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In the short story, How I Met My Husband, the author Alice Munro decries the imaginary love affair that a young girl has for an uninterested pilot. Eddie is working for the rich Peebles family who has just settled in the countryside. Both Dr. and Mrs. Peebles portray a little understanding of the social rules of their community. Edie, the narrator of the story, is a simple girl from a humble background. Her greatest undoing is to let herself be carried away by her infatuations. She is enthralled when the pilot, Chris Watters, compliments her dressing even though she was putting on Mrs. Peebles’ clothes. Munro attempts to draw a line between true love and infatuation.
In this story, Munro displays a strong theme of class stratification. The small town where the story is set is highly segregated along with social classes. At the bottom of the social spectrum are the Birds. Farmers are the middle class, while the Peebles occupy the topmost class. Indeed, the Peebles household speaks of sophistication and class considering its possessions, such as labor-saving devices like washing machines (Gale, Cengage Learning). When people gathered on Peebles’ farm to look at the plane, Mrs. Peebles warns them against just standing there like a set of farmers and invites them into her house instead. Socially, farmers are low-key people who, according to Mrs. Peebles, are idlers and backward. Surprisingly, she makes these remarks in the presence of Edie, her employee, who hails from a farming background.
Munro critiques how women perceive love vis a vis what love truly is. For most parts of the story, Edie is portrayed as having a false and shallow judgment of love. She does not recognize that Chris is not interested in her and continues to cling to the false hope that he will write her a letter. On the other hand, Chris has everything going on in accordance with his plans (Gale, Cengage Learning). Edie’s infatuation towards him does not deter him from spending quality time with his fianceé, Alice Kelling. It is evident from the story that Edie’s suffering because of love is self-inflicted.
At the end of the story, Munro reveals to the reader the meaning of the title. It turns out that all the events in the story were justifications for how Edie ended up marrying her husband, the mailman. She dispels the belief by many readers that Chris was the husband to the narrator. Munro tactfully employs this kind of ending as an effective way of providing a denouncement. Incidentally, it was Edie’s naivety and lack of foresight that gave the story such a dramatic ending (Gale, Cengage Learning). Her belief in a mythical letter falsely promised by Chris made her visit the mail office every day to be noticed by the mailman. Thus, Edie’s gullibility of Chris’ hidden schemes made her meet her husband.
In the short story, How I Met My Husband, the author takes her readers through an opaque journey of a one-sided love affair between a 15-year-old country girl and a thirty-year-old pilot. Although the main theme is love, Munro also takes time to expose the hierarchies that characterize the village and the gullibility of women. This is a society that is defined by socioeconomic status, with those occupying the lowest positions being the most despised. I find the author’s approach of revealing the husband at the tail end of the story quite enchanting. It shows that Edie’s confused love life finally paid off as she encounters a husband.
Work Cited
Gale, Cengage Learning. A Study Guide for Alice Munro’s “How I Met My Husband”. Gale, Cengage Learning, n.d.
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