How I Met My Husband

Munro’s 15-year-old heroine Edie hails from a large, rural farming family. Edie has grown up without electricity and modern conveniences and has old-fashioned habits, such as only bathing once a week. Although Edie spent a year at high school, she did not take to academic work and prefers to become a servant in Mrs. Peebles’s house where she can use her practical talents. The ease of her life in Mrs. Peebles’s fully electrified house, means that she finishes her work quickly and has the leisure time to contemplate herself as someone other than a laborer. She indulges her curiosity as much as she can without destroying the Peebles’ perception of her as a virtuous people-pleaser. For example, she uses their mirrored bathroom to admire herself naked and secretly tries on Mrs. Peebles’s clothes and make up, but she is too nervous to search through her employer’s dresser drawers, fearing discovery. Her romance with Chris is another form of pushing the limits of who she can be, even as the family and their acquaintances seek to pigeon-hole her as a servant.

Edie is moved when Chris continues to see her as “nice and beautiful” even when he learns that she is hired help (60). Edie clings to this vision of herself as a sophisticated adult and orchestrates further meetings with Chris, while calculating how she can get away with an appearance of guilelessness. She feels that romance exonerates her sexual longings and despite knowing her society’s expectations of female chastity, does not blame herself for giving into desire. This aligns Edie’s attitude more with the 1970s publication date of the story than its postwar setting. Edie’s later misunderstanding of the word intimate not only points to her unworldliness but creates a tense scene which exposes the almost comic futility of using euphemisms for any type of sexual act, evincing the shared moral panic over sex among Alice, Mrs. Peebles, and Loretta, three women from very different backgrounds. While Edie is ashamed to the point of tears by Alice’s denunciation of her as promiscuous and degenerate, she does not lose her own good opinion of herself. This shows remarkable self-possession for a working-class girl in a conformist society. Even when she suffers the disappointment of never receiving the promised letter from Chris, she recovers by defining herself as a woman who is “busy and not waiting” (76). She thus goes against the stereotype of the romantic heroine who waits for the hero and makes her destiny with another man.

An older, more mature Edie is also a prominent figure in the story. This wife and mother, who has had modern conveniences in her home for a long time and has lost her slim figure along with her youthful ingenuity, offers reflections on her younger self’s actions. She judges younger Edie as alternately naive and ruthless, for example when she thinks Chris will write the letter, or when she conspires to keep him away from his fiancée. However, overall, she seems satisfied with her conduct and how everything has turned out. She retains her compliant and self-pleasing duality when she allows her husband to think she pursued him, all the while knowing her own version of the truth.

The pilot Chris Watters is the disruptive agent in Edie’s stable life at the Peebles’ home. In a story titled “How I Met My Husband,” this stranger also serves to mislead the reader about what his role in the heroine’s life will be. The reader might assume that Chris is the future husband instead of the catalyst who leads to Edie meeting the man she will marry.

A pilot who has been restless since the war ended, Chris feels displaced and discontented with civilian existence. He prefers a transitory life, earning money from giving fairground rides and living in a tent, aiming to mimic the excitement of a wartime existence. He prefers to forget his fiancée Alice Kelling and imagine that he is unattached and debonair enough to pursue attractive young girls like Edie. Chris objectifies Edie as an attractive working-class woman when he shows no care for her reputation by trying to get her to visit him alone. He also underestimates her intelligence in not sharing his wartime adventures with her, whereas he judges middle-class Mrs. Peebles worthy of these stories.

Munro does not grant Chris the power of sexually awakening Edie. She has already experienced sexual fantasies before Chris enters the scene, and even Chris’s offer of cigarettes, an implied invitation to adult relations, is not a first for Edie. Thus, while Chris does some vaguely defined “other things” to Edie when they are kissing (70), he is still responding to Edie’s own agency. He seems to be content with just kissing Edie and stops proceedings long before intercourse takes place. He thus anticipates the undesirable consequence of a pregnancy and acts to absolve both of them of responsibility for their transgression. Even though he pursues Edie, Chris treats her as less than an adult. Chris feels the needs to dignify his sexual interest in Edie with the idea of a romance and so promises to write her a letter with an address where she can come and visit him. However, Chris does not follow through, in a manner that imitates his avoidance of Alice.

Chris’s unreliability is accommodated by the patriarchal society he lives in. Alice uses the war, where Chris played a heroic role, as an excuse for his restlessness, while the women automatically blame Edie and not Chris for the liaison between them. Loretta Bird says, “men are all the same” (73), a comment that is synonymous with the attitude that it is standard male nature to pursue available women, and it is the differences in female behavior which determine men’s comportment. Thus, while the spotlight goes on Edie’s error in visiting Chris, Chris’s faithlessness to his fiancée in addition to his casual use of a young girl for his own pleasure go unremarked upon. Even Edie herself avoids passing judgement on Chris, more focused on her own discoveries about adulthood via her experiences. Munro allows the reader to make any moral judgements about Chris. 

