“I would kill myself.” She spoke not pityingly but impatiently. “If I was Muriel Mason I would want to kill myself,” Rose heard a senior girl say to another on the stairs. Yet, still some degree of shame by association: For example, the shame when an unused Kotex is found at the school, the anxiety that builds while the prevailing theory of ownership gets established and passed around, the relief when you are not the accused. This is not an empathetic shame but a kind of fear of being tainted. While “Half a Grapefruit” is settled well down in mid-to-low-tier Munro in my mind, the more I reflect on it the more humanity I see as Rose not only experiences shame due to her own misfires but also responds to the shame of others with her own shame, felt simply because of proximity. She has many opportunities to learn that “disgrace is the easiest thing to come by.” Though not just for her. “Half a Grapefruit” is an extended look at this particular time in Rose’s life. The kids recognize the lie (though know how to lie - have been lying about breakfast - themselves) and its accompanying pretensions, and she is thus further ostracized when they yell “half-a-grapefruit” at her for years “from an alley or a dark window.” If she’s going to pull of this re-mapping of herself, she’s got to come up with something better.īut we are not quite there yet. Pleased with herself at the moment, of course, this is a trick that doesn’t work. As the town kids answer that they had hearty breakfasts and the country kids answer they had practical and meager breakfasts, Rose decides that in her “no where” position she is going to say something that no one else has: she lies and says she had half a grapefruit. ![]() ![]() West Hanratty was where the store stood and they were, on the straggling tail end of the main street.” In the high school classroom, Rose seats herself at the end of a row filled with town kids, again putting her in a position that is essentially no where. We already know, from “Royal Beatings” and “Privilege,” that Rose is ashamed of where she lives. Though she lives in West Hanratty, the poor side of the river, she “thought of her own family as straddling the river, belonging nowhere, but that was not true. The classroom is already hopelessly divided, the wealthy kids from the town sitting on one side of the room while the poor country kids sit on the other. The teacher, perhaps not entirely innocuously, has asked each student to tell the class what they had for breakfast that morning. In “Half a Grapefruit” Alice Munro explores this tendency, which will continually cause pain and shame to her young protagonist, Rose, and eventually, as we learn in the remaining stories of The Beggar Maid, lead her to sacrifice quite a bit in order to align herself with those she considers her betters. Much of Alice Munro’s fiction explores how we do this even as children, fearing and purveying cruelty at the same time. We come up with so many ways to measure where we are (socially, economically, physically, etc.) relative to those around us, and we try to think of ways to game the system, to make ourselves into Potemkin villages.
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