Douglas Bauer on Building Characters from the Inside Out

Douglas Bauer | September 2023

Early in Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, Claudia McTeer—the younger sister of Frieda and the novel’s periodic narrator—describes wanting to “dismember” her Baby Doll. It was a Christmas gift, this doll, which all the world around her—“Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs” 1—has made clear she should treasure and adore. But its “blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned” 2 whiteness leaves her unmoved, to put it mildly, as she “finger[s] [its] face … [t]race[s] its turned-up nose, poke[s] [its] glassy eyeballs …,” 3 probing its impenetrable exterior in search of the doll’s deeper inner meaning. 

So, Claudia’s dismembering urge is more forensic than destructive, a kind of imagined, perplexed autopsy in order to take the doll apart and inspect what’s inside it, to see, she explains, “of what it was made.” For only in this way can she hope to “find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped [her].” 4 And going further still, Claudia next describes the “transference”—her word—of this same dismembering impulse to little white girls, the living creatures, coming from the same clinical curiosity—to learn “the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people”—that is, the people in Claudia’s Black world—“look at them and say, ‘Awwwww’.” 5

Here, in Claudia’s desire and her frustration, we have the perfect metaphor for the entwined relationship between a fictional character’s external and internal worlds, with the latter, the internal, being that place readers often wish to be privy to for some better understanding of a character’s power or appeal or whatever aspect it is that they want to understand. (Claudia is of course the “reader” here, her doll the character she needs to have explained.)

It’s this internal / external coexistence, and the narrative energy which results from their interplay—often a tension, an argument, a vivid contradiction between the exterior behavior and the interior hidden truth—that I want to examine. For it’s been my recent experience in workshops and manuscript exchanges with students, that in many of the narratives I’ve read, the internal worlds of their characters are more or less missing. That the characters’ interior landscapes, how they think and feel, have for whatever reason not been seen as foundational, integral. They weren’t present at the creation, we might say. I’m not speaking of these writers’ considered decisions to refer for some reason to the internal worlds in their fiction only rarely or implicitly. Rather, when asked, they often confessed no recognition, no thought, that they should somehow, in some way, account for the internal world at all. And being keen revisionists, they agreed that what was missing would be included in their next drafts.

So, by way of exploring the vital narrative aspect of interiority—which is the term I hear most often—I want to look at the work of three great writers, starting with Henry James, moving next to, again, Toni Morrison, and finally to Alice Munro. It might seem at first glance a most unlikely grouping, but there’s method to my madness, as I hope will be made plain.

In a pivotal chapter of James’ novel The Portrait of a Lady, we find Isabel Osmond, née Archer, sitting through the night, keeping, in James’s phrase, “a meditative vigil” 6 as she reviews the history of her miserable marriage. As a piece of craft alone, the scene offers a great deal to learn from. Not least the several ways in which it brings to this extended moment in a character’s mind a genuine sense of motion, an impression of uninterrupted activity throughout. 

James says in his preface to the novel that his ambition was to give the scene “all the vivacity of incident.” 7 And here I’m citing the scholar and critic, Michael Gorra, in his book, Portrait of a Novel: The Making of an American Masterpiece, who believes that’s just what James accomplished. Gorra writes, that “these pages … change the very sense of what counts as an event in fiction. Sitting still counts; thinking, doing nothing, not moving. Emotions count, and the activity of perception as well.” 8 (I love that phrase, “the activity of perception,” for itself and for how well it describes what readers experience here.)

We can imagine James, as he was writing, being guided by a kind of fictional requirement: That if narrative is composed of concrete scenes—and James is on record in believing it should be—then scenes require a sense of action, some element of animation, if they’re to be made concrete. And if that animation isn’t happening externally—creatures human or otherwise moving about in the visible world—then it must happen in the universe of the characters’ thoughts and feelings.

Which certainly does happen in Isabel’s mind as it performs a kind of kinetic, pinball ricocheting of thoughts, impressions, memories, assessments. This is not to suggest a flightiness, a mental scatteredness. Quite the opposite. There’s a sense of busy order to her mind’s activity, a cerebral sequence of one moment yielding to its scenically logical next.

I’m emphasizing this by way of wondering if, as writers, we might sometimes think that attending to a character’s internal world sacrifices the cinematic movement so naturally occurring in the external one. But in imagining Isabel’s night by the fire, James shows us that an interior landscape, and that which populates it, can be depicted as something every bit as fluid, as mobile as the external world and the way that it behaves.

