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ETHICS AND AFFECTS
IN THE FICTION OF
ALICE MUNRO
Edited by Amelia DeFalco
& Lorraine York

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN AFFECT THEORY

AND LITERARY CRITICISM
Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary
Criticism

Series Editors
Adam Frank
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada

Joel Faflak
Western University
London, ON, Canada
The recent surge of interest in affect and emotion has productively
crossed disciplinary boundaries within and between the humanities,
social sciences, and sciences, but has not often addressed questions of
literature and literary criticism as such. The first of its kind, Palgrave
Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism seeks theoretically
informed scholarship that examines the foundations and practice of lit-
erary criticism in relation to affect theory. This series aims to stage con-
temporary debates in the field, addressing topics such as: the role of
affective experience in literary composition and reception, particularly in
non-Western literatures; examinations of historical and conceptual rela-
tions between major and minor philosophies of emotion and literary
experience; and studies of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and disability
that use affect theory as a primary critical tool.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14653
 Amelia DeFalco · Lorraine York
Editors

Ethics and Affects

in the Fiction
of Alice Munro
Editors
Amelia DeFalco Lorraine York
University of Leeds McMaster University
Leeds, UK Hamilton, ON, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism

ISBN 978-3-319-90643-0 ISBN 978-3-319-90644-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940744

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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 Praise for Ethics and Affects in the
Fiction of Alice Munro

“Shame, guilt, envy, disgust and other negative affects recur in the sto-
ries of Alice Munro, who explores insoluble moral dilemmas with deep
compassion. In this groundbreaking collection, ten scholars respond
with an answering compassion, paying close attention to those conflicts
that relate to embodied female subjectivity. Focusing on a range of top-
ics, from breastfeeding to murder, these essays shed new light on ancient
human questions.”
—Magdalene Redekop, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Toronto,
Canada, and author of Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro
(1992)

v
 Acknowledgements

Amelia DeFalco thanks Robert and Morris Hemmings for teaching her
new lessons in ethics and affects, and for reminding her that thinking
and feeling are never discrete. Additionally, she thanks Lorraine York for
making the process of collecting and editing this volume so congenial,
rewarding, and straight up fun! It’s been such a wonderful trip, Lorraine,
that reaching the destination is a little bittersweet.
Lorraine York thanks the editor of Studies in Canadian Literature,
Dr. Cynthia Sugars, for granting permission to reprint “‘A Sort of
Refusal:’ Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career” in this volume. The content
originally appeared in the journal’s 40th anniversary issue: volume 40,
number 1 (2016). She owes thanks as always to Michael Ross, for crit-
ical advice, seemingly infinite support, and devastatingly acute wit. She
also thanks Amelia DeFalco for collegiality and friendship that span the
Atlantic Ocean. It’s been such an honor to work with you, Amelia.
The editors wish to thank the contributors for their perceptive
insights into the ethical and affective complexities of Alice Munro’s
stories, and for their patience in taking on the various rounds of revi-
sions that encompass the creation of a volume such as this one. We also
wish to thank Allie Bochicchio, Literature Editor at Palgrave Macmillan
U.S. for her enthusiasm for the project and Emily Janakiram and Rachel
Jacobe, Editorial Assistants, Literature, for guiding us through the publi-
cation process and answering many a question along the way.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice Munro’s Fiction

of “Exquisite Shame” 1
Amelia DeFalco and Lorraine York

2 Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s Stories 13

Sara Jamieson

3 The Shame of Affect: Sensation and Susceptibility

in Alice Munro’s Fiction 35
Amelia DeFalco

4 Embodied Shame and the Resilient Ethics of

Representation in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over
the Mountain” 57
Ana María Fraile-Marcos

5 Alice Munro’s Dramatic Fictions: Challenging (Dis)

Ability by Playing with Oedipus the King and Embracing
the Queer Art of Failure 79
Marlene Goldman

ix
x    Contents

6 “Chunks of Language Caught in Her Throat”: The

Problem of Other(ed) Minds in Alice Munro’s Stories of
Cognitive Disability 109
Heidi Tiedemann Darroch

7 Alice Munro and the Shame of Murder 127

Susan Warwick

8 Child’s Play: Ethical Uncertainty and Narrative Play in

the Work of Alice Munro 153
Katherine G. Sutherland

9 Gravel and Grief: Alice Munro’s Vulnerable Landscapes 177

Claire Omhovère

10 “A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career 195

Lorraine York

11 Life After Life: Survival in the (Late) Fiction of Alice

Munro 219
Naomi Morgenstern

Index 245
 Notes on Contributors

Heidi Tiedemann Darroch has taught at several universities and col-

leges and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Her article on
food imagery in Munro’s fiction and Mary Pratt’s paintings is forthcom-
ing in Canadian Culinary Imaginations. She is currently working in stu-
dent services at Camosun College in Victoria.
Amelia DeFalco is University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities
in the School of English, University of Leeds. She is the author of
Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (Ohio State
University Press, 2010), Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency,
and Canadian Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2016), as well as
essays on contemporary cultural representations of aging, disability, gen-
der, care, and the posthuman. Her current book project, Curious Kin:
Fictions of Posthuman Care, examines nonhuman care in literature, film,
and television.
Ana María Fraile-Marcos is Associate Professor of English at the
University of Salamanca where she teaches Canadian Literature. She is a
Lorna Marsden Fellow at the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York
University (Toronto, ON), and has been visiting scholar at various US,
Canadian, and European universities. Her articles have appeared in vari-
ous peer-reviewed journals (Canadian Literature, Journal for Canadian
Studies, MELUS, Atlantis, Open Letter, African American Review) and
as chapters of influential edited volumes. Among her recent publica-
tions is the edited collection Literature and the Glocal City: Reshaping

xi
xii    Notes on Contributors

the English Canadian Imaginary (Routledge, 2014). She is currently the

Principal Investigator on the research project “Narratives of Resilience:
An Intersectional Approach to Literature and Other Contemporary
Cultural Representations” (FFI2015-63895-C2-2-R).
Dr. Marlene Goldman is a Professor in the Department of English at
the University of Toronto who specializes in Canadian literature, age
studies, and medical humanities. She recently completed a book enti-
tled Forgotten: Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s in Canadian
Literature on the correlation between narrative and pathological modes
of forgetting associated with trauma, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease
(McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017). She is currently writing a book entitled
Performing Shame: Simulating Stigmatized Minds and Bodies. In addi-
tion to her scholarly work, she has also written, directed, and produced
a short film about dementia entitled “Piano Lessons” based on Alice
Munro’s short story “In Sight of the Lake” from her collection Dear
Life (2004). She is currently adapting the story “Torching the Dusties”
about aging and intergenerational warfare from Margaret Atwood’s
recent collection Stone Mattress (2014) into a short film. She is the
author of Paths of Desire (University of Toronto Press, 1997), Rewriting
Apocalypse (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2005), and (Dis)Possession (McGill-
Queen’s Press, 2011).
Sara Jamieson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at
Carleton University, where she teaches Canadian literature. Her research
is focused on representations of aging in contemporary Canadian writ-
ing, and includes publications on Alice Munro, Paul Quarrington, Joan
Barfoot, and Margaret Atwood. She is currently working on a project on
midlife in Canadian fiction.
Naomi Morgenstern is Associate Professor of English and American
Literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto.
She specializes in psychoanalytic and post-structuralist critical theory and
gender studies and teaches courses in nineteenth, twentieth, and twen-
ty-first century American literature. She is the author of Wild Child:
Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics in Contemporary North
American Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) as well as essays
on a range of American writers (Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, David
Mamet, among others) and on the short stories of Alice Munro.
 Notes on Contributors    xiii

