would have to say. Skinner published the letter after Alice Munro died. Nevertheless, the literary world has been quick to render a guilty verdict for Munro without a trial, and with saying hardly a word of the actual complicity of Jim Munro.
We might be used to some right-wing conservatives blaming women when bad things happen, such as conservatives blaming women for not protecting Trump at his rally, or JD Vance blaming women (particularly those without children) in part for the putative imminent downfall of the United States. But I suspect we are seeing a form of this with Alice Munro in more progressive-minded people. I am left with a gnawing question: Would the same thing have happened if Alice Munro were a man?
(Thanks to Carol Gilligan and Honor Moore for sparking ideas and discussions in this piece.)