So just how does James bring Isabel’s interior to such animated life? I think, this way: There are instances throughout where he employs metaphors of physical activity to say what could be said in more literal and, almost certainly, more inactive language.

Early in the chapter, Isabel is thinking hard about a ruthless request from her malevolent husband, Gilbert Osmond, and James writes that Isabel’s thoughts “wandered among [the] ugly possibilities until she had completely lost her way,” 9 and of her spending wretched moments looking in vain for some moral signpost to show her a direction, until suddenly, “she broke free of the labyrinth.” 10 Shortly after, he describes Isabel falling further into hopelessness as her “terrors crowded to the foreground” and how Osmond’s mistrustful words “made vibrations deep” 11 in her psyche. Later, we read that Isabel’s suffering “was an active condition; it was not a chill, a stupor, a despair” (all of which imply a stillness, a physically, as well as a mentally, inactive state); “it was a passion of thought.” 12 ( Which is to say, a condition of emotional vibrancy, an agitated disturbance.)

In the most illustrative passage in the chapter, we learn that at the start of knowing Osmond and succumbing to his charm she imagined him as “like a sceptical voyager strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide, looking seaward yet not putting to sea” 13 and that she, with her vast, capriciously inherited wealth, would lovingly “launch his boat for him.” 14

So, we read of Isabel’s thoughts wandering—mournful thoughts, lost in a labyrinth—and then of these thoughts breaking free. We read of her terrors crowding forward. We read of passionate thought, an animated suffering. And of Osmond’s venomous words vibrating, and deeply. And of the idea of a skittish temperament walking the beach at low tide, while a new and generous love wishes to demonstrate itself by launching the object of that love toward the life he’s been too fearful to engage. And all of it occurring over a long night of emotional revisits and summoned memories where the most frenzied bit of external action are the candles burning down, while Isabel’s crisply visible internal world moves from memory to memory, thought to thought, a vividly scenic meditation staying entirely in the precincts of Isabel Archer’s lively, troubled mind.

Before moving on, a literary historical footnote here.

What we’re encountering in this chapter is, of course, a stream-of-consciousness narrative. As we know, this notion of the mind moving continuously, unbrokenly, was first given clinical definition by Henry James’s older brother, the philosopher William James, in an essay that became part of his tome, the Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. Michael Gorra writes that William James described consciousness as “a process, unbounded, and his essay provides an exceptionally rigorous account of how, in the years to come, the novel would describe that inner life. It is,” Gorra continues, about William James’s theory, “a kind of crib sheet for modernism itself. 15

Except Henry got there first. In his novel’s exemplary chapter, Gorra says, “James … goes so much further than his predecessors that it amounts to a difference in kind. No writer in English had yet offered so full an account of the inner life . . .” 16

William James’s essay, with its conception of the mind’s ceaselessly moving behavior, appeared in 1884. Behavior which his little brother had brilliantly dramatized in fiction three years earlier.

In 1973, three years after The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison published her second novel, Sula. The novel features two families in the Black neighborhood of a small Ohio town in the early part of the twentieth century. The Wrights, whose domestic tone is set and supervised by the fanatically proper matriarch, Helene; her husband, Wiley; and their only child, Nel. And in spectacular contrast, there’s the raucous brood overseen by the ironically named Eva Peace—her daughter, Hannah; her son, Ralph, whom she calls Plum; and finally, Hannah’s daughter, Eva’s granddaughter, Sula.

Most of all, it’s the story of Nel and Sula, of their bonding, forged in girlhood, through adolescence and beyond, until the day it shatters in an act which for Nel is a shocking betrayal, but which Sula sees actually as a kind of “compliment” she’s paid her friend, true to their alliance as she’s always understood it. “A compliment to one was a compliment to the other” 17 is how the novel puts it in giving us Sula’s self-certain rationale. 

What most fascinates me here is the way Morrison choreographs the interactions of her characters’ internal and external worlds in order to maximize that storytelling tension I spoke of at the start. 

I’m choosing one scene from among many that work the same way: a highly charged moment rising to violence, whether physical or emotional or both, while the perpetrator of that violence assumes an eerie, unaffected, even ruminative calm.

