24 pages • 48 minutes read
Alice MunroFriend of My Youth
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Divided House
The house where the Grieves sisters live is divided in half; Flora lives in one half, and Ellie and her husband Robert live in the other, larger half. This is an arrangement that is known to nearby townspeople, as are the reasons for the arrangement. To the casual observer, however, the house looks unified and whole, as if one family occupies all of it. The divided house symbolizes the hidden interior lives of Flora and the narrator’s mother, as well as the philosophical divides between characters of different generations and beliefs.
Once Ellie dies and Robert remarries, the house’s division becomes more extreme and apparent. Robert’s new wife, a bossy, materialistic woman, modernizes her and Robert’s half of the house, while Flora leaves her half of the house unaltered. Now the house does look strange and lopsided from the outside, and it is not the new wife who is blamed for this, but Flora. In this way, Munro literalizes the shifting public perception of Flora in town. By not allowing Audrey Atkinson to modernize her half of the house as well, she is failing to keep up appearances. The townspeople will tolerate stubbornness and eccentricity in their neighbors, as long as these qualities are not made public. To the narrator, that her mother preferred Flora’s half of the home indicates her mother’s attraction to conservative ideals, while her mother believes that Flora’s half of the house is actually the more progressive.
Wedding Flowers
There are two weddings in this story, and both weddings are unhappy and shadowed by scandal. The first wedding is between Ellie Grieves and Robert Deal, and the second wedding is between Robert Deal and Audrey Atkinson. In each wedding, flowers symbolize propriety and respect for ritual, but also romance and new beginnings.
The wedding between Ellie Grieves and Robert Deal is supervised by Ellie’s older sister Flora, who insists on making it a proper, formal wedding, even if a last-minute one: “[I]t was Flora who pressed Robert’s suit […] and got Ellie out of bed and washed her and made her presentable. It would have been Flora who picked one geranium from the window plant and pinned it to her sister’s dress” (10). Here, Flora is given a degree of agency even as she is the jilted party. She makes sure that her sister’s wedding to her former fiancé is celebratory, not merely convenient. That the geranium comes from the “window plant,” i.e. from inside the house, further symbolizes how Flora gives her blessing to the union without reproach.
Audrey Atkinson also pins a flower in Robert Deal’s buttonhole before their own wedding. Like Flora, she has taken charge of the event and is trying make a potentially tawdry occasion more attractive. In this case, Audrey’s agency foreshadows how Flora has become irrelevant in the new household dynamic. Audrey’s dominance indicates that her beliefs and social ideals have replaces Flora’s Cameronian principles.
Dreams
This story is framed by a recurrent dream that the narrator has about her deceased mother. Her return to life in the dream is strangely pedestrian, which makes the dream seem more real. She is healthy but not perfectly healthy, and is happy but not overjoyed to see her daughter again. She does not seem like a ghost, only like her old nonchalant self.
The narrator describes the dream at the beginning of the story, and then returns to it at the story’s end, this time analyzing its effect on her. Through this structure, Munro implies that the narrator needed to tell the story in order to understand the dream and the degree to which it disconcerted her. She tells us that while she was relieved to see her mother in the dream, she also felt betrayed by the ease of her mother’s return. She returns to the subject of her dream by way of speculating about Flora, her mother’s old friend; she imagines running into Flora, then realizes that she is really thinking about her mother.
This use of a dream as a framing device for the story works in two ways. It shows us how preoccupied the narrator is by her mother’s death, and how her grief is always just under the surface of the story. Secondly, it makes the events of the story seem unstable and dreamlike, undermining their reality and emphasizing how the narrator, a writer, may be shaping the narrative. It suggests that nothing is certain and that reality is determined by the individual.
Related Titles
By Alice Munro
