Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 26

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motel room. This sudden jump in time signifies Pauline’s freedom of movement;
she has shed the hindrance that her children represent.
Of course, the burden does not disappear with the children’s absence. She is
no longer physically encumbered but she must deal with a different kind of
hindrance. Mara and Caitlin stay with Pauline in the form of her grief. Carrington
argues that “they also stay with their mother: they are a permanent burden of guilt
and grief for the parent who does not stay”.20 They become an “acute pain”,
something to “carry along and get used to”.21 Despite the choice she has made,
there is no shedding motherhood. Pauline is not unlike her character in the play,
Eurydice, whose lies and affairs follow her around. In the same way, Pauline’s
children will be “sticking to her forever”.22
Sexual mothers abound in Munro’s stories. ‘The Children Stay’ and ‘White
Dump’, for example, centre on adultery. The sexual relationships in these two
stories are a self-assertion on the women’s part, a breaking away from their
maternal role. The men – be it their husbands or their lovers – are
inconsequential. In ‘The Children Stay’, Jeffrey represents an escape. The link
between their affair and their work on a play clearly marks Pauline’s pulling away
from her maternal duty to pursue something that belongs to her, something
outside of motherhood. Carrington argues that “Pauline is a woman whose
sexuality ‘shockingly’ outweighs her sense of maternal responsibility”.23 When
Brian makes “a heavy, formal, righteous threat” in saying the “children stay”, he is
calling on her maternal instinct, on her ‘natural’ need to be with them.24 It does not
work; she chooses sex. The children stay but she does not.
Redekop argues that adultery “serves to make visible the body of the
mother”.25 In ‘White Dump’, Isabel is inspired by her mother-in-law’s exhibitionism.
Redekop suggests that “Sophie’s attention to herself goes contrary to the
behaviour of Isabel who pays attention to her family. Isabel is oppressed by her
caretaking role and longs for liberty”.26 Her affair with a pilot is her key to freedom,
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20

Ildikó de Papp Carrington, ‘Recasting the Orpheus Myth: Alice Munro’s ‘The Children Stay’ and
Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice,’ Essays on Canadian Writing 66 (1998): 200.
21
Munro, ‘The Children Stay,’ 78.
22
Ibid., 68.
23
Carrington, ‘Recasting the Orpheus Myth,’ 202.!
24
Munro, ‘The Children Stay,’ 77.
25
Ibid., 203.
26
Ibid., 202.