Queenie
Coming of age, growing up too fast, love, family, memory. Is there is a word for someone you used to be close to who isn't in your life anymore? Not for any particular reason you just...lost touch. I wonder what ever happened to--
The Facts
Text: Queenie Author: Alice Munro
Genre: Modern fiction, Realism Year: 1998
Available: The London Review of Books online archive (Free!)
Content Warning: mentions/description of an abusive relationship. gaslighting. Age difference/barley legal marriage.
The Fiction
Around the world there are hundreds of famous novelists and a handful of famous poets and playwrights. Many of these writers will have dabbled in the short story medium before. But there are few today who have made a career and who have made a legend of themselves in our pop culture on the merit of their short story writing alone.
Actually there is probably only one: Canadian Nobel prize winning writer Alice Monro, who writes only short stories. Alice Munro is as famous as it is possible be for a modern short story writer having received awards and honors not only in Canada (three time winner of the Governor General's award) but by the international community (again she won a Nobel prize in literature for writing short stories!)
Alice Munro is particularly famous for her style of moving backwards and forwards in time when telling her stories in a non linear fashion, and for her stories typically containing little plot instead focusing entirely on exploring her characters. She is known for writing complex characters, particularly women. Her influence is such that her style is thought to have defined and shaped the look and feel of the modern short story genre.
So this week we're talking about an actual living legend, getting just a taste of her work through the 1998 short story Queenie. This story follows our narrator, Chrissy, as she visits her sister, nicknamed Queenie. Queenie is living in Toronto after having run away to marry the much older Mr. Vorguilla at eighteen. Chrissy is staying with the couple in the hopes of finding a job in the city to work for the summer before she starts teacher's college. The main narration of the story follows this summer visit, although time jumps back to Queenie's working for Mr. Vorguilla, Queenie running away with him after his wife passes, the family's reaction, and Queenie's own stories of being married to "Stan" while flirting with one of his student's, Andrew, a man much closer to her in age.
Chrissy tells us Queenie eventually runs away again while she herself was at teacher's college. Maybe with Andrew, maybe with someone else. She doesn't know, and she never heard from or saw her sister again. At least not until recently, now an old woman, retired with her own children grown up, and travelling our narrator starts seeing Queenie in the people around her. She describes her final sighting in the form of an old woman in a grocery store who seems to recognize her. She walks on ignoring the woman, but then after putting her groceries in her car runs back in to try and find her. She can't find the old woman, and wonders if she has left or if the two of them are both wandering the store moving between aisles constantly passing and just missing each other.
The Feeling
Queenie is in terms of plot a very simple story. It is Chrissy describing her estranged sister through the story of the first time she ran away. That simplicity belays the intensely complicated nature of these character's, especially the titular Queenie.
Is Queenie a victim, a young girl seduced by a much older man? Is she selfish for the way she runs from her family and never contacts them? Is she a survivor? An opportunist? The story refuses to tell us, laying out the details of what Chrissy knows and experienced but leaving all judgements or opinions of Queenie's motivations up to the reader.
Why did Queenie never contact her sister? Where did she end up? Why did she run again? Why did she run the first time? Like Chrissy we never get any answers, and instead have to form our own judgements from Queenie's behavior. This story mirrors real life where answers are rarely clearly written down and mysteries aren't just conveniently solved. Instead there are unsolved mysteries that haunt us our whole lives, and people who meant everything to us whose endings we never get to learn. "What ever happened to--" "I wonder how she's--" "I never understood why he--" we all have Queenie's in our lives, people who go on to live their own stories that no longer crossover with ours, who leave us with sudden and unceremonious cliffhangers.
Queenie is about that. But its also about love, and marriage as it explores the (no shocker) unhealthy relationship between Queenie and Stan Vorguilla. The age difference, the gaslighting, the threats of abuse, by the end of the story the reader is glad Queenie has runaway again, even if she has left the rest of her family in the dark. There is also the theme of coming of age, as Chrissy works her first job in Toronto and gains a lot confidence from the experience. Not from the nature of the experience itself, but simply through having an experience as an independent adult she starts to think and act with the confidence of an independent adult and is longer afraid of Mr. Vorguilla.
The most striking scene in this story to me is the end, with the image of Chrissy and Queenie wandering the aisles of a grocery store and missing each other. What is more mundane than a grocery store? The reunion (if indeed it really was Queenie) is not a dramatic or epic moment. It is ordinary. It is something possible, but the reality of it is questionable, after all we don't know if the old woman was Queenie after all these years. It is something that could happen in our world, its believable, but we don't know if it is the truth, if its what really happened.
There are no definitive answers, no tidy resolutions. This ending and the feeling it leaves its readers with is ambiguous: is there joy in the two sisters glimpsing each other again, or is there sorrow in them being so close and yet so far from each other? Is the thought of the people no longer in ours lives possibly walking in the next aisle over comforting or depressing?
It is not my place to say, and neither is it the author's. Alice Munro gives us glimpses of the sisters' relationship, she forces of us to ask questions and leaves us feeing, well, feeling something, but the judgements, and the answers, and the determination of what those feelings are she leaves infinitely up to her readers.
Realism is not, strictly speaking, my genre. Where are the dragons, the detectives, the Death personified? But when faced with master of her craft I can begin to see the draw of realism. Is the titular Queenie a good person? Bad? Hero? Villain? Victim? She is a person, an interesting, and complex one. A real one, or real enough in the context of fiction. She is around the corner, she is across the world, and she is gone. Somewhere.
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