Rich as Stink is a short story by Canadian writer Alice Munro included in the 1998 collection The Love Of A Good Woman.
Gaslighting, parentification, spousification, self-objectification, coercive control⌠People living in 1974 did not have ready access to the language of psychology and found it difficult to describe emotionally abusive relationships, let alone talk about the shame. Likewise, there wasnât the language to describe that disorienting transition from girlhood to womanhood.
THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMANÂ (1998)
- âThe Love Of A Good Womanâ â a story revolving around a crime but not a crime story. Reminiscent of Stand By Me. Also in the December 23, 1996 edition of The New Yorker.
- âJakartaâ â not actually set in Jakarta. A story of an old woman whose husband went missing, and also about the so-called âfree loveâ of the 1960s, which afforded far more freedom to men.
- âCortes Islandâ â a symbolic island standing in for the psychology of newly wed isolation. Also in the October 12, 1998 edition of The New Yorker.
- âSave The Reaperâ â a re-visioning of Flannery OâConnorâs âA Good Man Is Hard To Findâ. Also in the June 22, 1998 edition of The New Yorker.
- âThe Children Stayâ â What did divorce look and feel like when divorce was brand new? Also in the December 22, 1997 edition of The New Yorker.
- âRich As Stinkâ â Focuses on an adolescent girl. Some commentators call her âprecociousâ but I think she is a typical 11-year-old.
- âBefore the Changeâ also in the August 24, 1998 edition of The New Yorker
- âMy Motherâs Dreamâ â Critics donât love this one, but I do. I read this short story as a commentary on how it takes a village to raise a child, and when any given mother doesnât measure up as parent, other women can step in. Together, caregivers can band together to create a âwholeâ, and bring up a perfectly rounded and cared-for child, but alone? No. And we shouldnât expect mothers to be perfect.
But Munro must have studied all this in detail, because she wrote about these things with deep insight. As Esther Perel has said on her relationships podcast Where Should We Begin, one big job of being in a relationship is working out the power dynamics. Oftentimes, one person is afraid of losing the other; the other person is afraid of losing themselves. This story isnât about that exactly, but power and control within relationships is a theme that spans Munroâs work, and âRich As Stinkâ is yet another permutation of power relinquished, power gained. Sometimes, when power balance goes very, very wrong, we end up with a coercively controlling dynamic. Munro showed interest in this dynamic from her early work, starting perhaps with Queenie, the classic delineation of a coercively controlling man. Partly for this reason, I code Derek as a coercively controlling man.
A commentator at the Mookse and Gripes blog likens âRich As Stinkâ to What Maisie Knew, which was also my first thought. Iâve not read Henry Jamesâ novella but have seen the film adaptation. What Maisie Knew is the O.G. story of showing the audience a telescoped view of the world through a naive, young girlâs eyes. An extremely limited third person viewpoint leaves the reader to do a lot of heavy lifting, filling in gaps, fleshing out the fuller picture. Interpretations will be various because of what any given reader brings to the table.
After reading âRich As Stinkâ, Iâm left wondering what the hell is going on with these people. I know something is off, but what, exactly?
Sure, Iâm discomfited, but this is masterful storytelling. Isnât that exactly how we feel, as members of society, when we observe another family, another collection of people, and something just feels⌠off? We sense something feels wrong, but canât quite put our finger on it. Too often, we donât have the evidence to take it further.
Iâve felt this most keenly with a teenage girl I taught, after meeting her father at parent teacher interviews â a single father who seemed quietly dangerous, who complained about his daughter and compared her to his much easier son, unable to accept how difficult it is to be a teenage girl. I observed more closely at that sixteen-year-old girl in my form class, quiet, downcast, and wished sheâd tell me â or anyone â what was really going on at home. But I never saw any bruises. And a bad gut feeling isnât nearly enough, even when charged with reporting duties.
He was a good looking man, which didnât help. He was so good looking that my boss sat down at my desk after heâd left me reeling and said, âDid you notice anything about Kâs dad?â I must have looked baffled because then she said, âI guess heâs too old for you.â And I realised my worldly high school principal at a low SES school had only noticed the manâs good looks. (She hadnât spoken to him herself.)