Chris’s city-born, educated fiancée is the embodiment of a woman waiting for a man who will not fulfil his promises to her, the kind of woman Edie decides never to become. While such waiting could be portrayed as romantically picturesque in more traditional love stories, Munro uses Alice’s character to show the grotesque result of delayed satisfaction and subjugation of the self. To Edie’s mind, Alice has aged prematurely. Her “rather low and bumpy” bust, in addition to her grown-out permanent hairstyle and worried face indicate that she has neglected her appearance while chasing after Chris (65). The fact that Alice is a nurse who met Chris at the time of an injury illustrates the transactional nature of the relationship between them and how he gads about restlessly while she is left to pick up the pieces. Their lackluster engagement is not even dignified by being a wartime romance, as the two met before Chris was in action. Although Alice thinks of herself as rational, her failure to relinquish the pilot indicates the desperate side of her character.

Alice inability to accept Chris is jilting her causes her to focus her wrath onto Edie. She makes a facile opposition between herself and Edie, positing herself as middle class, educated and sexually pure, while characterizing Edie as a “filthy little rag” who lets herself be used by men (73). She disproportionately blames Edie for Chris’s departure, for which there is much precedent, and overlooks the problems already inherent in her relationship. Alice escalates the scene by demanding to medically examine Edie in order to verify the nature of her intimacy with Chris, preferring to enact harm on another woman rather than admit her unwise choice of lover.

While young Edie loathes Alice and judges her harshly, older Edie pities Alice, saying that “women should stick together” and act in solidarity rather than against each other (72). The older Edie explains that her younger self could not relate to either Alice or her troubles. While older Edie does not specify that she has come to resemble Alice, Munro’s omission allows the reader to judge that older Edie has come to empathize with the fiancée. As women, they might have much in common in their struggles against patriarchy, as they were both wronged and misled by Chris.

Edie judges her boss Mrs. Peebles as deficient as a woman and homemaker because she feels “tied down, with the two children out in the country” (57), and does not know how to cook, can, or clean, and must hire help for tasks Edie thinks of as obligatory. Edie also looks down on Mrs. Peebles’s ignorance of countryside social hierarchies when she judges Loretta Bird to be a rustic countrywoman rather than a meddlesome neighbor. Still, Edie admires Mrs. Peebles’s wealth and beauty, and aspires to a similar kind of sophistication.

Mrs. Peebles is portrayed as a typical city woman who is unsuited to life in the countryside. A woman who came to the countryside in accordance with her husband’s pastoral urges, Mrs. Peebles monitors her weight and has a wardrobe of finery for which she has no occasion to wear. She is so listless and bored that she naps to pass the time and half-entertains the idea of flying in Chris’s plane, though she does not have the courage to do so. Mrs. Peebles with her fractious, nervy temperament represents the type of bored middle-class postwar housewife deconstructed by feminists in the era of the story’s writing. While the other female characters in the novel resent Mrs. Peebles’s ease of situation in having only two children and no work, she herself is unhappy. In one respect, Mrs. Peebles’s hovering about the home while she delegates her housework to Edie also classifies her as a woman who waits rather than acts, allowing her life to be shaped by her husband’s desires. Instead of waiting for a man, Mrs. Peebles is waiting for an outside element that will make her life happier.

While Mrs. Peebles observes the class rules, engaging with Alice as a friend and Edie only as an employee, she defends Edie against Alice’s accusations. As the highest status woman, Mrs. Peebles referees the showdown between Alice and Edie and judges it to be a “misunderstanding,” when she learns that Chris and Edie did not have sex. Mrs. Peebles’s preference for seeing Edie purely as the simple country servant girl who came to her from strict parents rather than as an autonomous subject in her own right influences her decision. Munro writes how after the incident Mrs. Peebles “had to see” Edie “all the time and it got on her nerves, a little” (75). Here, Mrs. Peebles’s wish to not see Edie indicates a typical middle-class discomfort with the fact that the woman working for her and managing her intimate affairs is also a person with impulses, curiosities, and desires that challenge the status quo.

The nosy neighbor Loretta Bird occupies a class status in between Edie and the wealthier Alice and Mrs. Peebles. Though Loretta, like Edie, is local to the town, Loretta aspires to Mrs. Peebles’s social circle, even as she gossips incessantly about her new neighbors. Edie dislikes Loretta strongly, considering her incompetent, nosy, and ingratiating. However, Loretta also shares Edie’s view of Mrs. Peebles as an unskilled woman of leisure. Loretta is moralistic, judging the Peebles’ presumed use of contraception and quick to support Alice’s characterization of lower-class women as promiscuous. Mrs. Peebles tolerates Loretta, yet she does not permit Loretta the friendship she quickly establishes with Alice, despite both Loretta and Alice displaying unattractive qualities. This simultaneous tolerance and resistance to Loretta evinces the Peebles’s classism, even as they seek to live among the country community. Munro also uses Loretta to contrast Edie not only against women of different classes and backgrounds, but against the older women of her own community, revealing Edie’s subversion of societal norms as both a generational difference and individual personality.