A Woman’s Place
Through writing novels and short stories authors are able to analyze pieces of human
nature while at the same time entertaining their audience. Alice Munro is a Canadian author
recognized internationally for her mastery with short stories. She looks at scenes of the everyday
and manages to pull from them studies of gender issues and relationship issues. She does so, so
seamlessly that readers do not realize there are deeper issues being looked at within the story
than what is just on the surface until after they are finished reading, considering the story. A
wonderful example of her skill is the short story “Meneseteung,” a tale that looks at the gender
roles that society creates for and places so tightly upon everyone. Munro focuses on these issues
and the consequences that follow the deviation from them.
Munro’s story “Meneseteung” tells the life of Almeda Roth. Almeda is a single woman,
who is nearly thirty, trying her best to adhere to the stereotypes of 1879 Southern Ontario.
Almeda’s family moved west from Kingston when she was fourteen. Three summers after, both
her younger sister and brother died of a fever. Her mother never recovered and passed away
three years after that leaving only Almeda and her father in the house he built. For twelve years
Almeda makes house for her father, taking care of all of the cooking and cleaning while he
worked at his shop until he also passes away leaving Almeda completely alone. Mr. Roth always
let his daughter to do the things she loves to do while at the same time making a house for him;
the things she loves to do being reading everything and writing poetry. In 1873, her book is
published leading to much discussion amongst the residents of her town, “The local paper, the
Vidette, referred to her as ‘our poetess.’ There seems to be a mixture of respect and contempt,
both for her calling and for her sex. . . (476)” Even though Almeda makes the house for her
father for so long, essentially being the wife of the house, she is still straddling the line between
adhering to her role as a woman and being independent.
One of the best representations of the conflict that Almeda experiences lies in the location
of the house that she lives in. The house sits on the corner of Pearl and Dufferin Streets.
Respectability lives on Dufferin Street – a salt wells operator, a mill owner, and merchants who
all reside on Dufferin Street. Everything that life should be is on Dufferin Street. On Pearl Street,
adjacent to Almeda’s yard, live the working men and then, “Things deteriorate toward the end of
the block, and the next, last one becomes dismal. Nobody but the poorest people, the
unrespectable and undeserving poor, would live there at the edge of the boghole (drained since
then), called the Pearl Street Swamp. (481)” By the swamp, small shacks have been erected,
surrounded by piles of refuse and garbage with young children running around and slop being
thrown out windows. No one wants to venture down the road, “It is said that even the town
constable won’t go down Pearl Street on a Saturday night. (481)” What happens on Pearl Street
and the people who live on Pearl Street, especially those by the swamp, are the people and the
consequences that follow deviating from what society requires.
The front of Almeda’s house faces Dufferin Street while the back faces Pearl. Almeda
sleeps in the same room that she shared with her sister Catherine before her death, and the
window faces Pearl Street. Almeda stays in the room because she also enjoys the view that it
presents in the morning, “From her window she can see the sun rising, the swamp mist filling
with light, the bulky, nearest trees floating against that mist and the trees behind turning
transparent. Swamp oaks, soft maples, tamarack, butternut. (481)” The swamp is considered to
be a blight on the town by all, definitely not a landmark to be thought of as beautiful as the sun
rises. Yet there is something about it that Almeda is drawn to. In some ways Almeda is the same
as her house. She faces society with a pretty face doing what she is supposed to while at the same
time being partly on Pearl Street – she enjoys looking at the swamp, instead of seeing it as filthy
and disgusting, she finds it to be beautiful.
In the beginning Almeda wants to live her life on Dufferin Street and does her best to live
according to the way that the people around her think she should live. She goes to church every
week, one of the most important parts of her expected life. Since she is still single, and not
because she was widowed, Almeda would be considered still pure and innocent. The late 1800’s
was still a very religious time when lives were still lived according to the ideals of the Church.
Gender roles and stereotypes are created by society according to the cultural beliefs of what is
right and wrong along with the religious and moral beliefs that those in the society adhere to.
Before the time of radio and television, both of which allow the modern media to greatly
influence the cultural standards of our time, there were newspapers and the word of god.