Sure, Iâd noticed the good looks, but that aspect paled in comparison to his scariness. I asked another experienced older teacher how he had struck her when they spoke. âDid he seem dangerous to you?â I asked, quietly, tentatively. âYes,â she confirmed. âHe seems to me the sort of man who beats women.â But nothing happened after that. Nothing that involved me, anyway.
Munroâs âRich As Stinkâ puts me in mind of What Maisie Knew, ofâQueenieâ, and of various works of fiction. But most of all, this story has got me thinking about real life as a hamstrung bystander.
TECHNIQUE OF NOTE: DISCOMFITING THE READER
How does Munro achieve this? In short, she dripfeeds information designed to disorientate. For another excellent example of the same techniques, see Munroâs âTrespassesâ from her Runaway collection. If you donât mind a difficult and technical read, Nancy Easterlin wrote an entire paper about how Munro disorientates the reader in âWho Was It If It Wasn ât Me?â: The Problem of Orientation in Alice Munroâs âTrespassesâ: A Cognitive Ecological Analysis. Itâs no coincidence that âTrespassesâ is also a story about the experiences of an adolescent girl. Perhaps adolescent girls are uniquely positioned to observe the world, because theyâre in that liminal space between girlhood and womanhood, more sophisticated than the younger Maisie (created by Henry James), and at the perfect age to learn something big about the world. An adolescent is still completely dependent on the adults around them, and sees more of an adult relationship than any other adult living outside the house. Adolescent girls can be very savvy, as well as naive â a dangerous but fascinating combination. Just look at the popularity of Lolita.
The following details make me worry for Karin:
- Sheâs on her own stepping off a plane. These really are different times. Munro tells us that people arenât really supposed to be coming through the doors to where the passengers are getting off but do anyway. This is something that wouldnât happen these days. In short, no one at the airport is looking after anyoneâs safety, least of all the safety of a self-assured eleven-year-old girl. Anyone could snatch her.
- This eleven-year-old is naive, which we can deduce from some of the psycho narration. But Munro is not sticking to Karinâs voice. At times a dissonant third person narrator tells the reader what eleven-year-old Karin could not articulate, for example when describing Derekâs âbright steady eyes and satirical mouthâ. This is not a description Iâd expect to hear from an eleven-year-old. Yet the description of the Hasidic Jewish men is very much in Karinâs voice. This moving in and out of childlike point-of-view aims to discomfit: Which part of this narration is the authentic, childlike Karin, and which is she repeating, influenced by the adult voices around her? The narration itself creates an uncomfortable juxtaposition.
- Although dressing as a child doesnât make Karin any less vulnerable to predators (after all, paedophiles are attracted to children, and presumably to all things associated with childhood), our dominant culture primes us to balk a little at preadolescent girls wearing lipstick and other accoutrements of seduction. This is exactly why her own mother doesnât like it.
- Karin is looking around for an adult man, when Iâd expect an eleven-year-old to be glad to see her own mother after a long stint with her father and stepmother. Who is this man to her? Why is he such a dominant presence?
- As the story draws near the climax, paragraphs get shorter, perhaps only one line. The paragraphs donât segue into one another, creating an increasingly frantic tone. Then the pacing slows right down and we follow Karin in slow motion as she walks from the bedroom to where the adults are.
Much of Munroâs fiction is about the difficulty of establishing authoritative narrative accounts. She has this in common with the literary Impressionists, though they were more interested in the idea that there is no truth. I suspect Munro has in her mind a veridical version of this story, though thatâd be interesting to ask her.
In any case, how does Munro disorientate the reader?
- She doesnât let us know how characters are related. Iâm still not sure if the relationship between Rosemary and Derek is/was sexual. An eleven-year-old wouldnât know this, either. Munro avoids putting us in audience superior position to Karin.
- It took me a while to work out that Karin was as young as she was. At first I thought she was a small college aged student, and when she said she âlooked tenâ, she was exaggerating. My interpretation came from modern parenting in which eleven-year-old girls donât typically ride planes unchaperoned or buy their own lipstick, or use words like âtartâ.
