31 pages • 1 hour read
Alice MunroHow I Met My Husband
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Tent
The tent where Chris sleeps during his sojourn in the community is a symbol of his restless, unsettled status. An apparatus used by soldiers on the front line, the fabric shelter is the opposite of the sturdy brick homes other characters take refuge in and expresses Chris’s opposition to peacetime values like constancy and stability. Instead of restricting the owner to one location, the tent can be pitched wherever action and adventure are taking place. It can also be removed easily and disappear without a trace whenever a location or its inhabitants becomes troublesome. This is the case when Chris learns that his fiancée is pursuing him in order to force him to honor his promise of marriage.
For Edie, Chris’s tent becomes a symbol of whirlwind romance and disorder. It is in that tent, which she finds so lovely with “that smell of grass and hot tent cloth with the sun beating down on it” (70), that Edie escapes her position of dutiful servant and styles herself as Chris’s passionate love. The tent allows Edie a portion of the adventurous life that Chris is so fond of. In a society of sexual conservatism, the tent provides a honeymoon-like atmosphere where Edie can undergo the rituals that let her come of age away from the public gaze. While for Edie, these are kisses and a shot at romance, those who judge her imagine that she has rejected propriety completely by entering this private, transient space.
The Passage of Time
Time passing is a crucial motif in a story in which an older first-person narrator describes the actions of her younger self. The narrator often alerts the reader to this distance, commenting, for example, that she has had electrical appliances in her house for many years and is therefore different from the awestruck young girl who entered the Peebles’ house. However, she also presents the idea of time passing quickly in the duration of the story itself, as young Edie experiences a dramatic growth of confidence and boldness. Edie is initially so bashful in Chris’s presence that the older narrator judges that she “wasn’t old enough to realize or to say anything back, or in fact to do anything but wish he would go away” (60). Edie quickly accumulates enough daring and desire to visit Chris in his tent and pursue a romance with him. This fast-paced character development is consistent with Edie’s adolescence and her long held wish for sexual desire and intimacy.
Chris leaves, Edie watches summer become fall without the appearance of the promised letter. Eventually, she does not want to lose any more time to waiting. Edie rejects the idea of growing old while repeating the routine of going to the mailbox and waiting for the letter, judging that “I was never made to go on like that” (76). In imagining that it is not just her, but women in general—specifically ones like Alice—who wait around for a man until they grow old, Edie frames a personal problem within a societal one. She imagines a second type of woman, who is busy and not waiting, perhaps like the go-getting version of herself who visited Chris in his tent, and prefers to be that type of woman. Edie learns to unpin her hopes from a man who does not live up to his promises and an imagined future, and she reinvests these hopes in herself and her present moment.
Food
Food is an important motif in the story and becomes a barometer of different social stations and aspirations. Edie, who comes from a poor farming family, has been raised with a preference for culinary abundance. The pies and cakes she and her mother bake are an important indication that they live above subsistence level and can indulgently feed their guests. This ties into poor families’ anxieties about having enough to eat, especially following a period of wartime shortages, and demonstrates the farming family’s attachment to their traditional foods.
Mrs. Peebles who admits that she cannot even make a pie-crust, has been educated out of needing to cook and prioritizes maintaining her weight above having cakes in the home. Wearing the same size clothing as a fifteen-year-old girl, Mrs. Peebles aspires to an image of lean, metropolitan womanhood and not a domestic ideal. Edie, who feels “half hungry a lot of the time” at the Peebles’ (57), finds their reliance on convenience foods such as tinned peaches and soda cold and unwelcoming. When she takes Chris a crumb cake when she visits him in his tent, she follows her instinctive preference for culinary indulgence, as she seeks to abate Chris’s physical hunger at the same time as trying to steal him from his middle-class fiancée. Her instincts tell her that her personal offering of home-baking contributes to her wholesome appeal and can compete with Alice’s class-based distinction.
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By Alice Munro