Generally, women were only allowed to go to school through the eighth grade. That was enough
education that they could teach their kids the basics before they went to school. They would also
be able to read enough to study the Bible with their children, there in teaching them right and
wrong as well as the proper ways for women and men to act.
Next to Almeda, on Dufferin Street, one lot over, Jarvis Poulter moves in. Jarvis is
everything that a man should be, a fact that Almeda recognizes when she meets him. He is a
widow with self-made money, the perfect bread winner for any family. During the late
nineteenth century, the primary responsibility of men was to bring in the income to take care of
their wife and kids. Jarvis came to their town looking for oil but instead discovered salt, “. . . a
commodity for which the demand will never fail. (483)” His main business is the salt mines and
will always be wealthy and successful because people will always need salt. On top of his salt
mine business, he also owns a limekiln, a brickyard, and two farms from which he gets all the
wood he needs to run his other operations. Jarvis is a man through and through who never has
any problems with living within his rigid male stereotype.
Another way that Jarvis displays his success at being a man is the sparseness that
surrounds his home. He is a man that makes his living off of the land but puts nothing back into
it. This is what is expected of him though, “The house is plainer than the Roth house and has no
fruit trees or flowers planted around it . . . A man may keep his house decent but he will never –
if he is a proper man – do much to decorate it. (482)” Keeping a home decorated is a wife’s job
so doing anything to enhance the look of his home would be, for him, a digression. He could not
be a perfect example of maleness if he made any action outside of those that he was supposed to.
When Almeda meets Jarvis, she sees him as a man that she could marry. She is just on
the cusp of being too old to marry, moving into the life of a spinster, but she is not out of range
quite yet. Almeda and Jarvis begin to slowly court, both being still young enough to have a few
children and as yet still of marrying age. The first thing they begin to do together is to walk home
from church, “Nor does he call on her, and walk with her to church on Sunday mornings. That
would be a declaration. He walks her home, past his gate as far as hers; he lifts his hat then and
leaves her. She does not invite him – a woman living alone could never do such a thing. (484)”
This is the way that relationships began between two people. To do any more would be improper
and quite presumptuous and everyone would look down upon both parties involved. This fact
doesn’t stop Almeda from fantasizing about having him walk her home from church on Sunday
evenings. Though she would never say so, it would be looked down upon by society, she begins
to think of Jarvis in terms of marriage and knows she would say yes if he asked her.
Almeda knows though that she needs to be like other women if she is to get Jarvis
interested in her enough to ask for her hand in marriage. Perhaps because of the encouragement
from her father, she is used to an independent life in which she answers to no one and does
things her own way. When Jarvis moves in and shows an interest in her, she changes herself to
meet his expectations of what a woman really should be life. One of the things that Almeda
changes about herself in order to be more attractive to Jarvis is in the way that she acts very
demure and quietly around him. When they are walking home from church together, she lets him
talk about his salt mines and explain them to her while she just listens. A good woman I always
quiet while she lets her husband or the men around her have their conversations. A part of being
an innocent lady is to be modest in not only dress and action, but also speech. In the first
conversation between Almeda and Jarvis in the story, Almeda speaks two sentences while Jarvis
goes on and on about how the salt mines work, his competitors, and the other enterprises that he
is involved in.
Almeda also suffers from sleeplessness so she sees a doctor to get help. The doctor gives
her bromides and nerve medicine but she only takes the bromides because the nerve medicine
gives her too vivid of dreams. Furthermore, “She told the doctor her eyeballs felt dry, like hot
glass, and her joints ached. Don’t read so much, he said, don’t study; get yourself good and tired
out from housework, take exercise. He believes that her troubles would clear up if she got
married. (487)” In response to what her doctor tells her, Almeda begins to clean her house, the
church, helps friends who are wallpapering and getting ready for a wedding, and bakes one of
her famous cakes for a children’s picnic. In addition she decides to make grape jelly, small jars
being great for Christmas presents or for the sick. The creation of the grape jelly becomes far
more symbolic than just Almeda attempting to be what she is supposed to be.
On the day that she begins to make the grape jelly, Almeda runs out of time to finish so
she has to leave the hot pulp wrapped in cheese cloth to strain out the juice. She lets it to hang
over night, hearing the plop, plop of large dark purple/red juice dripping down into the container.
