Reading Response #2: "Princess Ida" and "Age of Faith"

"Age of Faith" chronicles Del and her brother's honest, funny, and touching struggles with faith and doubt. Munro illuminates the deeply personal and private nature of faith:

With the making of his prayer his face went through several desperate, private grimaces, each of which seemed to me a reproach and an exposure, hard to look at as skinned flesh. Seeing someone have faith, close up, is no easier than seeing someone chop a finger off (97).

When Del's younger brother earnestly, desperately tests out his faith in a manner which she knows is not viable, she cannot help but feel like she is looking at "skinned flesh". She feels that his inevitable failure (he prayed to save his dog from being put down) is her fault because it was she who planted the idea in his mind that prayer could alter the future (she had prayed and succeeded in avoiding a sewing assignment in school). While her prayer deals with a trivial matter, her brother's prayer involves the life of another sentient being who he loves. The chapter shows how religion confounds children. Del doesn't understand that faith invovles belief without proof. Her brother doesn't understand that prayer is only applicable to certain things. To test one's faith against something inexplicable is frustrating; to watch a loved one desperately trusting something impotent is heartbreaking.

Through "Princess Ida", the reader witnesses the changing relationship between Del and her mother. Dramatic irony is created when the reader realizes how similar Del is to her mother before Del does. For example, as Del tests the existence of god by praying to be exempted from sewing, her mother had:

Once ate cucumbers and drank milk because she had heard that this combination was poisonous and she wished to die. She was more curious than depressed. She lay down and hoped to wake in heaven, which she had heard so much about, but opened her eyes instead to another morning (64).

Both Del and her mother are immensely likable characters. They are fully fleshed out with failings and insecurities and humorous anecdotes. However, Del distances herself from her mother as she steps awkwardly into adolescence:

I felt the weight of my mother's eccentricits, of something absurd and embarassing about her- the aunts would just show me a little at a time- land on my own coward's shoulders. I did want to repudiate her, crawl into favor, orphaned, abandoned, in my wrinkled sleeves (54).

Munro has an incredibly keen eye for describing adolescent girls. Del's self-consciousness, or rather, consciousness of how others percieve her, blossoms in this section. Del starts to see herself and her mother through others' eyes: as "absurd and embarassign". She hasn't sufficently solidified her own concept of self to have enough backbone to question the qualifications of outside observers. She reminds me of my younger self - extremely serious and extremely susceptible to embarassment. Munro's characters are delightfully relatable and endearing.