Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 22

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The Maternal Body in Alice Munro’s Short Stories
Amandine Coquaz
(MA Creative Writing, Keele University)

In this paper, I argue that the maternal body is used in Munro's short
stories to challenge the notion of an innate maternal instinct in women. I
look at the following stories: ‘The Progress of Love’, ‘My Mother's Dream’,
‘The Children Stay’ and ‘White Dump’. In each of them, the maternal body
becomes unnatural: it is transformed beyond recognition, exposed as the
site of a performance, hindered...These bodily deformations point to the
contradictions and conflicts of motherhood. The pregnant body is
portrayed as invaded and birth is a physical as well as a psychological
splitting.
Keywords: Motherhood, Bodies, Gender, Alice Munro, Pregnancy

In ‘The Progress of Love’, the narrator remembers sharing a bed with her aunt,
Beryl, when she was younger. She explains that the “idea of sharing my bed with
a grownup was a torment to me”.1 However, despite the awkwardness of the
arrangement, she receives some advice from her aunt regarding the proper way
of doing her hair, which she ends up following “most carefully”.2 When reading this
scene, I was strongly reminded of my own experience of sharing a bed with my
aunt while I stayed with her and my cousins for a few days. Not unlike the narrator
of ‘The Progress of Love’, I learned a piece of information which has since stayed
with me. As she rolled herself a joint, my aunt told me about becoming a mother
for the first time. After she had given birth, she found herself thinking ‘Why have I
done this?’ She realised that she had made a mistake. I did not know whether to
be more shocked by this or by her smoking marijuana, which was also a new
piece of information. Up until then, my understanding of motherhood had been of
something that all women longed for. I struggled to imagine that it could be
anything but a source of joy and contentment. This conversation was my first step
towards thinking about motherhood not as something innate and immutable, like I
had been led to believe, but as a social construct.
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Alice Munro, ‘The Progress of Love,’ in Th H