Claire Omhovère is a Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature

at University Paul Valéry–Montpellier 3 (France). Her research inter-
ests are broadly based on perceptions and representations of space in
postcolonial literatures with a specific interest in the aesthetic and eth-
ical dimensions of landscape writing in settler-invader colonies such as
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. She is the author of several arti-
cles and her books include Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in
Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2007) and the col-
lection of essays L’Art du paysage (Michel Houdiard, 2014).
Katherine G. Sutherland retired in 2017 after a 25-year career
of teaching and administration at Thompson Rivers University in
Kamloops, B.C. She continues to do research and write about affect the-
ory, postcolonial literature, and motorcycle literature from her home in
East Sooke on Vancouver Island.
Susan Warwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Humanities and the Graduate Program in English at York University,
Toronto. She teaches in the fields of North American literature and
culture, contemporary fiction, and crime writing. Her publications and
presentations include works on Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Willa
Cather, James M. Cain, Canadian crime fiction, and Canadian war litera-
ture.
Lorraine York is Distinguished University Professor and Senator
William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture in the
Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.
She is the author of Literary Celebrity in Canada (University of Toronto
Press, 2007), Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity
(University of Toronto, 2013), and Celebrity Cultures in Canada,
co-edited with Katja Lee (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016).
Her new book, Reluctant Celebrity, examines public displays of celeb-
rity reluctance as forms of privilege intertwined with race, gender, and
­sexuality, appeared in 2018 from Palgrave Macmillan.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice

Munro’s Fiction of “Exquisite Shame”

Amelia DeFalco and Lorraine York

We can pinpoint the origins of this collection with unusual preci-

sion. In 2003, in an essay entitled “The Baby or the Violin? Ethics
and Femininity in the Fiction of Alice Munro,” Naomi Morgenstern
observed that “Munro’s stories have much to contribute to contempo-
rary efforts to think about literariness and ethics.”1 Indeed, although
previous critics of Munro had by no means ignored the ethical—or the
affective—dimensions of her work (Redekop, Howells, Heble), the
steadfast focus on those dimensions afforded by the affective and ethical
“turns” in literary studies during and since the time of Morgenstern’s
comment has allowed, and indeed called out for a dedicated analysis of
Alice Munro’s stories from the intertwined perspectives of ethics and
affects. Indeed, in that same 2003 essay, Morgenstern’s perception that
“Munro’s stories represent the risks of the ethical”2 made it clear that the
affective dimension—risk and its associated feeling of vulnerability—is

A. DeFalco (*)
School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
L. York
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. DeFalco and L. York (eds.), Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice
Munro, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_1
2 A. DeFALCO AND L. YORK

fully engaged in any discussion of the ethical. The two can hardly be dis-
articulated for, as Brian Massumi pronounces, “Ethics are about how we
inhabit uncertainty together.”3
The title of this introduction is inspired by the story “What Is
Remembered” (2001), one of many Munro stories suffused with duplic-
itous, conflicting, often mysterious affects, most prominently, a seduc-
tive but unbearable, erotic, yet despicable “exquisite shame.”4 The story
is a compelling entry point for an investigation of affects and ethics via
shame since the word itself occurs no less than five times in the 24-page
story. In fact, shame is in many ways central to the story’s exploration
of marriage, motherhood, and infidelity as experiences of embodiment
intricately bound to affect, aging, and mortality. The story concerns
Meriel, a young wife and mother chafing at the strictures of heteronor-
mative family life: “Young husbands were stern, in those days…Off to
work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days
spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical
glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up
between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and
emotions, the babies.”5 This vision of “ailments and emotions” as the
unseemly, contagious burden of cohabitation and home that masculine
power erects bulwarks against is central to our collection, which con-
siders how illness, disability, and affective embodiment destabilize the
illusion of the able-bodied, masculine, rational, unaffected subject that
underlies neoliberal political discourse. Meanwhile, in Munro’s work,
the wives of those young husbands, thrust into the “stunning respon-
sibility” of wifedom and motherhood succumb to, balk at, and shirk
(sometimes simultaneously) the oppressive demands of femininity,
indulging in “dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits”
that threaten to transgress the “newspaper” barriers that their husbands
have erected.6 Shared, “subversive” ribaldry is just one of the many rad-
ical, even dangerous affects that permeate Munro’s fiction. In Munro’s
work, affects expose and destabilize, threaten and transgress prevailing
gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective econ-
omies. Munro’s characters grapple with the risk of emotionality, the
undertow of affect that can, at its most extreme, produce selfish and
cruel indulgences of desire and “ugly feelings” such as disgust, shame,
and repulsion. At the other end of the spectrum is the exercise of self-­
effacing “prudence” that maintains affective economies, as Meriel does,
despite her fleeting indulgence of extramarital desire. In the end, she
 1 INTRODUCTION: RISKING FEELING: ALICE MUNRO’S FICTION … 3

pursues “some economical sort of emotional management” that carefully

balances risks and rewards, forgoing the radical happiness that suffused
her, momentarily, in her brief affair.7 The problem of affectivity recurs
throughout Munro’s oeuvre, which pays close attention to the economy
of emotions. As the character Joyce muses in the more recent story
“Fiction” (2009), “It almost seemed as if there must be some random
and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if
the great happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one person
could come out of the great unhappiness of another.”8 Affects are never
solitary, never without consequence, never apolitical. They are always
shifting, transmitting, transforming, at once exposing and creating dense,
unpredictable, invisible but palpable networks between bodies. Affects
are, in effect, always affecting, at once noun and verb, being and doing
simultaneously.
In “What is Remembered,” Meriel’s brief evasion of the “stunning
responsibility” of wifedom manifests in an unexpected, thrilling sexual
infidelity with a stranger she meets at a funeral. Guilt9 and shame are
the dominant affects associated with the “power and delight”10 of the
escapade. The association between eroticism and shame is not unusual,
but Munro complicates the straightforward shameful thrill, and thrill-
ing shame, of illicit sexual adventure with intimations of aging, disability,
and death. The opportunity for infidelity is afforded by Meriel’s plan to
visit her elderly namesake, Aunt Muriel, in a nursing home on her way
home from the funeral. The stranger, an unnamed bush pilot and doctor
who treated the deceased, offers to drive her there. Despite her cataracts,
Aunt Muriel easily recognizes the frisson between the pair, responding
to the invisible “transmission of affect” described by Teresa Brennan.11
“I could tell,” Aunt Muriel tells the pair, “I used to be a devil myself.”12
The magnificent tension between the narration’s first description of Aunt
Muriel’s pointedly ailing body—“swollen and glimmering” under her
asbestos blanket, smoking a cigarette alone in a “dim corridor” painted
a “liverish” color; her skin covered in “dead-white spots,” her hair “rag-
ged, mussed from being rubbed into pillows, and the lobes of her ears
hung out of it like flat teats”13—and the licentious stories she tells of sex-
ual adventure, the wild parties where people would “Just meet for the
first time and start kissing like mad and run off into the forest. In the
dark,”14 reanimates the story’s initial reference to the feminized space of
the home, here transformed into the nursing home, as an unseemly space
dominated by “ailments and emotion.” The concurrence of morbidity
4 A. DeFALCO AND L. YORK