Long Days, Short Years: A Cultural History of Modern Parenting
When did âparentingâ become a verb? Why is it so hard to parent, and so rife with the possibility of failure? Sitcom families of the pastâthe Cleavers, the Bradys, the Connersâdidnât seem to lose any sleep about their parenting methods. Today, parents are likely to be up late, doomscrolling on parenting websites. In Long Days, Short Years: A Cultural History of Modern Parenting (MIT Press, 2022), Andrew Bombackâphysician, writer, and father of three young childrenâlooks at why it can be so much fun to be a parent but, at the same time, so frustrating and difficult to parent. Itâs not a âhow toâ book (although Bomback has read plenty of these) but a âhow comeâ book, investigating the emergence of an immersive, all-in approach to raising children that has made parenting a competitive (and often not very enjoyable) sport.
Drawing on parenting books, mommy blogs, and historical accounts of parental duties as well as novels, films, podcasts, television shows, and his own experiences as a parent, Bomback charts the cultural history of parenting as a skill to be mastered, from the laid-back Dr. Spockâs 1950s childcare bibleâin some years outsold only by the actual Bibleâto the more rigid training schedules of Babywise. Along the way, he considers the high costs of commercialized parenting (from the babymoon on), the pressure on mothers to have it all (and do it all), scripted parenting as laid out in How to Talk So Kids Will Listen, parenting during a pandemic, and much more.
New Books Network
- What is the meaning of the title? If Rosemary is ârich as stinkâ, as Derek says, why does she agree to camp in the mobile home? There is clearly an off-the-page financial relationship at play, but what is it? When Rosemary gave up her apartment in Toronto, was that of her own free will? Are Ann and Derek using Rosemary as their bank, in some economically controlling relationship? What the characters say doesnât line up with what readers observe (are shown). The dissonance disorients. Like young Karin, we are forced to fill in the gaps and, like Rosemary is surely doing, weâre second guessing the situation. (Is Derek really all that bad?)
- Thereâs a structural circularity to this story, with Karin playing dress-ups both at the beginning and end of the story. As in âTrespassesâ, Munro may be subverting the happy ending story, drawing attention to the myth of eternal return. Home is not safe; there is no safe place; there is no home. While the reader is drawn into the circularity, the âreturn homeâ of your typical masculine myth is no such thing, and therefore disorients. Is this the ultimate female mythic tale? The tragic version, perhaps.
- In Munroâs short story âTrespasses,â the author delays introduction of the main character, which confounds the readerâs ability to prioritise and evaluate incidents and information. Itâs hard for us to work out whoâs important here. In âRich As Stinkâ, Karin is established as âthe mainâ character from the outset. Instead, Derek is the confusing character. Heâs not here in the flesh, but heâs clearly important because we âmeetâ him before we see him in a scene. Important how? Who is he in relation to Karinâs mother? Is he a nurturing caregiver or is he self-serving?
- By offering the reader only a snapshot through the eyes of a 10/11 year old girl, Munro leaves us standing on the perimeter of the setting rather than entering into it. We are deprived of crucial information.
- The old man in the coffee shop gives Karin a wink which is âlewd and conspiratorialâ. Karin understands this is because she is wearing lipstick. I assume though the wording is not hers, the feeling very much is. (Munro seems to be writing with the idea that children can understand things even if they canât articulate them.) But Rosemary laughs at the old manâs joke, âtaking it for country friendlinessâ. Why has Munro included this tiny scene? It tells us so much; Rosemary is oblivious to the abusive Derek, just as she hasnât noticed the lewd wink from this stranger. Rosemary cannot possibly protect Karin, because Rosemary is too deep in her situation to understand any imbalance of power, or the nature of abusive/entitled men. She doesnât flinch even when the old man says âlittle girl watching her figure?â. Whenever an old man comments on the body of a little girl (which I can tell you is often), this raises alarm bells for me. The word âfigureâ has sexuality embedded into it (itâs never a word applied to men by men), which sounds the alarm even louder.
SETTING OF âRICH AS STINKâ
Munro is well-known for creating an expansive geography, including the fourth dimension of time, and mirroring that in the mental space of her characters. Mark Levene writes in Alice Munro (edited by Harold Bloom) that ânew, unexpected and uncertain territory is an essential feature of Munro geographyâ.
