Paul Abela is a philosopher and associate professor at Acadia University.
Cowards die a thousand deaths; literary icons, only one.
The public response to Andrea Robin Skinner’s account of sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin – the late second husband of Alice Munro – has been fierce. Among many of the late author’s readers, a sense of disgust has descended; some have suggested she should be stripped of awards, including her Nobel. And although I do not teach in an English department, some of my colleagues are now wrestling with the revelation and how something hiding in relatively plain sight – that Mr. Fremlin pled guilty in 2005 and that Ms. Munro knew about it all – had not been picked up and published.
Others have expressed the gut punch in terms of “betrayal” – of her readers and her legacy.
That experience of shock, unreality and betrayal echoes an experience many Canadians encountered when hearing the news that Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, a non-profit creating communities for people with intellectual disabilities, had been accused in multiple cases of sexual abuse. As someone who grew up on the Catholic left, I idolized Mr. Vanier’s work. Like Dorothy Day, Mr. Vanier offered a moral exemplar to me. It was with disbelief and disgust that I read the report commissioned by L‘Arche that affirmed his guilt in 2023.
And like some who are removing Ms. Munro from their bookshelves, I removed Mr. Vanier’s work from mine.
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But here, the comparison ends. I think Ms. Munro’s legacy as a writer – and her relationship with her readers – remains intact.
The differences are revealing. Mr. Vanier’s actions stung so bitterly because of their moral force. Although he never put himself forward as a moral exemplar, that result was inevitable given the worthy cause he had committed his life to. As such, the depth of his failures came at a great cost; happily, the important work of L‘Arche survived him.
Ms. Munro, by contrast, is a writer whose gift was to show the tangled complexity of human experience – that every small town is filled with lives of compromise, tragedy, desire, joy and incompleteness. Great literature does this. Thankfully, it makes no claims to being a moral catechism.
The modern preoccupation to read everything through a moral lens is death to any worthy literary appreciation of the human predicament. Literature shows, after all, it doesn’t tell.
So, what is Ms. Munro, as a writer, guilty of? What has she “betrayed”?
Recall that Ms. Skinner said that she informed her mother of the abuse roughly a decade after it ended. Ms. Skinner’s biological father, we are told, was made aware from the earliest time and, unlike Ms. Munro, could have intervened. After learning of the abuse, Ms. Munro briefly left Mr. Fremlin, only to return to him, living with him until his death.
Ms. Munro’s choice is one that even the most ardent existentialist would have trouble justifying. There can be little doubt of the damage that decision inflicted on her adult daughter.
Moreover, the exculpatory account marshalled by Ms. Munro is heartless and selfish. Ms. Skinner writes that her mother suggested that “our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather.” It is difficult to see this as anything other than the worst twisting of genuine truths – the reality of misogyny – for narrow, self-serving purposes.
But in what sense is Ms. Munro’s moral failure a betrayal of her readers or legacy as a writer?
There is a tangible sense, once digested – and this will take time – that this dark secret was entirely in keeping with Ms. Munro’s vision of the world. Unlike the Vanier case, where the moral gut punch was fatal to his legacy, the revelations that emerge from Ms. Skinner’s brave account remind us of the kinds of damage we are capable of inflicting on one another – sometimes from malice, cowardice, desire, or weakness. Ms. Munro’s work did the same.
The yearning for a world absent of dark secrets is understandable, but it is ultimately a demand for a facile illusion. Ms. Munro’s literature points us to the real world, with all its joys, pains and choices – sometimes dark – in full view.
Was Ms. Munro flawed? Yes, and those faults wrought additional pain upon her adult daughter. Nothing can make that whole.
Should her readers, as readers, feel betrayed? No.
Leave Ms. Munro on the bookshelf among writers. As a writer, she deserves to be there.