Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 25

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the maternal body in order to make the maternal experience visible. In her stories,
the maternal body imposes itself; it refuses to be ignored.
Redekop identifies this visibility in two specific stories: ‘The Progress of Love’
and ‘White Dump’. In the first, a mother stages a mock-hanging, witnessed by her
daughter, while in the second, a grandmother appears naked in front of her family,
unashamed. These two spectacles reveal a truth; they show the mother’s body as
something other than maternal, as breaking free from the performance of
motherhood. In the show they are putting on, Marietta’s mother and Sophie are
appearing as their ‘true’ selves (that is to say, as their pre-maternity selves).
Isabel, Sophie’s daughter-in-law, is surprised that Sophie’s pubic hair “had not
turned white, but remained a glistening golden brown, and was as light a covering
as a very young girl’s”.15 In her nakedness, Sophie is returned to her younger,
child-free self. Marietta’s mother also appears childish. Standing on the chair, her
stage, she “smiled and tapped her foot, as if to say ‘Here I am, then. What are you
going to do about it?’”16 Beneath this playful dare, there is a truth: their spectacle
is a rebellion. Redekop argues that “[t]heir very exhibitionism challenges our
notions of innate motherhood”.17 We are offered a glimpse beneath the surface of
a performance that many see as an intrinsic state. Redekop refers to Munro’s
mothers as clowns, emphasising the absurd nature of the performance. In their
contrived exhibitionism, Marietta’s mother and Sophie are taking off their
costumes and their make-up. They are ceasing to be clowns.
In a similar vein to this notion of motherhood as an extra layer and a costume,
Baraitser explores the idea of “the mother as an ‘encumbered body’”, arguing that
motherhood “has its own kind of viscosity” and comparing a mother’s morning
routine to “wading through treacle”.18 In ‘The Children Stay’, we see Pauline
struggling to move from one place to the next with the children. It involves
“trundl[ing]” and “trek[ing]”.19 In opposition to this, a fast-forward occurs when she
leaves them to go to her lover. We cut straight from Jeffrey’s revelation that he
has followed her to the place of her family holiday to Pauline waking up in his
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Alice Munro, ‘White Dump,’ in The Progress of Love (London: Vintage Books, 1982), 300.
Munro, ‘The Progress of Love,’ 10.
17
Redekop, Mothers and Other Clowns, 177.
18
Baraitser, Maternal Encounters, 126, 128, 129.
19
Alice Munro, ‘The Children Stay,’ in Lying Under the Apple Tree: New Selected Stories (London:
Vintage Books, 1998), 70.!
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