In âRich As Stinkâ âthe problem of occupying spaceâ in the story ⌠is concentrated on the gloriously innocent ten-year-old Karin (whose name might also be Maisie Farange), who extends her emotions in terms of the spaces around the inside her. Her missing of Derek, her motherâs âfriendâ, she thinks of as âthe sense that there was space to fill, and a thinning out of possibilityâ. After the accident in which she is burned wearing a wedding gown, Karin evades her motherâs encroachment, her âabsurdâ sorrow, by becoming both âa continentâ and its minute contraction: âsomething immense and shimmering and sufficientâŚstretched out like this and at the same time shrunk into the middle of her territory, as tidy as a bead or a ladybug.
Mark Levene
Anything that seems both tiny and large at once is part of the disorientation, almost a form of spatial horror.
PLACE AND TIME
The first paragraph of âRich As Stinkâ places us firmly in place and time: Toronto, airport, summer, evening, 1974. However much she disorients us, she never does it by withholding this surface, setting kind of detail. Munro is always very upfront about that. A mistake writers sometimes make is to make the reader guess the era, the place in geography. This is never a fun thing to work out for a reader and should be given to readers upfront, as early as possible. Even when piecing things together isnât âfunâ by design, there has to be a reason to make your readers work.
SYMBOLISM
The land around Rosemary is spotted with juniper. Anytime I read juniper in a work of fiction I tend to link it back to the fairytale âThe Juniper Treeâ, another old story about a coercively controlling man, casting him as victim, since the one thing men cannot control in a traditional household is what the wife puts into the food.
This link is cemented when, in Annâs kitchen, Karinâs play acting goes like this:
âThe problem is that my husband is really mean and I just donât know what to do about him. For one thing he has gone and eaten up all our childrenâŚ.â
âRich As Stinkâ, Alice Munro
âThe Juniper Treeâ is, of course, a cannibalistic tale.
CHARACTERS IN âRICH AS STINKâ
Karin
The story opens with Karin, so we naturally empathise with her as viewpoint character. Not only that, Munro lets us deep inside Karinâs head. We see the airport through Karinâs eyes, we understand that she is sufficiently young to be caught up in Imaginary Audience Syndrome (concerned with how sheâs perceived by others), and that sheâs trying on a look, yet to work out who she is.
Karin is parentified by her mother, who understands that she could be sexually objectified by men, but ironically doesnât see it when it happens under her nose.
I mindfully avoid using the word âprecociousâ to describe Karin because, when applied to adolescent girls whoâve been encouraged to play adult roles, to attribute an adjective like that suggests there is something inherently mature about the girl, and this takes responsibility away from the adults around her. The word âprecociousâ also grates because it has been used time and again to describe abused girls in court, funnelling to one result: The word excuses the abuser.
Setting aside common misuses, Karin is not at all âprecociousâ. Sheâs a typical adolescent girl. She is dependent on the adults around her and therefore aims to impress them. She is drawn towards whichever of the adults will give her time and attention. She likes to play dress up, to look at herself in the mirror and imagine an adult version of herself. She also likes to be tucked into bed by her mother.
Rosemary
Early in the story when Munro pulls away from Karinâs head, she keeps the narrative âcameraâ hovering above the car. We are not allowed into Rosemaryâs head. Instead, Rosemary is described by an omniscient narrator. Rosemary is thereby established as a âcase studyâ of a character rather than as an empathetic one.
The view of Rosemary is not particularly flattering. She is an archetype who might have been labelled âhystericalâ last century: nervy, anxious, at the mercy of dysregulated emotion. Will Munro let us inside Rosemaryâs head later, I wonder?
It remains unclear to the reader the extent of Rosemaryâs culpability as a negligent parent. We have a few snapshots, but Karinâs impression of her mother has been influenced by Derek.
Derek
Munroâs thumbnail introduction of Derek is masterful, partly because he juxtaposes against Rosemary. They are clearly two halves of one (rancid) whole:
Derek was easy to find in a crowd because of his height and his shining forehead and his pale, wavy, shoulder-length hair. Also because of his bright steady eyes and satirical mouth, and his ability to stay still. Not like Rosemary, who was twitching and stretching and staring about now in a dazed, discouraged way.
