31 pages • 1 hour read
Alice MunroHow I Met My Husband
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
First-Person Narration
Munro uses first-person narration to foreground the perspective of Edie, a working-class hired girl whose middle-class employers prefer to think of her as having no subjectivity. The narrative voice challenges Mrs. Peebles’s stereotype by allowing the reader into Edie’s thoughts and by showing her to have agency in how she plans and reflects upon her experience with Chris. When Mrs. Peebles commands Edie to tell Chris that his fiancée will be back at five, Edie, who wants Chris for herself, judges that “he wouldn’t be concerned about knowing this right away” (69), and delays the message to bake Chris a cake. This passage shows Edie strategizing how to serve her employer and look after her own interests at the same time. The business of Edie’s mind contrasts with her perception of Mrs. Peebles’s languidness, as this unconventional heroine takes the middle-class marker of independent thought for herself.
While the first-person perspective tells the story of 15-year-old Edie, the older narrator’s presence often puts the younger self at a distance, as she offers comments that critique or reflect on behavior that resulted from inexperience. However, there are instances in the narrative when the customary past tense lapses into present and the older narrator re-enters the experience of her younger self. This occurs when she “can’t ever let myself think about” the kisses that Chris gave her (70), because they still mean too much and have the potential to carry her away. In such moments, Munro shows the significance of the romantic escapade for Edie. The story’s narration is not merely a nostalgia, but the account of an experience and a loss that moved her profoundly.
Plot Twist
The main twist of the story is that the man who fulfils the title’s promise and becomes Edie’s husband does not occupy the bulk of the narrative but appears only in the last three pages. The fact that the long-awaited husband does not appear until the very end, when the heroine’s romantic experience is over, centers the narrative on a woman’s perspective of love and not on the old-fashioned idea of romantic rescue by a man.
There are also twists in the narrative leading up to Chris’s displacement by the mailman, as Munro sets up expectations only to subvert them. For example, at the beginning Edie seeks out Chris only to persuade him to keep the secret about her trying on Mrs. Peebles’s clothes, but she later changes her attitude and actively pursues him. Similarly, with the confrontation in the kitchen, Munro sets up the expectation that Edie will be punished harshly for her transgression, in line with a patriarchal society’s castigation of promiscuous women, but Edie’s game of dress-up is never revealed.
Alice defames Edie in the strongest terms and even floats lurid ideas of a virginity test. However, Munro shows a milder, more ambiguous outcome when Edie explains herself enough for Mrs. Peebles to understand that she did not have sex with Chris and keeps her job. While Mrs. Peebles is even frostier towards her, in a further twist, formerly deferent Edie does not care that much and keeps her eye on how she can advance from the situation. Overall, Munro employs twists in her character-led story to show the extent of Edie’s agency and her refusal to be stereotyped.
Omission and Ambiguity
Munro applies omission and ambiguity to enable the reader to reach their own conclusions about the events of the story. This occurs especially in passages relating to sex and sexuality. For example, when Edie describes how she and Chris “lay back on the cot and pressed together, just gently, and he did some other things, not bad things or not in a bad way” (70), the reader deduces that some form of sexual activity has taken place. However, by not specifying what the activity is, especially after she has gone into detail with regard to the kisses Chris has given Edie, Munro grants her heroine a veil of protection from the reader’s judgement. The overall impression is of Edie’s pleasure and moral comfort with what Chris does to her. This is shown in the understated, gentle contact of their bodies and the idea that the sexual activity was not “bad” or done “in a bad way” (70). While the women in the kitchen demand to know exactly what Edie has done so they can determine how she should be punished, Munro, uses ambiguity to show that the experience belongs to Edie alone. This occurs to a deeper extent when she keeps the truth of her story secret from Carmichael.
Munro’s use of omission and ambiguity takes a further stand against patriarchal norms, as she rejects the desire for a singular theological meaning and empowers the reader to find meaning for themselves. Thus, she is less didactic and more suggestive, encouraging the reader to ask questions about the story and their own assumptions rather than providing a tidy conclusion.
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