and “decline”15 with sexual vitality and adventure asserts the persistence
of affective embodiment, the often-troubling unpredictability of human
embodiment as a site of combined vulnerability, power, and risk. The
masculine order that seeks to disavow this precarity, to confine “ailments
and emotions” to the feminine space of the home, is a futile rejection,
a false imposition of order that cannot be sustained because Meriel’s
husband, Pierre, like all the story’s men, succumbs to illness in the end,
though he strives to maintain masculine order throughout his illness.
When Meriel reads Fathers and Sons to him during his convalescence,
the couple argue over the novel’s depiction of gender and romance.
According to Pierre, Anna cannot respond to Bazarov’s declaration of
love because of the risk of “shame and rejection. She’s intelligent. She
knows that,” argues Pierre. “Intelligence makes her cold. Intelligent
means cold, for a woman.”16 Although he clarifies that he is speaking of
nineteenth-century tropes, his reading echoes the earlier description of
male breadwinners seeking to protect their rational world (with newspa-
pers, no less) from the disarrayed emotionality and embodiment of the
feminized space of home, a rearticulation of the notion that rationality
and embodied affects cannot cohabitate. The either/or fallacy of reason
versus emotion cannot be consigned to the past, as Meriel’s story of pas-
sion and prudence makes clear.
This persistent fiction—that emotions, embodied vulnerability can,
indeed should, be controlled and contained, limited to appropriate sec-
tors and zones of life—haunts Munro’s characters, who can only expe-
rience emotions as dissonance, as the disorienting conflict of “exquisite
shame,” or “morbid, preening excitement.”17 This dissonance and
its oxymoronic stylistic vehicle are characteristic of affect as theorized
by Silvan Tomkins; shame, he observed, is not walled off from affects
thought to be positive, such as interest/excitement or enjoyment/joy;
indeed, in his words it is, “produced by the incomplete reduction of the
positive affects of interest and enjoyment.”18 Recalling the brief affair
with the doctor years, even decades, later, Meriel experiences “the raw
surprise of her own body, the racketing of desire.”19 The story’s only
mention of entirely positive affects—her body “packed full of happi-
ness, rewarded as she would surely never be again, every cell in her body,
plumped up with a sweet self-esteem”20—is delivered as the (potential)
rationale for suicide. A barely entertained idea she takes from romantic
fiction, “a certain kind of story—not the kind that anybody wrote any-
more.”21 All-consuming pleasure, the kind that affects every cell in the
 1 INTRODUCTION: RISKING FEELING: ALICE MUNRO’S FICTION … 5

body, is such a rarity that it becomes a kind of inverse trauma, a haunting

recollection that takes her body by storm again and again in the decades
that follow.
“What Is Remembered” draws our attention to the inextricable entan-
glement of gender, bodies, affects, and ethics in Munro’s work. Margaret
Atwood has described Munro as the preeminent writer of shame: “I can
think of no other writer who returns to the emotion of shame so fre-
quently and meticulously as Munro.”22 However, as our contributors
demonstrate, shame is only the beginning. Munro’s stories explore the
wide range of shifting, contradictory embodied affects, at once per-
ceived and mysterious, felt and disavowed. The discussion of affects is,
we suggest, always inevitably a discussion of ethics because the way that
bodies register and create affects, and how those affects initiate, or often
fail to initiate, action in the world creates a tangle of causes and effects.
Munro’s stories explore the connections between negative affects—
shame, disgust, guilt—and negative, cruel, even homicidal actions in
often discomforting detail. The dismissal of emotions and emotionality
as frivolous, “feminine,” without consequence, as somehow removed
from the masculine domains of politics and work is a ridiculous, yet dan-
gerously persistent conviction. As the explorations of Munro’s fiction
make clear, emotions are powerful, productive, and always political.

***

The following chapters explore how the denizens and readers of Alice
Munro’s fictional worlds “inhabit uncertainty together” as they come up
against the manifold challenges of living in the world. Claire Omhovère
reminds us that the term ‘ethos’ first meant “dwelling place.” In
Munro’s fiction, being in the world becomes a matter of considering the
degree of habitability the world affords us and how “open” to that world
we can be. As several of our contributors note, in the case of characters
who find themselves on the lower rungs of social hierarchies of gender,
class, age, or (less often) race, the degree of choice about how open they
can be to the world and its harshness or pleasures is seriously compro-
mised. Some of that harshness comes from the confrontations of ethics
with morality, and its associated values of resoluteness and certitude.
The following chapters ponder the collision of ethics as “dwelling”—as
a place one can or cannot “inhabit”—and the “uncertainty” that attaches
itself to our (differently) embodied experiences of the world.
6 A. DeFALCO AND L. YORK

Embodiment is, for several of these critics, a dwelling too, and a con-
duit by which the particularities of the everyday resist the grander narra-
tives of morality and Enlightenment individualism. In these chapters, the
authors explore the consequences of unruly embodiment that interfere
with gendered identity and humanist conventions of the human based
on reason and rationality. For Sara Jamieson, the embodied dailiness
of breastfeeding offers one site at which Munro’s women can depart
(or not) from a timeless, transcendent-seeming moral realm of “good
mothering.” For Marlene Goldman, that most Munrovian affect of them
all—shame—brings subjects back to their inescapable, vulnerable cor-
poreality. Writing from her own embodied experience of chronic pain,
Amelia DeFalco shows how those affects that are visibly embodied
in Munro’s characters are precisely those that are socially denigrated,
for they transgress cultural privilegings of autonomy and individual-
ism. Several contributors examine Munro’s use of animal metaphors as
a means of signaling that denigration; for example, Heidi Tiedemann
Darroch notes the way in which the possession of “reason” is often cited
as evidence in favor of animal rights, an argument that has the effect of
disenfranchising cognitively impaired people as full subjects. She points
out that philosophical discussions of cognitive impairment as test cases
for viable or worthwhile lives have the same effect. Munro’s characters
whose embodied affects place them beneath consideration have a richly
troubling philosophical context.
In a similar fashion, many of these readings of Munro’s stories probe
the psychic dynamics by which such denigrations operate. Darroch argues
that those Munro characters who recoil from disabled people may be
operating out of envy for those who may lack self-consciousness about
their refusals or failures to follow social scripts. To be “shameless” is
subject, in Munro’s fictional world, to a complicated mixture of desire
and repulsion. In analyzing the extreme case of the urge toward repul-
sion—murder—Susan Warwick sees it as the ultimate test case for the
ethical choice between “repudiation and responsibility” that is endemic
to the encounter with the “other.” Amelia DeFalco sees the origins of
that choice in our very openness to the world, for it entails risk (the risk-
ing of affect); the desire to limit that risk that many of Munro’s characters
feel is, in effect, a refusal of ethical encounter. Like the phrase “exquisite
shame,” her description of this “affective dissonance and ethical unease”
syntactically balances and intertwines the affective and the ethical.
 1 INTRODUCTION: RISKING FEELING: ALICE MUNRO’S FICTION … 7