I mentioned Plum, Eva’s youngest, who, we learn, was adored as a baby growing up “float[ing] in a constant swaddle of love and affection,” 18 and who returns home from the war a cheerful, sweet-smiling heroin addict. He sleeps for days on end and eats next to nothing—his addiction having turned him back into that helpless baby boy.

Until the night Eva makes her way down the stairs from her room to Plum’s and the following occurs.

He was lying in his bed barely visible in the light coming from a single bulb … [Eva] sat down and gathered Plum into her arms. He woke but only slightly. “Hey, man. Hey. You holdin’ me, Mamma?” His voice was drowsy and amused … Eva held him closer and began to rock. Back and forth she rocked him … Rocking, rocking, listening to Plum’s occasional chuckles, Eva let her memory spin, loop and fall. Plum in the tub that time as she leaned over him. He reached up and dripped water into her bosom and laughed. She was angry, but not too, and laughed with him. 19

Things to notice in particular: Most obviously, there’s Eva’s reenacting her behavior as a mother rocking her baby. And from that a memory naturally emerges—the only time in the scene when we’re in Eva’s mind, and even then for just a few beats—of baby Plum splashing her with water as she washed him in the tub.

Eva lifted her tongue to the edge of her lip to stop the tears from running into her mouth. Rocking, rocking. Later she laid him down and looked at him for a long time … Plum woke up and said, “Hey, Mamma, whyn’t you go on back to bed? I’m all right. Didn’t I tell you. I’m all right. Go on, now.”

“I’m going Plum,” she said. She shifted her weight and pulled her crutches toward her … She dragged herself to the kitchen and made grating noises.

Plum on the rim of a warm light sleep was still chuckling. Mamma. She sure was somethin’. He felt twilight. Now there seemed to be some kind of wet light traveling over his legs and stomach with a deeply attractive smell. It wound itself—the wet light—all about him, splashing a wet lightness over him. Some kind of baptism, some kind of blessing, he thought” 20

Morrison’s deftness here includes the way she uses that very quick trip into Eva’s consciousness—remembering Plum the baby laughing as he splashes her with bath water—and recasts its elements echoing ominously. Now the splashing water is another kind of wetness and it is splashing Plum, not vice versa. Most important—the key to the excruciating tension of the scene—it’s his mind we’re in, not Eva’s, which means we have a surreal, drug-dream access to his internal world because his heroin confusion can’t possibly make sense of what’s happening to him, and since Morrison doesn’t offer us the cold clarity of Eva’s mind, only the drug-addled poetry of Plum’s internal misimpressions (“He felt twilight”), neither can we.

And then:

Eva stepped back from the bed … She rolled a bit of newspaper into a tight stick about six inches long, lit it and threw it onto the bed where the kerosene-soaked Plum lay in snug delight. Quickly, as the whoosh of flames engulfed him, she shut the door and made her slow and painful journey back to the top of the house.

Just as she got to the third landing she could hear Hannah and some child’s voice. She swung along, not even listening to the voices of alarm….By the time she got to her bed someone was bounding up the stairs after her. Hannah opened the door. “Plum! Plum! He’s burning, Mamma! We can’t even open the door! Mamma!”

Eva looked into Hannah’s eyes. “Is? My baby? Burning?” The two women did not speak, for the eyes of each were enough for the other. Then Hannah closed hers and ran toward the voices of neighbors calling for water” 21

I think the shocking impact owes everything to Eva’s internal world being the one we don’t have access to. What we get from her instead are the words she speaks to Hannah, sounding as I read them as if she’s separated from reality, or willing herself there, or even perhaps affecting that distance—pretending to be. There are her disembodied words, and there’s the look in her eyes as they meet Hannah’s, which is everything Hannah needs to see, for now.

I say “for now” because the scene isn’t finished, not until the novel visits it again thirty pages later when Hannah, in conversation with Eva, is once more “[w]atching her mother’s eyelids.” 22 We recall that the earlier action of this scene ended with the two of them looking into each other’s eyes, so it’s as if the narrative simply picks up where it left off to give Eva’s interior state a spoken voice at last as she tells Hannah why she did what she did that day. 

… he wanted to crawl back in my womb and well.… I ain’t got the room no more even if he could do it. There wasn’t space for him in my womb. And he was crawlin’ back. Being helpless and thinking baby thoughts and dreaming baby dreams and messing up his pants again and smiling all the time. I had room enough in my heart, but not in my womb.…I birthed him once. I couldn’t do it again” 23

As I said, the novel contains several scenes built in just this way: an instigator inflicting conflict or pain, physical or emotional, with no internal explanation, only external action in the moment, until pages later when we get the characters’ words or thoughts or both returning to address what happened, and why.

