WENLOCK EDGE

    Critical Analysis: 

 Wenlock Edge

I remember “Wenlock Edge,” for it is one of those stories we have talked about before that seem to haunt us—especially that strangely unsettling scene when the narrator calmly sits in the nude and has dinner with an elderly man. Sandy asks if anyone can comment on the narrator’s emotion when she says she is on a course discovering her own wickedness. I think Sandy is right that an important element of the story is the narrator’s concern with what is real in life. For me, the issue has to do with a common theme in the short story as a genre—the blurring of the edge between reality and unreality—and a common short story technique of exploring this question in terms of the reality of unreality. The narrator is a student of literature. In fact, I suspect that only an English major would have willingly taken her clothes off for dinner with a strange old man primarily as a challenge to the charge, “So you’re just a bookworm. That’s all you are.” And indeed, she is a bookworm, that is, she primarily lives in books and makes adverse judgments on those, such as the two English majors who live downstairs, whose conversations and preoccupations seem hardly different from those who work in banks or offices. The narrator believes that one who studies literature should see reality differently than others. However, the narrator admits at one point that, except in examinations, she gets many things wrong. And the main thing she thinks she may have gotten wrong is, as Sandy points out, her notion that what she is doing—reading literature—is what is real, or at least teaches us how to see the real. The other characters in the story, she comes to realize, see reading literature as only a game. The narrator gets many of her ideas and expectations from reading. Her own experience with reality other than what she reads is sparse. For example, Nina’s story of her children, the death of one child, her life with Mr. Purvis, makes her feel like a simpleton. Still, the narrator thinks that Nina has no pegs on which to hang anything because she has not read about Victorian, Romantic, Pre-Columbian,

that she could not find on the map the many countries she has visited, and that she wouldn't know whether or not the French Revolution came before the First World War. When Mrs. Winner comes to pick her up for dinner with Mr. Purvis, the woman’s platinum hair certifies to the narrator a hard heart, immoral dealings, and a long bumpy ride through the sordid back alleys of life. When Mr. Purvis takes her to his library, she has a notion of the sort of story that few people ever get a chance to read, about a room called a library turning out to be a bedroom with soft lights, puffy cushions, and downy pillows. Obviously, the narrator’s knowledge includes not only high literature, but also pulpy, soft-core porn. When she is asked to read Housman’s “Wenlock Edge,” she feels comfortable, at peace with the familiar rhythms of the poem. She lives in fiction more easily than in phenomenal reality. So why does she willing take her clothes off? Because, as she says, it is a challenge, a sort of Bohemian dare, a gesture to show that she is not just a bookworm, but as daring as the women in the books with which she is familiar. She tries to assume the liberal, well-read, view that we are all naked under our clothes. For the moment, she sees herself as a liberated fictional figure, and does not worry that anything will happen to her. The fact that Plato is her favorite philosopher and that she likes his allegory of the cave is significant, for “Wenlock Edge” is filled with issues about what is real and what are misunderstandings, mere shadows, of reality. The fact that the narrator sends Mr. Purvis Ernie’s address, knowing that he will go round and fetch her away from Ernie, is less a wicked act than it is a tampering with the lives of others as if they were not real, but rather characters in a story that she feels free to manipulate around, as if they were puppets, shadows cast on the wall of Plato’s cave. The narrator, that is, the creator of the story we are reading, is wicked in the way that all writers of fiction are wicked—creating fictional characters, pretending they are real and then manipulating them mercilessly as merely fictional characters. At the end of the story, the narrator says she keeps learning things, such as the Uricon, the Roman camp, is now Wroxeter, a town on the Severn River. But such knowledge, although historically accurate, and what some new historicist critics nowadays would called “context,” is not as important as the more subtle, inchoate knowledge that the short story in general and Alice Munro in particular make their own.

Bibliography:

Pandey, Dr. Sanjay Prasad. “Beauty: Illusion or Reality.” The Achievers Journal 1.1. (2015) .pag. web <theachieversjournal.com>

By Rahul Torlapati

Reg. 11401675