As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.
Interpretation
The quote explores the assumptions and expectations surrounding the dynamics between men and women when they are alone together.
Alice Munro reflects on the inherent tensions and possibilities that arise when men and women find themselves alone in a confined space. The quote suggests that society often assumes that this situation will lead to an exploration of desires and instincts, revealing both the dangers and the intriguing possibilities that exist in male-female interactions. It provokes thought about the way perceptions and expectations influence relationships and how people can be driven by both attraction and fear.
In practice
During a discussion on gender dynamics, this quote could highlight the societal assumptions we make about men and women.
Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
I wasn't saying whatever they're saying I was saying. I'm sorry I said it really. I never meant it to be a lousy anti-religious thing. I apologize if that will make you happy. I still don't know quite what I've done. I've tried to tell you what I did do but if you want me to apologize, if that will make you happy, then OK, I'm sorry.
A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her.
Don't you ever orget that in the end, our future is tied to people, that it's more about ideas than a tax.
Groups break up because they never got across what they wanted to do personally, and they have creative differences, and egos start to clash.
I just always knew that I lived in two worlds. There was the world of my house and community, but to make my way in that white world I had to modify the way I spoke and acted. I had to sometimes not make direct eye contact.
...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
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