The earnest, dignified manner with which Munro echoes the absurd longings of adolescent girls for gawky pubescent boys is absolutely side-splitting. She hits it dead on: "every day he wore a blue-gray sweater, darned at the elbow, and this smoky color, so ordinary, reticent, and mysterious, seemed to me his colour, the colour of his self" (11o). The romantic, idealistic, imaginative musings that fill Del's head are executed without self-awareness or self-deprecation. This brings painful, embarassed, but ultimately joyful bursts of recognition:
...We talked all the time about these two boys. We called them F.A.'s. It stood for Fatal Attraction.
"There goes your F.A. Try not to faint" (112).
This passage is so absolutely dead on I cannot help but laugh aloud each time I read it. It perfectly captures how seriously in love adolescent girls think they are, and how heroically they bear their secret longings. It shows how curiously these boys saturate their every conscious thought: they are not so much in love with the boys as they are infatuated with the idea of being in love. It shows how funny and fun "liking" some boy can be: how it is rather a sport, a secret game between friends. The scandalous secrecy and the constant threat of exposure, embarassment and loss of dignity are exhilarating. It's like a drug: they are absolutely giddy about it. How ridiculous it all is, when they known little to nothing of the objects of their liking, when neither girl nor boy has matured enought to actually talk of love. And yet, it is through this silly business that adolescent girls mature into women.
Miss Farris in her velvet skating costume, her jaunty fur hat bobbing among the skaters, always marking her out, Miss Farris con brio, Miss Farris painting faces in the Council Chambers, Miss Farris floating face down, unprotesting, in the Wawanash River, six days before she was found. Though there is no plausible way of hanging those pictures together- if the last one is true then must it not alter the others- they are going to have to stay together now (118).
The death of Miss Farris closes “Changes and Ceremonies”. It is an unsettling, disturbing, not fully reconciled ending to a mostly joyful chapter. Juxtaposed against the mirthful absurdity of adolescent pining, it is a surprising and somewhat tragic ending. It is full of mystery, “a mystery presented without explanation and without hope of explanation, in all insolence, like a clear blue sky” (118). It makes the reader pause and realize the complexity of the reality Del lived in, and realize what unhappiness slipped by her unnoticed. This troubling event closes the chapter, and her adolescence.
...We talked all the time about these two boys. We called them F.A.'s. It stood for Fatal Attraction.
"There goes your F.A. Try not to faint" (112).
This passage is so absolutely dead on I cannot help but laugh aloud each time I read it. It perfectly captures how seriously in love adolescent girls think they are, and how heroically they bear their secret longings. It shows how curiously these boys saturate their every conscious thought: they are not so much in love with the boys as they are infatuated with the idea of being in love. It shows how funny and fun "liking" some boy can be: how it is rather a sport, a secret game between friends. The scandalous secrecy and the constant threat of exposure, embarassment and loss of dignity are exhilarating. It's like a drug: they are absolutely giddy about it. How ridiculous it all is, when they known little to nothing of the objects of their liking, when neither girl nor boy has matured enought to actually talk of love. And yet, it is through this silly business that adolescent girls mature into women.
Miss Farris in her velvet skating costume, her jaunty fur hat bobbing among the skaters, always marking her out, Miss Farris con brio, Miss Farris painting faces in the Council Chambers, Miss Farris floating face down, unprotesting, in the Wawanash River, six days before she was found. Though there is no plausible way of hanging those pictures together- if the last one is true then must it not alter the others- they are going to have to stay together now (118).
The death of Miss Farris closes “Changes and Ceremonies”. It is an unsettling, disturbing, not fully reconciled ending to a mostly joyful chapter. Juxtaposed against the mirthful absurdity of adolescent pining, it is a surprising and somewhat tragic ending. It is full of mystery, “a mystery presented without explanation and without hope of explanation, in all insolence, like a clear blue sky” (118). It makes the reader pause and realize the complexity of the reality Del lived in, and realize what unhappiness slipped by her unnoticed. This troubling event closes the chapter, and her adolescence.
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