The Comic Spirit in Alice Munro's Open Secrets: "A Real Life" and "The Jack Randa Hotel" - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by W. R. Martin, Warren U. Ober

Millicent tries hard to get Dorrie to marry the very wealthy visitor from Australia, but she is unaware of the irony: Dorrie's married life turns out to be successful, not because she gains wealth and social status, the advantages that Millicent understood and the reasons why she urged Dorrie so strongly to go through with it, but because Dorrie is the sort of woman she is, inner-directed and concerned with substantial issues that give purpose to her life. "`I have a life,' Dorrie said" (75)--meaning she already has a real one. This is what Millicent can't understand. But eventually, with tears, cajolery, and threats that Dorrie would be evicted from her old family home, she prevails. "Dorrie walked to her wedding." Millicent and her husband "stopped the car [for her] and she said, `No, I want the exercise. It will clear out my head'" (77).

In spite of her reluctance to leave the life she is attached to in Canada, Dorrie's life in Australia is so successful that after her husband's death she "stayed on, ... on a great property where she grew sugarcane and pineapples, cotton, peanuts, tobacco. She rode horses ... and had learned to fly an airplane." Dorrie dies at a ripe age in New Zealand "climbing up to look at a volcano" (78). Millicent and Muriel are no doubt impressed by this kind of "real life" abroad, not perceiving that Dorrie's life, unlike their own, has always been real: real people lead real lives, whether in Huron County or in Queensland. If Muriel is the object of cheerful satire and Millicent of gentle irony, the treatment of Dorrie exemplifies true Meredithian humor, for she is a comic figure whom we "laugh all round" and "pity ... as much ... as expose," one whose "likeness" to ourselves we would be pleased to "own" (Meredith 42).

In a touching conclusion to the story Millicent, revisiting Dorrie's deserted old house--now Millicent property--reflects on Dorrie's past life among the walnut trees, with their fallen nuts, "losing again, again, their delicate canopy of leaves." In this poignant episode Millicent reflects on the walnuts that Dorrie and her brother--and then Dorrie alone--used to pick up, an apparently "useless chore." We see very clearly that she is puzzled, and perhaps even on the point of gathering them herself. But she doesn't, indicating that the inner significance of Dorrie's life--"a life of customs, of seasons" (80)--still eludes her. It is a dramatic moment not of satire but of gentle irony.

The nature and function of the comic aspects of "A Real Life" are clear-cut and obvious, and it is in some ways reminiscent of such stories of Munro's as "Sunday Afternoon" (Dance of the Happy Shades) and the uncollected New Yorker story, "Hired Girl" (82-88), based as it is on a contrast between bourgeois and rural life and depending as it does on faults of taste and good sense. In "The Jack Randa Hotel," the story that follows the dark "Open Secrets" in the volume, the comedy is ostensibly farcical, but it operates at a deeper level, leading us to subtle and moving perceptions of volitions and dilemmas in human life.