Rich As Stink
Rosemary met Derek through her job editing manuscript. My own prejudices about certain kinds of people who call themselves writers come in to play; some people have the time and resources to write books but are contemptuous of working âinside systemsâ, and have an inappropriate accumulation of hubris.
Derek goes downhill from there. Heâs one of these guys who thinks women are basically crazy. Clearly, only another female character (even if only eleven) could reason with a crazy lady.
Then I look back and remember how Karin wants to please him. I code this as the learned response of a coercively controlled person. This man is far too embedded in Karinâs thoughts, especially considering she only spends summers with these people. How did he do that? It didnât happen by accident.
The evidence for a coercively controlling man run right through this short story. To list the evidence only from the first three pages of âRich As Stinkâ, I make a list to convey the density of evidence:
- âIf people like us can break upâ, Rosemary tells Karin. This is of course an ambiguous thing to say. It could mean that Derek wonât let her end the relationship without making her life a living hell.
- âDerek wasnât standing behind Rosemaryâ, observes Karin, suggesting thatâs where he almost always is.
- The more dissonant third person narration suggests that whatâs on the page isnât what is true; ââSquallâ was the name Rosemay and Derek themselves used to describe their fights, which were blamed on the difficulties of working together on Derekâs book.â
- That Rosemary and Derek have been working together on Derekâs book suggests a sublimination of Rosemaryâs own desires and career goals. âWhy donât you quit working on the book?â Karin asks. âYouâve got all your other stuff to do.â If Derek doesnât respect Rosemary in general, I doubt heâd respect her opinions on her book. The editing gig could be a cover for keeping her under his close surveillance.
- Rosemary is lacking the confidence to do ordinary things. She doesnât like driving, for instance. A common tactic of the coercively controlling abuser is to undermine the confidence of their victim. Itâs very common for them to say, âSince youâre not good at driving, Iâll drive you.â To the outsider, this looks like a kindness, when in fact the victim becomes less and less confident about their own driving, and more and more reliant upon the abuser driving them around, increasingly convinced theyâre hopeless, increasingly under their control.
- Derek hasnât told Rosemary where heâs gone, or if heâs gone âon a tripâ. Itâs helpful for the coercively controlling abuser to give their victim the sense that they could pop in anytime without warning, and leave whenever they like. This establishes the hierarchy of dominance and keeps the victim on high alert. Munro uses the word âjumpyâ to describe Rosemary. Ostensibly this is because she is not a confident driver. But that is only the surface interpretation. (Thereâs always an ostensible âreasonâ for something.)
- We learn that Ann ânever goes anywhereâ. Is this because Derek has two women under his control? Ann has been in Derekâs life longer. Ann is Rosemaryâs future self. Alice Munro commonly writes stories about one younger woman, one older, in which the older woman might function as the youngerâs older self. (This is one trick she uses for creating a sense of expansive time.)
- We are told by the more dissonant third person narration that Ann has financial means. For instance, she doesnât have air-conditioning in her car, ânot because she canât afford it but because she doesnât believe in it.â (I doubt thatâs Karinâs wording?) Second, she has bought a quite expensive piece of coffee-making equipment, but Derek has that in the kitchen at what is âstill his houseâ. Why has Derek taken a piece of equipment purchased by Rosemary and put it where she doesnât have access to it? Who does that? Notice how Munro puts this detail inside brackets. Why the brackets? Is this a more omniscient narrator stepping in to clear something up for us? Must be, because this is a detail Karin wouldnât know at this point.
- âYour mother is addicted to [coffee] places like this because of her awful childhoodâ, Derek has told the even younger Karin in a flashback scene. Itâs a common tactic of coercively controlling abusers to paint a picture of their victims as crazy. This is Derek taking Karin into his confidence, making her feel grown up, which is the reward she accepts while also learning the lesson, from him, that her own mother canât be trusted. We see that Karin has lost all trust in her mother when she doesnât want to go out for a trip with Rosemary in case Rosemary gets them lost. The third person narrator tells us, in case we missed it, that Derek tells Karin more detail about Rosemary than Rosemary herself would divulge.
- Derek controls what Rosemary eats, and probably also her âmedicalâ procedures, such as enemas.
- etc.