Including the seminal day when Nel walks into her house to find Sula and Nel’s husband, Jude, naked on the floor on all fours, “[n]ibbling at each other,” 24 and after being discovered, Sula calmly gets up and sits on the bed, “not even bothering to put on her clothes … [h]er chin in her hand, [sitting] like a visitor from out of town waiting for the hosts to get some quarreling done.” 25 And to make the point again, the narrative here is coming from Nel, with her sense of what she’s walked in on. We get nothing from Jude, and especially nothing from inside Sula in the moment, sitting on the bed, calm and naked as a cherub, a sublimely lustful one, and thinking perhaps, You got yourself a man well worth having, Nel. So naturally, and a compliment to you, I had him.

The defining event in Alice Munro’s story, “Fits,” is the murder/suicide of a recently arrived retired couple in Gilmore, one of the small, self-scrutinizing Canadian towns that Munro has made identifiably her own. The Weebles lived next door to Peg and Robert Kuiper and Peg’s two teenaged sons by her first marriage, and it is Peg who discovers the bloody scene in the Weebles’ bedroom, after knocking on their door early one freezing winter morning and getting no answer, though she notices their car in the driveway. She’s on an errand to deliver them a carton of eggs, so she enters the house and calls their names and, still no response, moves into the kitchen and then the living room, noting how warm the rooms are, and eventually up the stairs to where their bedroom is located at the top.

But the axis of the story is not the horrific event, which has already happened before we joined it. Though the narration is somewhat coy at the start, with a deceptively benign opening sentence that reads, “The two people who died were in their early sixties,” 26 then proceeds for two pages of background, including Robert’s vagabond past, both professionally and romantically, before his marriage to Peg, until we come to, “It was entirely by accident that Peg was the one who found them.” 27

The central preoccupation of “Fits,” instead, is the character of Peg and the great mystery of her behavior in the aftermath of her discovery. Why a great mystery? Because not once, not for a sentence, do we enter Peg’s mind to learn what she’s thinking and feeling about the murders themselves and about her being the one who found the Weebles.

It’s an exclusion so complete that when we get the description of Peg entering the house and repeatedly calling their names before she starts up the stairs, then beginning to climb and not calling again, Munro writes, “She must have known then or she would have called.” 28

She must have known.

It’s as if the seemingly omniscient narrative intelligence is itself uncertain here, barred from Peg’s internal world at this crucial moment. As if the story, like the rest of us, is among those at the mercy of her extreme discretion.

It’s by way of Peg’s extreme discretion that Munro creates the same energizing tension that runs so powerfully through Sula. Indeed, the story’s very founding, its fictional design, the driving psychology of its “plot,” if you will, derives from the town’s citizenry, all of Gilmore, wanting, like us, (we become, as readers, like honorary voyeuristic residents) to know what’s going on in Peg Kuiper’s internal world. And why not? She left the bloody bedroom and drove the few blocks to the constable’s office to report what she’d found. Then she continued on to work at the town’s general store, which is owned by Robert’s family. She said nothing to her coworker, Karen, who had to learn what happened from a customer, which left her so wounded that she said to someone, “I always believed Peg and me to be friends, but now I’m not so sure.” 29

As the story moves through the day, more people approach Peg and try to pry from her the information they need for themselves. Which leads to this narrative reflection:

What was it they were really looking for? Surely not much in the way of details, description. Very few people actually want that, or will admit they do, in a greedy and straightforward way. They want it, they don’t want it. They start asking, they stop themselves.…Perhaps they wanted from Peg just some kind of acknowledgement, some word or look that would send them away, saying, “Peg Kuiper is absolutely shattered.” “I saw Peg Kuiper. She didn’t say much but you could tell she was absolutely shattered.” 30

To those she might have told, her silence amounts to a kind of social hoarding. They see something even finally hostile about it, or if not that, haughty, certainly selfish. In any event, it’s an unreadable parsimony that has left people wondering if they know Peg as well as they thought they did. 