Human encounters often form the tacitly assumed ground zero of

ethical criticism, and yet both the burgeoning field of animal studies and
the wider examination of more-than-human worlds offer salient correc-
tives to that tendency. For instance, in Claire Omhovère’s chapter, land-
scape is not the usual reflective metaphor for human ethical encounter
but it becomes, instead, the very locus of ethical and affective negotia-
tion. Landscape, in the form of those frequent references to geological
change and the recurring figure of waste in Munro’s stories, is a site for
a phenomenological being-in-the-world: a mutually constitutive rela-
tionship between a vulnerable environment and its vulnerable human
inhabitants.
Omhovère’s phenomenological language finds resonance in other
chapters in this collection that take phenomenology in a more femi-
nist, performative direction. Judith Butler opened her pioneering essay
“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” by thinking about femi-
nist reimaginings of phenomenology, specifically de Beauvoir’s revisions
of Merleau-Ponty. Butler’s understanding of the way identity is forged
in repeated mundane acts depends on a sense of embodiment that grows
out of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body as a historical idea rather
than a transhistorical essence. So too, in the readings of Munro’s embod-
ied affects and their ethical implications, several of these critics emphasize
the repeated, performative nature of ethics. In her earlier essay, Naomi
Morgenstern asked why, in Munro’s work, the central ethical insight
(i.e., the existence of the other beyond the self) needs to be repeatedly
rehearsed. In the essays that follow, critics have much to say about this
iterative, performative nature of ethical behavior. Katherine Sutherland
argues that Munro’s retrospective narratives of childhood often detail
the breakdown of affective relations between children and adults that are
in a state of constant becoming. In examining “the performative nature
of shame” Marlene Goldman also stresses iterative mimicry; shame, she
concludes, is the consequence of an inability or unwillingness “to mimic
the norm.” In a similar vein, Lorraine York explores Munro’s own per-
formance of public affects, and how her performance of reluctance has
been subsumed within a larger national mythology of Canadian humility.
Despite this normalization and apparent acquiescence, Munro’s reluc-
tance manages to maintain its roots in ambivalence and unease as a way
of “tarrying with” difficult, negative, often ugly emotions.
8 A. DeFALCO AND L. YORK

Affective performativity in (and by) Munro, like performativity in

general for Butler, opens up the possibility of departure from social
scripts, even though there remain social punishments for not performing
according to those scripts. Accordingly, many of the contributors to this
volume approach the question of hope amid sometimes painful, difficult
affective and ethical exchanges: is there a possibility for subversion of the
hierarchies that are tied to embodied affects, to those shamefully visi-
ble performances of affect in Alice Munro’s stories that lead to betrayal,
inhibition, self-denial, “royal beatings,” and even murder? Marlene
Goldman identifies “socially transformative performative utterances…
alternative, gestural forms of communication and mimesis”: in a word,
play. Ana Fraile-Marcos sees shame as potentially enabling the work-
ings of what Winfried Siemerling calls re/cognition: moving beyond
the capacity to see the other in the self, and the self in the other, which
arguably involves assimilating the unknown to the known, and, instead,
accomplishing the more refractory, challenging work of cognitive and
ethical change. Such a possibility is active in Silvan Tomkins’ theoriz-
ing of shame as intimately intertwined in “a relationship of mutuality”;
for the shame that Tomkins associates with the physical act of averting
one’s face and gaze from the source of humiliation or judgment bears
“the residual positive wish…not only to look at the other rather than
to look down, but to have the other look [back] with interest or enjoy-
ment rather than derision.”23 Susan Warwick, considering the ultimate
breakdown of ethical exchange or “gaze”—murder—perceives hope even
there: the response of shame at such a failure can bring with it a deeper
understanding of the responsibility we bear for each other.
Closing out our collection, Naomi Morgenstern’s new essay offers
radical and nuanced grounds for hope. Morgenstern proposes that the
posthumous existence of Munro’s female characters who live on, endure,
survive, says something profound about Alice Munro’s ethical world.
Living on in the aftermath of death, abandonment, and pain, she sug-
gests is a deeply “relational” act. Like Omhovère’s musings on “wasted”
landscape as a refusal of the economies of utilitarianism, Morgenstern’s
life-left-over challenges the teleology of the life narrative as ending in
death and presents us with a moving sense of life itself as posthumous. In
seeing Munro as the chronicler of women’s affective lives-after-life that
take shape in narratives that are always attentive to the might-have-been
alternative narratives, Morgenstern implicitly places her in a tradition of
women’s writing that has deeply examined the ethics and affects of lives
 1 INTRODUCTION: RISKING FEELING: ALICE MUNRO’S FICTION … 9

that exceed conventional narrative containers. As Jane Austen’s Anne

Eliot declared in her (fittingly) posthumous novel Persuasion, “All the
privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need
not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is
gone.”24
In our own nod to the recursive performances of ethics and affects
in the work of Alice Munro, we perceive this volume as a response to
Morgenstern’s “The Baby or The Violin”—the 2003 essay that issued
a call for the extensive study of ethics in Munro’s fiction—and we close
with her critical return to Munrovian ethics as gendered, relational, and
posthumous in Morgenstern’s “Life after Life: Survival in the (Late)
Fiction of Alice Munro.” Within this recursive frame, the scholars who
have contributed to this volume have plentifully and creatively answered
Morgenstern’s—and our—invitation to ponder the “exquisite shame” of
Alice Munro’s ethics and to inhabit uncertainty together. Munro’s fic-
tion reminds us of the consequences of everyday affects, the extraordi-
nary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage again and again.
In her exploration of the minutiae of the everyday, anthropologist
Kathleen Stewart explains how “The ordinary throws itself together out
of forms, flows, powers, pleasures, encounters, distractions, drudgery,
denials, practical solutions, shape-shifting forms of violence, daydreams,
and opportunities lost or found. Or it falters, fails. But either way we
feel it.”25 Stewart’s evocative description reads like an encapsulation of
Munro’s corpus, which delves into the affects and effects of what is often
dismissively termed the “ordinary.” Like Stewart and other theorists of
affect, Munro’s stories remind us, again and again, why and how “ail-
ments and emotions” do not intrude into our lives, but rather consti-
tute those lives, betraying the redundancy of phrases like “emotional
life,” that imply the divisibility of the two, the possibility of some kind
of non-emotional existence. Life, survival, is always, already, emotional,
embodied, vulnerable, relational, in short, an exquisite tangle of affects
and ethics.

Notes
1. Naomi Morgenstern, “The Baby or the Violin?: Ethics and Femininity in
the Fiction of Alice Munro,” Literature Interpretation Theory 14 (2003):
73.
2. Ibid., 69.
10 A. DeFALCO AND L. YORK

3. Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 11.

4. Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), 234.
5. Ibid., 220.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 241.
8. Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
2009), 58–59.
9. Munro, Hateship, 224.
10. Munro, Hateship, 227.
11. The oft-cited opening to Teresa Brennan’s The Transmission of Affect
elaborates on the processes of affective communication: “Is there any-
one who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmos-
phere’?…The transmission of affect, whether it is grief, anxiety, or anger,
is social or psychological in origin. But the transmission is also responsi-
ble for bodily changes; some are brief changes, as in a whiff of the room’s
atmosphere, some longer lasting. In other words, the transmission of
affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the
subject. The ‘atmosphere’ or the environment literally gets into the indi-
vidual. Physically and biologically, something is present that was not there
before, but it did not originate sui generis: it was not generated solely or
sometimes even in part by the individual organism or its genes” (1).
12. Munro, Hateship, 229.
13. Ibid., 227–228.
14. Ibid., 230.
15. Ibid., 227.
16. Ibid., 237.
17. Ibid., 220.
18. Silvan Tomins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press:
1995), 147.
19. Ibid., 238.
20. Ibid., 239.
21. Ibid.
22. Margaret Atwood, “Lives of Girls and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Woman,” in Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, ed. David
Staines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 99.
23. Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, 138.
24. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. D. W. Harding (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1965), 238.
25. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007), 29.
 1 INTRODUCTION: RISKING FEELING: ALICE MUNRO’S FICTION … 11

Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. “Lives of Girls and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Woman.” In The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, edited by
David Staines, 96–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Austen, Jane. Persuasion, edited by D.W. Harding. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1965.
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2014.
Heble, Ajay. The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Howells, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1998.
———. “Intimate Dislocations: Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage.” In Alice Munro, edited by Harold Bloom, 167–192.
New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009.
Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity, 2015.
Morgenstern, Naomi. “The Baby or the Violin? Ethics and Femininity in the
Fiction of Alice Munro.” Literature Interpretation Theory 14 (2003): 69–97.
Munro, Alice. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 2001.
———. Too Much Happiness. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009.
Redekop, Magdalene. Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro.
New York: Routledge, 1992.
Siemerling, Winfried. “Ethics as Re/Cognition in the Novels of Marie-Célie
Agnant: Oral Knowledge, Cognitive Change, and Social Justice.” University
of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2007): 838–860.
Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Tomins, Silvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
 CHAPTER 2

Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s

Stories

Sara Jamieson

In her discussion of ethics and femininity in Alice Munro’s fiction,

Naomi Morgenstern outlines how we might read Munro’s representation
of the relationship between mother and baby as one that embodies “the
complexities of an ethical encounter.”1 Drawing upon Derek Attridge’s
definition of the ethical as a category in which the concrete responsibil­
ities and obligations to others that characterize morality are infused with
a degree of “unpredictability and risk,”2 Morgenstern offers a reading
of Munro’s extraordinary story “My Mother’s Dream” (1998) as one
in which a mother, responding to the “absolute” and “annihilating”3
demands of her infant, runs “the risk that she will never recover herself.”4
In response to Morgenstern’s concluding suggestion that “much more
might be said about the specificity of ethics and the mother-child rela-
tion in Munro’s work,”5 this chapter examines infant feeding as one of
the specificities of early motherhood that receives persistent and detailed
attention in Munro’s later stories, not only in “My Mother’s Dream,”
but also in “Jakarta” (1998), “The View from Castle Rock” (2006),
“Dimensions” (2009), and “Deep-Holes” (2009). From a philosophical

S. Jamieson (*)
Department of English, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

© The Author(s) 2018 13

A. DeFalco and L. York (eds.), Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice
Munro, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_2
14 S. JAMIESON

perspective, breastfeeding has often been taken for granted as “such an

immanently somatic…practice [as to be] morally…insignificant,” yet
at the same time it is “arguably the most conspicuously moralized ele-
ment of mothering” in contemporary culture.6 Challenging perceptions
of breastfeeding as either morally neutral or morally obligatory, Munro’s
stories shift the focus to the ethical. Situating her fiction in relation to
didactic literature on infant feeding directed at contemporary mothers, as
well as cultural and philosophical critiques of that literature, this chapter
details her representation of breastfeeding (and bottle-feeding) women as
ethical subjects whose experiences of feeding their babies intersect, and
sometimes collide, with the kinds of information they receive regarding
their responsibilities to their children in this area of motherhood.
In Otherwise than Being, Emmanuel Levinas gestures toward the
intersection of infant feeding and the ethical when he frames responsi-
bility to the Other in terms that foreground a lactating body: “the abso-
lutely other…I already have on my arms, already bear, according to
the Biblical formula, ‘in my breast as the nurse bears the nurseling’.”7
The Biblical formula that Levinas refers to comes from Numbers 11:12,
where Moses, protesting the overwhelming burden of shepherding the
Israelites out of Egypt, likens himself to a “nursing father” charged with
the care of an insatiable “sucking child” that he has neither “conceived”
nor “begotten.”8 As Lisa Guenter comments in “Like a Maternal Body:
Emmanuel Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses,” Levinas’ use of the
idea of wet nursing to signify the concept of infinite responsibility “risks
identifying femininity too closely with saintliness, thus confirming the
patriarchal ideal of a woman who thinks nothing of herself and gives self-
lessly to Others.”9 At the same time, the fact that the nursing body fig-
ured here belongs neither to a mother, nor even to a woman, posits an
understanding of maternity as a response to an ethical imperative from
the Other, but one that is “disengaged from a strict biological interpre-
tation” and defined instead as a “locus of responsibility” that does not
have to be borne by mothers, or indeed by women, alone.10 Levinas’
image of lactation both reinforces and subverts an ideal of self-­sacrificing
maternal generosity long associated with nursing; it suggests how an
ethical approach to infant feeding opens up an avenue for questioning
the straightforwardly moralistic identification of “good” mothering with
the biological process of breastfeeding that has dominated infant feeding
discourse for the past several decades.
 2 ETHICS AND INFANT FEEDING IN ALICE MUNRO’S STORIES 15

The image of the nursing man provides an illuminating point of entry

into my discussion of how Munro’s fiction undertakes such question-
ing, since it is reminiscent of the “mock mother” figures that, accord-
ing to Magdelene Redekop, populate so many of her stories. Rather than
affirming motherhood as “anything inexpressible or sacred,” Munro’s
mock mothers instead “enable us to walk ‘disrespectfully’ around our
idealized images of maternity.”11 If Redekop sees milk as “an inherently
absurd image” in Munro’s work, one that jars our complacent expec-
tations of “maternal selflessness,”12 Chantel Lavoie has more recently
drawn attention to how Munro’s representation of breastfeeding (spe-
cifically the comparison of the maternal breast to a “snouted beast” in
“My Mother’s Dream”) conflates “animal and monster” in a way that
unsettles whatever we believe to be ‘natural’ about the figure of the
mother.”13 In my readings of the representation of infant feeding in
Munro’s later stories, what I want to stress is neither its absurdity, nor its
monstrosity, but rather its dailiness. Her emphasis on feeding as one of
the tasks of mothers’ day-to-day lives, something they are often shown
accomplishing simultaneously with other tasks, might be seen as an
example of how her fiction continues to “domesticate the…madonna”
(an idealized image of maternal nursing if ever there was one) in order
to “destroy the distance that makes her into an object of adoration.”14
Drawing attention to infant feeding as a quotidian practice that is his-
torically contingent and highly localized rather than a timeless, natural
function of motherhood, these stories undermine the moral authority
of nature through which contemporary infant feeding discourses con-
struct breastfeeding as a maternal obligation. Representatives of those
discourses—doctors, breastfeeding support workers, characters who
reproduce fragments of the kinds of advice routinely directed at nurs-
ing mothers—make peripheral appearances in these stories, yet Munro’s
focus on the daily lives of mothers counters the tendency of these dis-
courses to render women’s needs, desires, and feelings invisible.
Critics of contemporary breastfeeding advocacy have traced this mar-
ginalization of women to an overwhelming emphasis on breastfeeding
as valuable primarily for the nutritional advantages that it confers upon
babies. Surveying materials on infant feeding disseminated by Health
Canada in the 1990s, Glenda Wall observes that the literature draws
much of its moral authority from its emphasis on the health benefits of
breastfeeding for babies, and reinforces a child-centered approach to
infant feeding that displaces mothers as subjects.15 The health benefits
16 S. JAMIESON

