Friend of My Youth

The narrator’s mother died young after a long and difficult illness. To the narrator, her mother’s conventionality and her illness are intertwined. The narrator experiences her mother’s opinions and mannerisms as stultifying, as she does the burden of having to care for her. Her mother’s illness necessitates a relentless domesticity, one that seems an inevitable outgrowth of her life as a mother and homemaker: “My mother did become busy with her own life and finally a prisoner of it” (19).

Yet Munro implies that the mother’s conventionality is circumstantial, and that she might have been a different person had she lived in a different time. She was a schoolteacher as a young woman, and she tells the narrator that she believes she “could have been a writer” (19), a remark that implies some wistful envy of her daughter. Her younger self seems to have been venturesome and sociable, and it is striking that her most romantic feelings are not towards men, but towards her old female friends: the “friends of my youth” of the story’s title. In romanticizing these friends, she is also romanticizing her own youth, a time of relative freedom and possibility. While the narrator considers her mother old-fashioned, the mother thinks more highly of herself and her own generational attitudes. 

Flora Grieves is the oldest of the Grieves sisters, and a mysterious and complicated character. She is cheerful and self-sacrificing as a young woman, accepting the betrayal of her fiancé without complaint and devoting herself to caring for her invalid sister Ellie. Later in her life, she abruptly abandons her farmhouse and pious way of life, a decision which coincides with her re-initiation of contact with the narrator’s mother after ending their friendship years earlier.

Flora’s piousness and her sense of family duty seem to have shielded her from introspection, so that she is mysterious to herself as well as to other people. When the narrator’s mother attempts to discern Flora’s real feelings about Robert’s second betrayal, Flora ends the friendship rather than reveal any negative feelings. This fierce emotional makes her unpredictable: She is stoic when she might be expected to take defiant action, then defiant once she is assumed to have adjusted to her life. For the narrator, Flora becomes a metaphor for her mother, an unknowable woman of an older generation.

At the time when the narrator’s mother meets her, Ellie Grieves is already bedridden with a mysterious illness. That her illness seems related to her repeated pregnancies and miscarriages emphasizes the narrator’s rejection of traditional roles for women as mothers and caretakers. Ellie is remembered by nearby townspeople as a lively and mischievous young girl. It is her introduction to sex through the character of Robert Deal that is implied to have broken her body and spirit. Ellie transforms completely from a free spirit into a woman antagonized by both her body and her marriage. Stories like Ellie’s are what make the narrator’s mother so cautious and reticent on the subject of sex: “My mother had grown up in a time and in a place where sex was a dark undertaking for women. She knew that you could die of it” (22).

Robert Deal is seen entirely in relation to sex. He comes into the story as Flora’s fiancé, a practicing Cameronian and a seemingly upstanding young man. He then gets Flora’s younger sister Ellie pregnant, ending his and Flora’s engagement and necessitating a hasty marriage to Ellie instead. Once Ellie has died—and he and Flora might have reconciled—he abruptly marries Audrey Atkinson, Ellie’s nurse, and abandons his religion to suit his new wife.

Although Robert Deal initiates many of the main events in the story, he is portrayed as a mostly passive character. He submits to his circumstances, allowing himself to be controlled by the women around him even while sowing disruption in their lives. While his marriage to Ellie might be explained by a sense of remorse or duty, he also submits to Audrey Atkinson, allowing her to modernize their farmhouse and flout Cameronian tenets. In his mute acquiescence there is a sense of shame and bewilderment, as if—like Ellie—he does not fully understand what has happened to him. Through her narrator, Munro makes Robert—and by extension men—seem incidental. Robert is an obstacle or object of desire in the story, which centers instead on the shifting attitudes of the women.