The Runaway Stories
'Runaway' is the latest of Alice Munro's collection of short stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives and happenings. 'Silence' is the last part of the trilogy about Juliet, the active protagonist and her daughter Penelope, the voiceless yet dominant character. All of Munro's stories are set in small towns in Ontario, Canada. She writes about ordinary people and their everyday life, her characters vivid and real like our own. So real, almost similar to our next door neighbours, waiting to be analysed--about betrayals, surprises of love, between men and women, between friends, between parents and children.
In 'Silence', Juliet suddenly finds herself estranged from her twenty-one-year-old daughter Penelope who decides to go incommunicado. It offers one of Munro's most complex explorations of reverberation of silence. Penelope uses silence as a weapon to sever relationship with her mother, wounding and punishing her. Munro portraits what the power of silence can do in domestic relationships. Juliet fails to apprehend the need of her daughter as well as the lack of certain practices at home, the religious teachings absent in recognising the fundamental principle of spirituality, something supreme and superior than ourselves, the very code to moral values which constitutes and binds societies and communities. When not recognised, it rejects virtues of rectitude, uprightness and morality. Munro in silence reminds us of the virtue of respecting tradition.
Juliet's success as an interviewer on Television, addressing and discussing other peoples' controversies and complexities contrasts her failure to recognise the needs of ethical spirituality in bringing up her daughter. It is as though Juliet took Penelope's presence being with her for granted. She put Penelope in a private school instead of a public one, allowed her to outings with her friends and went out to places by themselves as mother and daughters do.
They were always together. But at times when things weren't right between Eric and Juliet she wanted Penelope out of the way. This had a profound impact on Penelope's psyche, she was not considered a part of the complete family. Penelope was a love child and she resented the non-committal attitude of her mother towards her father. She was fond of her father, went sailing and fishing with him. Her father's death and cremation, without Penelope's consent distanced her further from her mother. Juliet had some men friends visiting her, Penelope resentful of the few affairs Juliet had. Juliet in her conversation with Christa, her friend and former mistress of Eric, tried to rationalise the reason why her twenty year old daughter suddenly no longer was in contact with her.
It is sad and pitiable as Juliet's suffered through so much from her daughter. Juliet later examines her own life through the disappearance of her daughter caught in a religious cult so as Juliet presumed. Silence, was Penelope's victory to conformism and tradition, and Juliet's defeat was the failure to provide Penelope with the desired religious studies and holiness in family relationships.
Asfa Hussain is a lawyer.
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