ANN
We wonder who Ann is. When we meet her, she could be anyone. Is she a family member, friend, neighbour, what? Often, in life, we hear peopleâs names before we understand where they fit in, and Alice Munroâs stories of social realism mimic the ways in which we really get to know people. Plonking us in the area with no formal introduction is a disorientation technique. We deduce that Ann is Derekâs long-suffering wife.
âHow about Ann? Is she still there?â
Rich As Stink
âProbably,â said Rosemary. âShe never goes anywhere.â
My read: Derek is using Rosemary economically, and possibly sexually as well, but he is longterm partnered up with Ann. Iâm not even sure if Ann and Derek are married, because Derek is a hippie who doesnât think much of weddings. Has Ann purchased and kept this wedding dress just in case he were to change his mind?
Off-the-page, Derek has used the to classic controllerâs tactic of âdivide and conquerâ; Rosemary and Ann were previously on decent terms, but Derek has soured their relationship. We donât know why or how, just as Karin doesnât know why or how.
TED
Whereas Derek works âoutside the systemâ, Ted is his off-the-page reflection character â a university economist. His job title suggests he is a good money manager, and capable of earning money in his own right, another way in which Derek is different. We know basically nothing about him other than that he has a new partner who likes to attend dress-up parties and that he comes from a rich family.
In an embedded narrative, Karin tells Ann the story of how her own parents met, including the part I wouldnât expect a child to know. Either Ted or Rosemary have broken the boundaries by parentifying their child (I suspect Rosemary, if either of them), or, Derek has subequently wheedled this backstory out of Rosemary and told Karin himself.
Munro follows this scene with a jump back to the present in which Karinâs mother puts the sleepy child to bed, juxtaposing adult knowledge with a childlike scenario in which Karin is properly parented.
STORY STRUCTURE OF âRICH AS STINKâ
Turning now to the basic structure, this is a story that takes place over a day, but with flashbacks included, takes place over a year or so. A story-within-a-story takes us to Rosemary and Tedâs childhood. A sentence or two after the climax takes us forward, past Karinâs burn recovery, and goodness knows how far into the future, in which her intimate relationships are negatively affected because of the man controlling her motherâs life.
PARATEXT
From the title we might expect this will be a story about the rich poor divide. Itâs always interesting to put rich and poor people together in a story, and storytellers do this often. In fact itâs not about wealth versus poverty much at all, except in what we might guess.
At first I thought ârich as stinkâ might be a Canadian expression? A Canadian speaker will have to tell me if itâs Canadian or specific to Alice Munro. I would say âstinking richâ in my NZ/Australian English, or to use the same grammar, ârich as bastardsâ. New Zealand English tends to put âasâ after adjectives as a regional intensifier (ârich asâ, âsweet asâ etc.) and Iâm guessing âas stinkâ works the same way in this particular dialect.
The story âRich As Stinkâ is in a collection about women and their various ways of loving men, so I already know itâs going to be about that.
SHORTCOMING
Like any adolescent, Karinâs main shortcoming is her youth. Eleven-year-olds are at the mercy of adults around them, and their naivety is their main vulnerability.
Eleven-year-old Karin is a strange mixture of knowing and naive, but I find thatâs the case with any adolescent. For instance, she knows who Irma la Douce is, but doesnât know the word âHasidic Jewâ, instead describing the men at the airport by their costume: âmen who wore black hats and had little ringlets dangling down their cheeks.â
DESIRE
Like any adolescent, Karin wants to be a part of something, to imagine herself older, to play as a child when she wants to, to impress significant adults.
The desire that drives this particular story? Near the end she dresses up in a wedding dress. She wants to entertain.
OPPONENT
Every character in this story functions as an opponent for the others.
Derek wants Rosemary to edit his work; she no longer wants to. Ann wants to be her maternal self with Karin but thatâs a bit awkward because something off-the-page happened between Ann and Rosemary. Derek may or may not be coded as the Minotaur opponent by the reader â the puppeteer of misery, keeping women exactly where he wants them with sophisticated emotional manipulation. But to me he is clearly terrible.
PLAN
Karinâs plans have been made for her, given her age. But once she gets to her motherâs house she does have a little autonomy so she uses that to visit Ann nearby. She also uses her (sense of) autonomy to go with Derek on his rock-finding adventures, which reveal themselves as underwhelming, not matching Karinâs imaginary, symbolic version of caves and castles.