It is a hot night in August and though she goes to bed very tired, Almeda is woken in the middle
of the night due to the heat and the noises of people fighting out on Pearl Street. It is a Saturday
night and the yelling and laughter seem to be moving up the street toward the house. When
Almeda looks outside, she sees and hears a woman yelling out, “Kill me now!” The woman is
being beat while a crowd of onlookers cheers the men on until the woman is thrown against the
fence around Almeda’s backyard. Almeda is so startled by the fight that she falls back against
her bed and puts her pillow over her head as if to block it out.
When Almeda wakes again, it is morning but there is still a body slumped against her
fence. Barefoot and dressed in only her nightgown and robe, Almeda rushes to Jarvis Poulter’s
house. When he answers his door she rushes to speak, “’Mr. Poulter, excuse me. A body of a
woman. At my back gate.’ He looks at her fiercely. “Is she dead?’ his breath is dank, his face
creased, his eyes bloodshot. (490)” This is the first conversation between Almeda and Jarvis in
which Almeda speaks first and continues on in a conversational fashion. Jarvis does not seem at
all ruffled by the fact that there may be a dead body in Almeda’s backyard. He puts his hat on,
locks his door, then walks without hurrying to where the body lying. Almeda follows him in
silence and can only watch while he pokes the woman with the toe of his boot to see if she is still
alive. The body if covered in blood and vomit making Almeda nauseas. Almeda suggests getting
the doctor right before the woman lets out a long howl and begins to bang her head against
Almeda’s fence. Jarvis grabs the woman by her hair before ordering her to stop and to go home.
He gets blood on his hand but the woman finally stands up before stumbling down Pearl Street
toward her home. Almeda watches silently as Jarvis wipes the blood and vomit from his hand on
a leaf before walking Almeda to her door.
Suddenly, Jarvis is struck with all of what he should have been feeling for Almeda
before. Even though he has calculated her worth, respectability, and comeliness, “He has not
been able to imagine her as a wife. Now that is possible. He is sufficiently stirred by her
loosened hair – prematurely gray but thick and soft – her flushed face, her light clothing, which
nobody but a husband should see. And by her indiscretion, her agitation, her foolishness, her
need? (491)” Until this momentary digression on both of their parts – her being inappropriately
dressed and in need and him disheveled – Almeda was the only one who could see the two of
them being married.
At this same moment, Almeda is feeling so ill that she wants nothing at all to do with
Jarvis. He walks her all the way to her backdoor and even into the back hall of her house. Instead
of exciting her, all Almeda can think about is getting him out of the house so that she can go
vomit. For the first time, Jarvis speaks to her with “harsh joviality.” Jarvis takes Almeda’s
silence as a sign that she is alarmed by what she saw outside, “‘No need for alarm,’ he says. ‘It’s
only the consequences of drink. A lady oughtn’t to be living alone so close to a bad
neighborhood.’ (491)” Jarvis then makes the move that Almeda had been waiting for him to
make by telling her he will call on her to walk her to church later. After she rushes to the
bathroom to relieve her troubled stomach, Almeda realizes that part of her discomfort came from
the fact that she was beginning her menstruation.
This is the culminating point in the story. After trying so hard to be the woman that
society expected her to be, Almeda discovers that what she was working for was not at all what
she wanted. Her realization comes at the same moment that a sign of true womanhood,
menstruation, comes for her. She puts a note on her door telling Jarvis that she is not feeling well
and wishes to rest all day and spends the rest of the day in her house drinking tea and listening to
the dripping of grape juice which has spilled all over the kitchen. She puts some of her nerve
medicine in her tea and after drinking it all day she is struck by the desire to write a new poem.
She wishes to put everything into the poem and decides to call it “The Meneseteung” after the
river because of the way that the words are flowing out of her.