of breastfeeding for babies have been represented as so profound and

incontrovertible that mothers are implicitly encouraged to “endure any
and all costs to ensure that their children’s needs for ‘optimal’ care are
met.”16 Within the last decade, an increasing number of journalists,
social scientists, and breastfeeding researchers have shown many of the
claims about the health benefits of breastfeeding to be exaggerated and
based on research that is methodologically flawed; nevertheless, the
contemporary conversation about breastfeeding remains pervaded by a
“moral urgency” that “distinguishes… good parents from bad” on the
basis of how and what they feed their infants.17
In contrast to the view of mothers’ infant feeding practices as
“straightforward sites of moral accountability,” a view that obscures the
“reasons why breastfeeding can be an acutely uncomfortable and risky
practice for some…women,” feminist philosopher Rebecca Kukla empha-
sizes the need for a “more sophisticated ethical analysis” that looks
to “the social and symbolic contexts that might make mothers’ feel-
ings explicable and reveal their needs.”18 Kukla’s emphasis on “moth-
ers’ feelings” characterizes the ethical analysis that she proposes as one
that would prioritize maternal affect as an important aspect of wom-
en’s experiences of infant feeding, one that has only recently begun to
be acknowledged in research on this topic. In her work on affect and
infant feeding, sociologist Charlotte Faircloth argues that the privileg-
ing of babies’ health as the primary argument for breastfeeding not only
inculcates damaging emotions—like shame—in women who struggle
with nursing, but also threatens to eclipse the “joyful, pleasurable” feel-
ings that many women derive from it as a form of bodily interaction with
their children, as something that they want to do even as they acknowl-
edge that the “‘science’ around breastfeeding…is more flimsy than the
advocacy case suggests.”19 An ethical analysis that is alert to the role of
affect in women’s lives as mothers thus offers a way to move beyond the
focus on biomedical evidence of benefits to babies and to make women’s
experiences more visible within the cultural conversation about infant
feeding.
Munro’s stories contribute to this process by stressing infant feed-
ing as something that fits into women’s daily lives in ways that involve
many considerations beyond that of what might be “best” for their
babies’ health. Joan Wolf argues that the current framing of breast-
feeding as a maternal obligation ignores the context in which decisions
about mothering take place, the “tangle of competing needs and desires
 2 ETHICS AND INFANT FEEDING IN ALICE MUNRO’S STORIES 17

that is family life.”20 It is precisely through their attention to context

and complexity that fictional representations like those of Munro inter-
act with contemporary debates about infant feeding. In her work on
Canadian caregiving narratives, Amelia DeFalco contends that it is in
their attention to “human particularity, context, the details of life,” that
literary narratives convey ethical dilemmas that “complicate straightfor-
ward ‘right’ or ‘superior’ moral reasoning.”21 Fictionally recreating the
particular details of a range of infant feeding practices in various times
and places, Munro’s stories offer us multiple scenarios of mothering that
collectively challenge the moral certainties that pervade the conversation
about infant feeding in contemporary culture.
“Dimensions,” from Munro’s 2009 collection Too Much Happiness,
highlights the displacement of mothers as subjects in contemporary
breastfeeding advocacy. The story is focused on Doree, whose breast-
feeding is bound up with the “natural” image that her husband Lloyd
desires that she project.22 When her third child, Dmitri, becomes “col-
icky,” Doree suspects a problem with her milk, and Lloyd brings in “a
lady from the La Leche League [to] talk to her.”23 Munro’s phrasing
suggests Lloyd’s high-handed treatment of Doree, who is much younger
than he, as someone who needs to be “talked to” (rather than listened
to) even though the fact that she has already nursed two other children
lends credence to her sense that something is not right this time around.
The largest and most influential breastfeeding support organization in
the world, La Leche League (LLL) International, was founded as a local,
grassroots concern in 1956 by seven conservative Catholic women com-
mitted to providing “mother-to-mother” encouragement and assistance
with breastfeeding.24 This type of help was much needed at a time when
formula was very commonly used, and infant feeding fell largely under
the purview of doctors, most of them men, who had little knowledge
of the mechanics of nursing. In the story, the woman-centered approach
central to LLL philosophy is violated because it is Lloyd who seeks out
help from them rather than Doree, who has already sought to remedy
the problem by secretly supplementing with formula. Munro’s rep-
resentation of Doree’s experience draws attention to how the efforts of
the LLL to wrest control of infant feeding from the hands of doctors and
return it to mothers risks reinforcing an allegedly “natural” identification
of femininity with motherhood that is easily coopted by a patriarchal ide-
ology that rigidly circumscribes women’s control over other aspects of
their lives.
18 S. JAMIESON

The story further explores the very complicated relationship between

breastfeeding advocacy and feminism through its disturbing representa-
tion of the breastfeeding imperative as a form of violence against women.
When Doree eventually tells Lloyd that her milk has dried up, his reac-
tion is to “squeeze one breast after the other with frantic determination”
until “he succeeds in getting a couple of drops of miserable-looking
milk.”25 As this and other instances of Lloyd’s abusive and controlling
behavior indicate, Doree is a woman profoundly in need of help with
problems more serious than whether her baby is breastfed. The story is
silent on whether the LLL volunteer, as a visitor to their home, notes
anything suspicious about the dynamics of Lloyd and Doree’s marriage;
the only help she is shown to offer Doree is a warning to not, under any
circumstances, use a “supplementary bottle.”26 Munro’s representation is
consonant with the LLL’s self-styled image as a “single-issue” organiza-
tion that has been reluctant to involve itself with matters affecting wom-
en’s lives that it deems too “political,” as well as its history of endorsing
“patriarchal notions of men’s rights over their wives’ bodies.”27 By evok-
ing the history of the LLL’s complicity in the very domestic structure
that is the source of Doree’s problems, Munro’s story articulates a cri-
tique of a culture in which the importance of breastfeeding has been
exaggerated to the point where the alleged “need” of babies for their
mothers’ milk takes precedence over the needs of mothers themselves.
In Feminism, Breasts, and Breast-Feeding, Pam Carter argues that
feminists have been reluctant to grapple with the ethical shortcomings
of breastfeeding advocacy because of their own commitment to the idea
of breastfeeding as a “stolen art,” taken from women in the twentieth
century by the forces of capitalism and medicalization which alienated
women from the natural capacities of their bodies, and eclipsed moth-
ers and grandmothers as repositories of practical knowledge.28 Munro’s
historical fiction “The View from Castle Rock” is an example of how
her stories can acknowledge the appeal of a particular strain of femi-
nist “yearning for an archaic maternal past,” but its representation of
maternity also alerts us to the dangers of romanticizing the notion of
a “pre-industrial golden age” of breastfeeding.29 The story certainly
registers the upheavals associated with modernity as forces that cre-
ated particular difficulties for childbearing women as it imagines the
Atlantic crossing undertaken in 1818 by Munro’s Scottish ancestors,
one of whom, a woman named Agnes, gives birth to her second child
on the ship. Agnes’ emigration separates her from her mother, who
 2 ETHICS AND INFANT FEEDING IN ALICE MUNRO’S STORIES 19

