MASTERCLASS
WHAT’S YOUR passion?
Helen M Walters looks at ways of injecting passion into your characters’ lives, with a short story by Alice Munro
The title of this month’s story encapsulates what I want to discuss about it. In Passion by Alice Munro, our main character, Grace, is looking back at an earlier time in her life and the people she knew then, particularly the Travers family. Munro builds up a complex web of relationships between Grace and the other characters and the theme of passion runs through. You can read the story here: http://writ.rs/passion
RELATIONSHIPS
Let’s start by looking at some of those relationships. Firstly, Maury Travers is Grace’s boyfriend. He’s the character you’d expect her to be most passionate about. But that really doesn’t seem to be the case. Notice how when they meet and he asks Grace out for the first time, she doesn’t even know whether to take him seriously or not. Then, as their relationship develops, she realises that she actually enjoys spending time with his family more than with him to the extent that she alters her shifts at work, trading time with him for time with his family.
There is a lack of physical passion in their relationship as well. They would ‘park up’ during their evening out together, but her willingness to offer herself up physically to him never came to anything. Later on she would find herself relieved to be going to bed alone. He seems to love her, attracted by her ‘uniqueness’, enough to suggest they get married, but she distances herself from the reality of this. When she meets Neil, Maury’s brother, she is able to go off with him without a thought for Maury.