In such tiny towns, local news and gossip is the social currency and it’s assumed whoever has it will dispense it generously. “In Gilmore,” Munro writes, “. . . [s]ecrecy and confidentiality are seen to be against the public interest.” 31

All to say that Peg’s interiority is present, is palpable, rendered vividly by its ever more emphatic absence. And Munro makes it the engine of the drama—the conflict between a character, whose internal world remains an utter mystery throughout, and everyone else, friend or family, named or otherwise, (and their interior lives wide-open to the reader) pressing her for what their predatory curiosities tell them they are owed. 

This bafflement finds its way into the Kuiper household as well, where Robert “felt troubled, even slightly humiliated, to think that he hadn’t known; Peg hadn’t let him know.” 32 He’d been away for the morning, repairing the roof on another store he owns in a neighboring town, and Peg hadn’t phoned him. He learned about the deaths and Peg’s reporting them when he stopped at the highway diner for lunch and found the constable holding forth for the noontime crowd. It wasn’t till that evening that she described it all to him. Talking with her in the kitchen as she makes supper, he’s struck that “The only thing more apparent than usual to [him] was her gracefulness, lightness, quickness, and ease around the kitchen.” 33 And struck too by “[h]er tone to her sons,” which, “under its severity, was shockingly serene.” 34

Working to understand Peg’s failure to call him right away, he reminds himself that she’s a “self-contained” 35 person, a quality he has always admired. Indeed, the story tells us that when they met, he was drawn to Peg’s “patterned, limited, serious” life. 36 All features he found deeply desirable in her.

The family conversation continues after supper. Older-brother Clayton reports on a convoy of “[s]tupid cars all crawling along [the] street,” 37 people needing to get a look, hoping to see something they can take away from their moment of proximity to where it happened. This offends Clayton greatly and he quickly homes in on the wish to unsettle his mother, to get her finally to emote, to break the surface of that shocking serenity, just as Claudia McTeer wished to crack open her doll’s hard plastic exterior to get at what was inside.

About the people in the cars trolling past, Clayton says, “I don’t see why they can’t believe [what happened]. Mom could believe it all right. Mom wasn’t surprised.” 38 To which Peg responds, saying of course she was surprised. Just because she didn’t scream didn’t mean she wasn’t surprised.

Clayton says that he supposes the Weebles had a fight, and again Peg takes issue, insisting there’s no way to know that. “We don’t know if they had a fight, or what.” 39

And here Clayton finds his opening.

A fight. His mother’s words. Did the couple have “a fight”? Although I’m not sure he consciously knows it’s what he’s been looking for, or if it simply, suddenly presents itself and with the aggression of his new mood he seizes it. In any case, he does seize it and summons an ugly memory of Peg’s turbulent first marriage to his father.

“When you and Dad used to have those fights, you know what I used to think? I used to think one of you was going to come and kill me with a knife.”

“That’s not true,” said Peg.

“It is true. I did.”

Peg sat down at the table and covered her mouth with her hands. Clayton’s mouth twitched. He couldn’t seem to stop it, so he turned it into a little, taunting, twitching smile.

“Clayton. We would never either one of us ever have hurt you.” 40

The essential point is that both the internal and external worlds are unremittingly present in every fictional universe; always there in some fashion; in some guise or other; in conflict or cooperation, apparent or implied. For by attending even now solely to Peg’s exterior, describing precisely what’s visibly apparent—to Clayton, and to Robert, and to us—Munro shows us how wildly Peg’s interior world has been roiling all this while. She describes her, sitting at the table, her mouth covering her hands, and “looking at Clayton. She who always seemed pale and silky and assenting, but hard to follow as a watermark in fine paper, looked dried out, chalky, her outlines fixed in steady, helpless, unapologetic pain.” 41 For me, it’s the word “unapologetic” which conveys especially well the layers of upended feeling in Peg. She’s revealed here, no longer able—and at this moment no longer caring—to conceal what this day has done to her. Her pain is “unapologetic.” She has no strength, no concern, for emotional decorum. Clayton has succeeded in breaking something loose, setting something free inside his mother that returns her to a history she’s been able to keep contained, obedient, as she’s gone about her outwardly “patterned, limited [and] serious life.” 42

I’ll leave the story here, though it’s far from finished at the end of this scene. Indeed, it takes a classically Munrovian turn, away from an explicit focus on Peg, to follow an unnerved Robert on a long walk in the cold night, over the frozen, sculpted snow, as he thinks about the life in Gilmore he’s embraced so enthusiastically, a life where he’s been able at last to feel grounded, rooted, and where he’s often had the sense as he’s gone about his days of “walking onto an informal stage where a rambling, agreeable play was in progress. And he knew his lines—or knew, at least, that his improvisations would not fail.” 43 Well, no more. Not after today and what he’s learned about what he hasn’t learned about Peg and her past, and their life together, and his own life apart from her in a marriage and a culture he’s adopted so gladly for being able to predict them both so well.