“would have known…which leaves to mash to make a soothing poultice”

to ease the pain of late pregnancy.30 At the same time, Agnes’ adherence
to a superstitious belief that she must add salt to her milk or her child
“will grow up half-witted” cautions against the uncritical celebration of
a female folk medicine that generates its own absurdities and perpetuates
unnecessary anxiety.31 Agnes’ insistence on the necessity of salt questions
the assumption that breastfeeding was ever “natural,” and characterizes
it instead as a cultural practice too thoroughly “shaped by different kinds
of beliefs” to constitute a body of knowledge that can be straightfor-
wardly “lost.”32
Agnes’ demand for salt scandalizes the two “Edinburgh ladies” who
assume her post-partum care “out of charity,” and who initially refuse
to give it to her, even as her baby “howl[s]” with what might be hun-
ger.33 It is the doctor who presided over the birth who ultimately inter-
venes and commands that Agnes be given the salt. While his intervention
is tinged with condescension toward her rural origins, he is nonethe-
less prepared to support her infant feeding decisions as hers, despite the
absence of any scientific basis for them. While there is similarly no scien-
tific justification for Doree’s conclusion that her baby’s colic is caused by
her milk, she receives no such support in her decision to use formula: her
“failure to breastfeed [is] recalled” whenever Dmitri “had a cold, or…
still hung onto chairs at an age when his brother and sister were walk-
ing.”34 The passive construction signifies the diffusion of Lloyd’s indi-
vidual voice into a generalized chorus on the medical and developmental
benefits of breastfeeding that authorizes him to pathologize differences
among his children and to blame his wife (and formula) for ordinary
childhood illnesses and behaviors. Lloyd’s assessment is grounded in the
common assertion that breastfed babies have a lower risk of respiratory
tract infections, but the story stops short of endorsing this view; we are
not told that Dmitri gets more colds than his siblings do, only that when
he does, it is construed as being Doree’s fault.35 With its reference to
colic, a condition for which the cause remains unknown, the story high-
lights the fallibility of medical science in the area of infant health and
questions the certainty with which breastfeeding science is sometimes
deployed in the service of an oppressive domestic ideology, underscoring
the need to reframe the discussion about infant feeding in a way that pri-
oritizes maternal choice over medical authority.
“My Mother’s Dream” examines in more detail the kinds of assump-
tions about formula generated by the complicated history of the
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Title: Clovis, Tome 2 (of 2)

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CLOVIS
 DU MÊME AUTEUR
Les Origines de la Civilisation moderne, 4e édition. Paris,
Retaux, 1898, 2 volumes in-8º de xii-326 et 354 pages. Ouvrage
couronné par l'Académie royale de Belgique 8 fr.
Histoire poétique des Mérovingiens, Paris, Picard, 1893. 1
volume in-8º de 552 pages. Ouvrage couronné par l'Académie
royale de Belgique 10 fr.
La Frontière linguistique en Belgique et dans le Nord de la
France. Bruxelles, Schepens, 1896-1898. 2 volumes in-8º de 588 et
156 pages, avec une carte. Ouvrage couronné par l'Académie royale
de Belgique 12 fr.
Sainte Clotilde, 6e édition. Paris, Lecoffre, 1900. (Dans la
collection Les Saints.) 1 volume in-12 de 182 pages 2 fr.
L'Église aux tournants de l'Histoire. Bruxelles, Schepens, 1900.
1 volume in-8º de 154 pages 3 fr.
EMILE COLIN, IMPRIMERIE DE LAGNY (S.-ET-M.)
 GODEFROID KURTH

CLOVIS
Ouvrage auquel l'Institut de France a accordé le 1er prix
d'Antiquités nationales.

DEUXIÈME EDITION REVUE, CORRIGÉE ET AUGMENTÉE

 TOME II
PARIS
VICTOR RETAUX, LIBRAIRE-ÉDITEUR

82, RUE BONAPARTE, 82

1901

Droits de traduction et de reproduction réservés.

TABLE DES MATIÈRES
 DU TOME SECOND
LIVRE IV
I. La guerre de Burgondie 1
II. Clovis attendu en Aquitaine 26
III. La conquête de l'Aquitaine 56
IV. La guerre de Provence 98
V. L'annexion du royaume des Ripuaires 117
VI. Le concile d'Orléans 131
VII. Clovis et l'Église 155
VIII. Derniers jours et mort de Clovis 191
IX. Conclusion 220
APPENDICES
I. Les sources de l'histoire de Clovis 233
II. La controverse sur le baptême de Clovis 277
III. Le lieu du baptême de Clovis, par M. L. Demaison 287
 GODEFROID KURTH

CLOVIS
Ouvrage auquel l'Institut de France a accordé le 1er prix
d'Antiquités nationales.

DEUXIÈME EDITION REVUE, CORRIGÉE ET AUGMENTÉE

 TOME II
PARIS
VICTOR RETAUX, LIBRAIRE-ÉDITEUR

82, RUE BONAPARTE, 82

1901

Droits de traduction et de reproduction réservés.

 AVIS AU LECTEUR
Dans la préface du tome I de cet ouvrage, j'ai fait part au lecteur de
mon intention de republier, dans les pièces de l'Appendice, mon
mémoire intitulé: Les sources de l'Histoire de Clovis dans
Grégoire de Tours. Mais au moment de donner suite à ce projet,
je me suis aperçu que la substance de ce travail se trouve déjà en
résumé aux pages 233-239 du présent volume. J'ai donc renoncé à
le réimprimer, et je me contente de renvoyer le lecteur aux deux
recueils dans lesquels il a paru en 1888[1].
[1] Voir tome I, p. vi.

G. K.
CLOVIS
LIVRE IV
I
 LA GUERRE DE BURGONDIE
Maître du royaume le plus vaste et le plus solide de l'Europe, Clovis
était devenu l'arbitre de l'Occident. Seul, parmi les souverains de
son voisinage, il se sentait vraiment roi. Les Francs barbares
vénéraient en lui le représentant le plus glorieux de leur dynastie
nationale; les Francs de race Gallo-Romaine[2] le saluaient comme
le défenseur de leur foi et de leur civilisation. Il pouvait, sans
inquiétude, tourner toute son attention du côté du midi; en arrière de
lui il n'avait que des alliés, dans son royaume que des sujets fidèles.
Il n'en était pas de même de ses voisins, les rois visigoths,
ostrogoths ou burgondes. En Burgondie, tout spécialement, le trône
était assiégé de soucis sans nombre, et le roi ne pouvait envisager
sans inquiétude l'avenir de la dynastie. Les troubles confessionnels
étaient à l'ordre du jour, la défiance sévissait entre indigènes et
barbares; au sein de la famille royale elle-même régnaient des
dissensions fatales. Il y avait là autant d'invitations tacites à
l'intervention étrangère. Jeune, ambitieux, chef d'un peuple
belliqueux, conscient du courant de sympathies qui du fond des
royaumes ariens dirigeait vers lui les espérances catholiques, Clovis
ne pouvait manquer de répondre avec empressement à un appel
explicite qui lui viendrait de Burgondie. Cet appel ne tarda pas à se
faire entendre, et il partit de la dynastie burgonde elle-même.
[2] Voir pour la justification de ce terme mon mémoire sur La France et les Francs
dans la langue politique du moyen âge. Reçue des questions historiques, t. 57.)