THE BIG STRUGGLE
The climax is of course the scene where Karin catches on fire. Notice what Munro does with the pacing leading up to this scene. She speeds it up then slows right down, then bam, the girl is on fire. Itâs shocking how fast it happens, mimicking the realworld sensation of bursting into flame.
ANAGNORISIS
Because Munro has fused Karinâs emotional landscape with the literal landscape, when Karin notices the changes, we can deduce she herself is changing. Notice how Munro lists what is not there rather than what is, signifying a need, a lack:
Karin walked up the gravel road and wondered what was different. Aside from the clouds, which were never there in her memories of the valley. Then she knew. There wre no cattle pasturing in the fields, and because of this the grass had grown up, the juniper bushes had spread out, you could no longer see the water in the creek.
âRich As Stinkâ, Alice Munro
The ending is a (disturbing, literal) pyrrhic victory. Whenever thereâs a type of mask in a story, and in this case itâs the dressing up, the masked character is in danger. Karinâs dress-up clothes can quite literally kill her, but the symbolism is hardly subtle; she understands the dangers of matrimony, or any sort of formalised arrangement with a man.
After her mask (wedding costume) comes off, Karin better understands the danger of relationships with controlling menâŚ
NEW SITUATION
âŚbut cuts herself off completely, for now persuading herself that itâs either have that kind of relationship or be alone.
This disappointment has been foreshadowed with Karinâs expectations about the rock-finding expedition, in which treasures are cheap mica, the castle and the cave are nothing like she hoped.
Munro has used a geography metaphor to describe Karinâs emotional landscape, so tidies that up at the end with this:
For that was what Karin felt she had become â something immense and shimmering and sufficient, ridged up in pain in some places and flattened out, otherwise, into long dull distancvs. Away off at the edge of this was Rosemary, and Karin could reduce her, any time she liked, into a configuration of noisy black dots. And she herel â Karin â could be stretched out like this and at the same time Shrunk into the middle of her territory, as tidy as a bead or a ladybug.
âRich As Stinkâ by Alice Munro
EXTRAPOLATED ENDING
Why canât Karin imagine a good relationship with a man? Iâd like to know more about her own father. Mainly due to his absence in Karinâs thoughts, I donât get a Good Father vibe.
I have argued that most of this story resides in what the reader extrapolates. I have extrapolated a man coercively controlling two women, probably by having or promising a sexual or economic relationship with them both. The eleven-year-old daughter of one of those women is going to either be drawn in, or something will happen to afford her a bit of distance. At the beginning of the story, Karin is on a path to being controlled by men, groomed at first by this one.
What is grooming?
[W]hether weâre referring to a children or adults, âgroomingâ someone means manipulating them into accepting treatment or into going along with something shady, something that is not in their best interest, and/or something the âgroom-erâ knows the target most likely wouldnât do if they were just asked outright and allowed to give informed consent. A mugger who demands your wallet at knife-point isnât grooming you, a con artist who forms a relationship with you so that youâll give them your money is.
Captain Awkward
The fire is terrible, and highly symbolic, and functions as a torchlight of knowledge gained; after that brief conflagration/illumination she is able to see whatâs going on â if not the plot of it, then the feeling of it. Whatever she saw terrified her as much as the flame itself, and most of the scars are internal.
Derek has led directly to Karinâs character change, even if Karinâs response is defensiveness rather than compliance:
âŚthere were people whom you positively ahced to please. Derek was one of them. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could keep you and have contempt for you forever. Fear⌠could make Derek decide to give up on her. As he had given up in different ways on Rosemary and Ann.
âRich As Stinkâ, Alice Munro
RESONANCE
This story was published in a 1998 collection. The power and control wheel was developed almost two decades earlier in 1982 by the Domestic Abuse Program in Minneapolis but, even in 2020, the very predictable tricks of a controlling person are just starting to be understood by regular people without a psychology/counselling background.
A reader is unlikely to read anything into Derekâs controlling actions unless they have some experience with a controlling person themselves. I suspect âRich As Stinkâ functions as an âI see youâ story rather than as a âteachingâ story. For a more obvious depiction of coercive control, see âQueenieâ.
Header painting: John Collier â Fire