The testimony of Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of Alice Munro, has fallen like a bomb in the literary world. Already, the title of her open letter published in the Toronto Star Sunday was hard to take in: “My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, decided to stay with him.”
The more one reads, the more the unease grows. Andrea’s father, Jim Munro, knew; but he failed to protect his daughter. Alice Munro, for her part, saw her daughter as a child as a rival for her partner’s affection. The mother looked the other way when signs of abuse began to emerge and feigned ignorance when her daughter told her about it. The abuser, Gerald Fremlin, was convicted of his crime in 2005, but the media silence on this aspect of Alice Munro’s personal life, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, continued. Andrea Skinner, in solidarity with her siblings, finally tells us her story, a few weeks after the Canadian literary icon’s death.
Since then, two questions have caused a lot of ink to flow. The first is the eternal debate on the value of a work despite the monstrosity of the artist. I leave it to others to feed it. The second, which will interest us here, is the taboo broken by Andrea Skinner on the question of mothers complicit in the abuse of their children.
I therefore propose that we move away from the specific case of the Munro family to reflect more broadly on the role of women in patriarchal violence, as it has long been examined by feminist theorists. Bell Hooks’ essays are part of the body of work that most influences collective introspection on this issue in North America. What follows draws in particular on her wisdom.
1. Patriarchy is not about “men.” It is a way of organizing society in a way that concentrates power in the hands of men.
2. Patriarchal culture is, in part, how women are socialized from childhood to value romantic love above all other forms of love. A woman who bases her value on the affection or even just the attention a man gives her will do anything to keep that attention. Sometimes that means accepting violence against herself. Sometimes that means violence against her own children. Anything to keep her man.
3. A patriarchal culture that values women based on the attention they get from men is also a deeply ageist culture toward women. A woman who has internalized patriarchy is haunted by the fear of becoming “invisible” to men as she ages. This insecurity can translate into competitiveness toward younger women.
In the professional sphere, many women grappling with the nightmare of being “replaced” struggle to become mentors for new recruits—and may even seek to crush them. In the family sphere, this fear of obsolescence can be transformed, more or less consciously, into dynamics of competition, even oppression, that poison mother-daughter relationships. The Munro case is an extreme example.
4. Patriarchy is an ideological system that also tries to convince us that it is perfectly normal for a man to have difficulty loving. This is one of the great paradoxes of patriarchy: it puts men above us and, at the same time, normalizes very low expectations of them. Viewing men as both naturally superior and inferior leads to mixtures of admiration and resentment that are not without toxicity. This view of men also leads to excusing behaviors that harm them and the most vulnerable among their loved ones.
5. The idea of “maternal instinct,” that all women are naturally loving and made to care for children, is also fueled by patriarchy. In Communionbell hooks examines how abusive mothers can also be… “maternal,” that is, in a form of caredespite everything. Which complicates the denunciation.
As long as we see the “bad mother” as a kind of abomination of nature, a frontal attack on the very idea of femininity, it will be difficult to have a nuanced social discourse on the way in which a person who takes care of us physically can also be psychologically violent. This taboo makes Andrea Skinner’s words deeply disturbing. In many much less extreme cases, it also prevents families from properly naming painful traumas, and therefore from healing from them.
6. Patriarchal culture also removes all credibility from the words of young girls. Not taking them seriously also contributes to making them easy prey for aggressors. Most victims of sexual violence are very young, particularly because society continues to produce abundant representations in which adolescent girls are mean-spirited and do not know what they are saying.
What feminists encourage us to do is to name the different aspects of patriarchal culture in order to better heal from them. To value the voices of young girls. To decenter heteroromantic love, to give more importance to friendship between women, and in particular to intergenerational sisterhood. To deconstruct mythologies about motherhood that prevent any critical reflection on women’s violence. To free ourselves from the gaze of men in the image we have of ourselves. To stop normalizing or excusing patriarchal violence.
These are changes in morals that have little to do with the legal battles for women’s rights. But they are cultural changes that contribute to reducing the risks of multiplying little Andreas walled up in silence, in the middle of a society that pretends not to know.
Anthropologist, Emilie Nicolas is a columnist at Duty and to Release. She hosts the podcast Detours for Canadaland.