Le royaume des Burgondes avait eu, dès l'origine, une destinée

bizarre et semée de vicissitudes. En 413, à la suite des troubles de
la grande invasion, les Burgondes étaient parvenus à passer jusque
sur la rive gauche du Rhin, où Worms était devenue leur capitale.
Là, au contact des indigènes catholiques, une partie d'entre eux
avait embrassé la foi romaine[3], et l'on eût pu croire qu'ils étaient
appelés à remplir quelque grande mission dans l'histoire du monde
naissant. Les traditions épiques de l'Allemagne ont conservé le
souvenir de ce premier royaume burgonde, et le poème des
Niebelungen a enchâssé dans ses récits la description de la brillante
cour de Worms, où trois rois jeunes et vaillants régnaient entourés
d'un peuple de héros. Mais le royaume de Worms n'eut qu'une
existence éphémère. Aétius, en 435, infligea à l'armée burgonde une
défaite sanglante, dans laquelle périt le roi Gunthar, et, deux ans
après, les Huns, sans doute excités par lui, exterminèrent presque le
reste. C'est ce dernier désastre qui est devenu plus tard, dans
l'épopée germanique, le massacre des héros burgondes à la cour
d'Attila. Il était cependant de l'intérêt de l'Empire de conserver les
débris d'une nation qui lui avait déjà rendu des services dans sa lutte
contre les Alamans, et qui avait toujours fait preuve de dispositions
plus bienveillantes que les autres barbares. En 443, il accueillit donc
sur son territoire les Burgondes fugitifs, et leur assigna sur les deux
rives du Rhône, avec Genève pour capitale et à peu près pour
centre, la région montagneuse alors connue sous le nom de
Sapaudia[4]. Ce fut là le noyau du deuxième royaume des
Burgondes. Les barbares s'y établirent et partagèrent le sol avec les
propriétaires indigènes, d'après un règlement calqué sur celui qu'on
appliquait, dans les provinces, à l'occasion des logements militaires.
Les Romains durent livrer chacun à son hôte,—c'est ainsi que la loi
appelait le soldat,—le tiers de sa maison et de ses esclaves, les
deux tiers de ses terres et la moitié de ce qu'il possédait en forêts[5].
Seulement, ces logements militaires d'un nouveau genre étaient
définitifs, et l'hôte s'installa pour toujours avec femme et enfants. On
comprend les souffrances que l'arrivée des nouveaux venus dut
causer à la population indigène, et que d'amers souvenirs soient
restés attachés, pour elle, aux premiers jours de la nationalité
burgonde. Les racines du royaume plongeaient, pour ainsi dire, dans
une spoliation universelle qui ne se laissait pas oublier, toute légale
qu'elle fût, et que de nombreuses violences individuelles devaient
rendre plus insupportable encore. Un saint de cette époque a flétri
avec une courageuse indignation les excès que les barbares se
permettaient envers des populations inoffensives et désarmées, et
dans une de ces inspirations prophétiques comme en avaient si
souvent les grands solitaires, il prédit aux Burgondes l'arrivée
d'autres hôtes qui leur appliqueraient leur propre mesure, et avec
lesquels il leur faudrait partager à leur tour[6].
[3] Paul Orose, vii, 32.
[4] Longnon, p. 69; Binding, pp. 16 et suiv.
[5] Prosper, a. 443; Marius, a. 456; Lex Burgundionum, tit. 54; Frédégaire, ii, 46.
Voir sur cette question des partages Gaupp, Die Germanischen Ansiedelungen
und Landtheilungen, pp. 85 et suivantes.
[6] Vita Lupicini, dans les Acta Sanctorum des Bollandistes, t. III de mars (25). p.
265.
Les années, en s'écoulant, n'avaient en rien amélioré cette situation
de malaise et d'hostilité mutuelle. Deux nations restaient en
présence l'une de l'autre, ou, pour mieux dire, vivaient l'une sur
l'autre. Partout le Romain sentait sur ses épaules le poids de ce
barbare qui avait pris son bien, qui parlait une langue inintelligible, et
qui était étranger à sa vie sociale et intellectuelle. Tout l'éloignait de
lui, et ce qui aurait dû l'en rapprocher, le voisinage et la cohabitation,
ne servait qu'à rafraîchir sans cesse le souvenir des humiliations et
des violences de la première heure. La religion, ailleurs si puissante
à éteindre les conflits et à rapprocher les cœurs, restait désarmée
ici: au lieu d'unir elle divisait. Car les Burgondes, séduits par
l'exemple des autres nations de leur race, venaient de passer en
grande majorité à l'arianisme, si bien qu'on ne se rencontrait plus
même au pied des autels. Telle était la situation intérieure dans celui
des royaumes hérétiques où le vainqueur était le moins inhumain, et
où les rois veillaient avec le plus de soin à préserver les droits de
leurs sujets de race romaine. Aussi, tandis que dans le royaume
franc la fusion des races se fit dès le premier jour, avec une rapidité
étonnante, en Burgondie, elle était à peine commencée au début du
viie siècle. Chaque fois que le chroniqueur national de ce peuple
parle d'un de ses compatriotes, il a soin de nous dire s'il est de race
burgonde ou romaine[7], et le fait d'une constatation pareille est à lui
seul la preuve que l'on continuait d'avoir conscience de la distinction
des deux peuples.
[7] V. mon article ci-dessus cité. pp. 375-376.
Les Burgondes, d'ailleurs, ne furent jamais les ennemis de l'Empire.
Campés, comme on vient de le dire, au milieu d'une province
romaine, ils entendaient payer l'hospitalité qu'ils recevaient. Ils
étaient les soldats de Rome, et ils observaient loyalement le pacte
conclu entre eux et les empereurs. En échange des terres romaines,
ils donnaient leur sang, et le versaient sans marchander. Ils furent à
Mauriac en 451, combattant sous les drapeaux de cet Aétius qui,
fidèle à la politique romaine, se servait tour à tour des Huns contre
les Burgondes, et des Burgondes contre les Huns. Tant qu'ils
vécurent comme peuple, ils gardèrent une vraie dévotion à l'Empire.
Que le maître du monde fût à Rome ou à Byzance, ils ne cessèrent
d'être à ses pieds, et de lui parler dans des termes d'une obéissance
humble et pour ainsi dire servile. Rome les récompensa avec des
insignes et avec des dignités. A l'un de leurs rois, Gundioch, celui
que le pape Hilaire appelait son fils[8], elle donna le titre de maître
des milices; un autre, Chilpéric, reçut les honneurs du patriciat. Les
rois burgondes étaient donc de grands personnages, mais comme
fonctionnaires romains plus encore que comme monarques
indépendants. Gondebaud hérita du titre de patrice qu'avait porté
son oncle; cela lui permit, à un moment donné, de créer un
empereur: il est vrai que c'était le faible et éphémère Glycérius. Ces
rois se considéraient de plus en plus comme faisant partie du corps
de l'Empire, et comme constitués à sa défense. Ils ne prêtèrent pas
l'oreille aux suggestions de Romains qui, comme le préfet Arvandus,
leur offraient le partage de la Gaule avec les Visigoths. Lorsque
ceux-ci, ambitieux et entreprenants à l'excès, mirent la main sur
Arles et sur Marseille, et manifestèrent l'intention de soumettre toute
la Gaule, les Burgondes furent dans ce pays les meilleurs soutiens
de l'Empire agonisant, et ils allèrent tenir garnison à Clermont en
Auvergne, pour mettre à l'abri d'un coup de main ce dernier poste de
la civilisation romaine[9]. On ne leur en sut pas gré dans ce monde
de décadents: on trouvait qu'ils faisaient fuir les Muses, et qu'ils
sentaient mauvais avec leurs cheveux frottés de beurre rance[10].
Finalement, un empereur de rencontre abandonna sans combat, aux
conquérants barbares, cette province qui n'avait eu que des
barbares pour défenseurs. Euric et ses Visigoths entrèrent à
Clermont en vertu du pacte conclu avec eux par Julius Nepos,