The novelist and story writer Alice Mattison, in an online interview, says something that gets precisely at what that moment with Peg in the Kuipers’ kitchen exemplifies. Mattison is speaking of literary fiction needing to have the courage to give readers characters “who do wrong and have problems.” 44 And she posits possibilities for why writers might have reasons for avoiding what she calls “trouble” 45 on the page. More than anything else, Mattison suggests, they may not yet have discovered, as she says it took her years to do, that “the genius of narrative is not just to describe interior states but to embody them—to find an equivalent for them in the visible world.” 46

This is just what Munro does in the scene where Peg comes undone. She, that is Munro, finds an equivalent for Peg’s interior state in the immediate, visible world—a woman at a table, her face fixed in the pain of a past she’s been brought back to—a world which embodies, which visually articulates, her internal one so fully that we know it, we see and feel it. We have no need for access to it. 

We don’t need to break the doll.

We began by looking at Henry James’s depiction of a young woman sitting by the fire with her thoughts through the night. A narrative that’s entirely internal. And we concluded with one that, in its central character’s case, is entirely void of it, is wholly unavailable to us, and to every other character in the story she dominates. So exactly opposite conceptions, opposite executions. And yet, in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James tells us that his aim was to create in Isabel Archer a character “living in relation to herself.” 47 Which is exactly what Munro is up to in her creation of Peg Kuiper. Showing us, instructively, that whether one extreme or the other, or the brilliant mix of them in Sula, we have a marvelous narrative tool available to us as we render our characters’ internal states and, in Alice Mattison’s phrase, “their equivalents in the visible world”? What are the compelling complements and messy contradictions which the internal and external worlds produce, whatever form, whatever attitude each takes? What are the delicious tensions these two worlds create, separately and together, that can bring our stories to life? \

Douglas Bauer’s most recent book is The Beckoning World, a novel, published in November, 2022. He teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA in Writing and Literature.

Notes

1.              Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, (New York: Plume, 1994), 20. 

2.              Ibid. 

3.              Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 21. 

4.              Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 20. 

5.              Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 22. 

6.              Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Norton, 1995), 14. 

7.              Ibid. 

8.              Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (New York: Liveright, 2012), 236. 

9.              James, The Portrait of a Lady, 355 

10.            Ibid. 

11.            James, The Portrait of a Lady, 354. 

12.            James, The Portrait of a Lady, 356. 

13.            James, The Portrait of a Lady, 357. 

14.            Ibid. 

15.            Gorra, Portrait of a Novel, 236. 

16.            Ibid. 

17.            Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Plume, 1982), 84. 

18.            Morrison, Sula, 45. 

19.            Morrison, Sula, 46–47. 

20.            Ibid. 

21.            Morrison, Sula, 47–48. 

22.            Morrison, Sula, 71. 

23.            Ibid. 

24.            Morrison, Sula, 105. 

25.            Morrison, Sula, 106. 

26.            Alice Munro, Selected Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 353. 

27.            Munro, Selected Stories, 354. 

28.            Munro, Selected Stories, 359. 

29.            Munro, Selected Stories, 360. 

30.            Munro, Selected Stories, 364-65. 

31.            Munro, Selected Stories, 365. 

32.            Munro, Selected Stories, 363. 

33.            Munro, Selected Stories, 367. 

34.            Ibid. 

35.            Munro, Selected Stories, 355. 

36.            Munro, Selected Stories, 357. 

37.            Munro, Selected Stories, 368. 

38.            Ibid. 

39.            Munro, Selected Stories, 369. 

40.            Ibid. 

41.            Ibid. 

42.            Munro, Selected Stories, 357. 

43.            Munro, Selected Stories, 362. 

44.            Alice Mattison, interview by Stephanie Trott, The Rumpus, November 25, 2016. 

45.            Ibid. 

46.            Alice Mattison, The Kite and the String (New York: Penguin, 2017), 8. 

47.            James, The Portrait of a Lady, 11.