No longer does cleaning the house matter to her, nor does getting dressed and putting on
the proper front. Almeda sees what the essence of being a female is when she sees begins
menstruating and sees the truth in Jarvis’s behavior when all of the pretences of acting within the
confines of gender roles are dropped. The last section of the story that tells Almeda’s life is the
obituary that is given for her in the Vidette. The article is from fourteen years after the main
section of the story. The beginning tells of the skill with which Almeda wrote poetry and what a
loss it was to lose her from the community, it then goes on to describe how her mind seemed to
become a little “clouded” and that she became very rash in her behavior. It then goes on to say,
“Her attention to decorum and to the care and adornment of her person had suffered, to the
degree that she had become, in the eyes of those unmindful of her former pride and daintiness, a
familiar eccentric, or even, sadly, a figure of fun. (495)” After the final scene with Jarvis,
Almeda stopped putting on any pretenses of even trying to be a ‘good’ woman by becoming a
recluse and not keeping up the appearances that she previously had. Instead of focusing on her
unfortunate later life outside of society, the article then talks about, “. . . her labours in former
days in the Sunday school, her dutiful care of her parents, her noble womanly nature, charitable
concerns, and unfailing religious faith. (495)” She did so much work in the Sunday school it was
obvious that she had strong maternal instincts to go along with her womanly behavior and faith.
In short, for a time, Almeda was every bit the woman that she was expected to be. It says a lot
about the town that most of the article focuses on the traits that she lost instead of looking at the
part of her life during which she was happiest.
The story goes that she was chased into the bog by some of the youth on Pearl Street. She
caught a cold that later developed into Pneumonia, which led to her ultimate demise. Even
though it was a place that she once thought was beautiful, looking at the bog and the end of Pearl
Street was an entirely different matter than actually venturing down close to it. Once the trip to
the end of Pearl Street is finished, there is no going back from it. Almeda had the chance to live
the ‘good’ life but instead chose to live the life that she wanted to.
Jarvis Poulter’s obituary is much simpler: it tells only that he was a “mover and shaker”
in the town. He died while at work, not a surprise because his business ventures were what his
life revolved around. All else that is said about him is, “Mr. Jarvis Poulter possessed a keen and
lively commercial spirit, which was instrumental in the creation of not one but several local
enterprises, bringing the benefits of industry, productivity, and employment to our town. (496)”
Nothing about his personal life is mentioned seeing as how men are supposed to be very private
and not show any emotion. All that is talked about are his business skills, which are what makes
him the man that he is.
Alice Munro uses the short stories she writes to pick apart the complexities of human
nature and relationships while at the same time making a comment about how people live their
lives. Through the short story “Menesetueng,” she dissects the complex place of gender roles
within society. She takes two characters, one female and one male, and compares them to each
other by juxtaposing not only their roles, but also the way that they live up to those roles.
Munro also comments on the expectations that societies place upon people through her
writing. She does this by showing characters, like Almeda Roth, who ultimately fail at being
what society wants them to be then showing the harsh consequences that follow not being able to
live within the rigid gender roles. She also parallels the gender roles of previous time periods
with those of today. Even though over a hundred years have passed since the time of
“Meneseteung,” the ideas of ‘female’ and ‘male’ have not changed that much. Even though most
houses today cannot survive without having a double income, the primary role of the woman is
to stay at home and take care of the cooking and cleaning and the kids and the primary role of
men is to go to work and bring home a paycheck. Dufferin and Pearl Streets may look a little
different than they did in the 1870’s, but the division is still just as clear. Munro addresses the
question, what kind of a society bases its judgment on how a person is supposed to act solely on
their presumed gender? Her answer would be that everyone needs to be an Almeda and take that
trip down Pearl Street.
From reading just one of Alice Munro’s short stories readers have the chance to examine
some hard questions not only about themselves, but also society as a whole. One of the best
examples of this comes in the story, “Meneseteung.” Almeda Roth does her very best to fit the
ideal that is pushed upon her but in the end cannot do it. Instead, she lives her life on Pearl Street
being considered crazy and rash by residents of the town even though what she is really doing is
living her life the way she wants to. Jarvis Poulter continues to live his life the way he is
supposed to and in the end, after all is said and done, leads a very unremarkable life. What does
Munro want readers to come away with after reading her story? To live your life the way you
want to, no matter what everyone else says you should be doing. It is your life, isn’t it?
Works Cited
Munro, Alice. "Meneseteung." Munro, Alice. Selected Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
476-497.