‘Wild Swans’ by Alice Munro

Wild Swans by Alice Munro, 1977

The magic trick:

An emotional outcome that is extraordinarily complicated

Following on yesterday’s feature, “The Judge’s Wife” by Isabel Allende, I’ve got a second entry from the wonderful short story class I took Summer 2025 with Mark Altshuler at Chatauqua. “Wild Swans” is a fairly wild read given what we now know about Alice Munro’s family life (notably turning a blind eye to her second husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter).

I know reading autobiography into art is a slippery slope at best, but, it’s just very difficult not to blur lines when the lines here are so obviously blurry. This story was published in 1977, right around when we now know Alice was likely made aware of her husband’s abuse. The story itself tells of a young girl’s first train ride by herself. She’s warned to beware of predatory men. Sure enough, she falls prey to a predatory man. And, as with any Munro story, the outcome is complicated. It’s appalling to our protagonist. It’s terrifying. It’s humiliating. But it’s also appealing in some way? It appears to spawn some kind of sexual awakening.

Read five years ago, this probably would be part of Munro’s catalogue of nuanced, troubling but brilliant explorations of female sexuality. But I hate to report, read in 2025 after the revelation of her family history, “Wild Swans” reads like one big cope.

The selection:

Rose was going to Toronto on the train for the first time by herself. She had been once before, but that was with Flo, long before her father died. They took along their own sandwiches and bought milk from the vendor on the train. It was sour. Sour chocolate milk. Rose kept taking tiny sips, unwilling to admit that something so much desired could fail her. Flo sniffed it, then hunted up and down the train until she found the old man in his red jacket, with no teeth and the tray hanging around his neck. She invited him to sample the chocolate milk. She invited people nearby to smell it. He let her have some ginger ale for nothing. It was slightly warm.

“I let him know,” Flo said, looking around after he had left. “You have to let them know.”

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