The second of the Alice Munro stories that I have chosen to read this week is “Too Much Happiness.” Like “Runaway,” it is the titular story of the collection it was first published in. “Too Much Happiness” is a fictionalization of the life of Sophia Kovalevskaya, a famous seventeenth century Russian mathematician who died at only 41 years old. While the majority of the story is told in the form of flashbacks, the story technically only takes place in the final few weeks of Sophia’s life. In the very first scene, Sophia is walking in a cemetery with her fiance on New Year’s Day, and she remarks that “one of us will die this year” – a Russian superstition which she does not seem to take seriously, but which comes true in the end. Sophia takes an arduous trip to Stockholm, during which she catches pneumonia and quickly passes away. The flashbacks, on the other hand, recount the span of Sophia’s life, including her struggles as a woman mathematician, her relationships with her family, her first marriage to a husband who killed himself, and her relationship with her new fiance. Throughout, themes of the struggles of women during that time are deeply woven in.
Sophia was a woman who breaks many of the expectations placed on women of her time. She was married, but it was a “White Marriage” – a marriage done for legal purposes, to allow the woman freedom from her parents. She and her husband Vladimir did not live together, except for brief periods when it was convenient. Sophia had a daughter, Fufu, who she was often criticized by other people in her life for “neglecting” – she often left Fufu in the care of others while she pursued her career. Most prominently, Sophia was a mathematician. She was the first woman to obtain a doctorate in the field, and she was doubted every step of the way. Her doctoral advisor, Weierstrass, even doubted her when she first came to him, at first brushing her off by giving her a test he assumed she would fail, and then when she exceeded his expectation, the Munro states “But he suspected her still, thinking now that she must be presenting the work of someone else, perhaps a brother or lover who was in hiding for political reasons.” Even when he did come to accept her as his advisee, he still did not entirely respect her as a woman. This is illustrated in the following exchange:
“Truly I sometimes forget that you are a woman. I think of you as — as a —”
“As a what?”
“As a gift to me and to me alone.”
Sophia seems to be touched by this, but it is still misogyny. Later in the story, she observes that her (now deceased) husband had not had “the manly certainties,” and that this was why he was able to treat her with some level of equality but never “that enveloping warmth and safety.” This is to say that a man is either able to respect a woman or he is able to love her, but not both. Weierstrass was only her advisor, but he had a fatherly affection for her and saw her as his personal protege, but not as a woman – she was too intelligent to be placed in the socially defined category of a “woman.”
There are many other instances of misogyny affecting Sophia’s life. For example, while she was able to obtain her doctorate in mathematics and win the Brozin prize (a lofty honor), she was never able to find work beyond teaching. She, a highly intelligent woman, was seen as a novelty, never a colleague or an authority. Sophia is frustrated by this treatment, and by the way that she does not fit into society. There is a moment in the story which I find incredibly important, when Sophia is feeling particularly resentful of the way that she is treated, and she instinctively directs this malice at other women. However, she catches herself, and she is able to examine the ways in which her initial misogynistic thought process was not fair to other women. It is a long passage, but I will include it here:
“Then they had given her the Bordin Prize, they had kissed her hand and presented her with speeches and flowers in the most elegant lavishly lit rooms. But they had closed their doors when it came to giving her a job. They would no more think of that than of employing a learned chimpanzee. The wives of the great scientists preferred not to meet her, or invite her into their homes.
Wives were the watchers on the barricade, the invisible implacable army. Husbands shrugged sadly at their prohibitions but gave them their due. Men whose brains were blowing old notions apart were still in thrall to women whose heads were full of nothing but the necessity of tight corsets, calling cards, and conversations that filled your throat with a kind of perfumed fog.
She must stop this litany of resentment. The wives of Stockholm invited her into their houses, to the most important parties and intimate dinners. They praised her and showed her off. They welcomed her child. She might have been an oddity there, but she was an oddity that they approved of. Something like a multilingual parrot or those prodigies who could tell you without hesitation or apparent reflection that a certain date in the fourteenth century fell on a Tuesday.
No, that was not fair. They had respect for what she did, and many of them believed that more women should do such things and someday they would. So why was she a little bored by them, longing for late nights and extravagant talk. Why did it bother her that they dressed either like parsons’ wives or like Gypsies?
She was in a shocking mood, and that was on account of Jaclard and Urey and the respectable woman she could not be introduced to. And her sore throat and slight shivers, surely a full-fledged cold coming on her.
At any rate she would soon be a wife herself, and the wife of a rich and clever and accomplished man into the bargain.
Later, in the present of the story, Sophia sees a woman caring for her sick child and has a moment of introspection about the position of women in society which I thought was especially insightful: “How terrible it is, Sophia thinks. How terrible it is the lot of women.” She goes on to consider the injustices that women face, and the fact that even still, most women simply have to get on with their lives, and do not have the luxury of waxing philosophical about all of it – they simply have to get by and cope in the ways that they know how. She thinks:
“And what might this woman say if Sophia told her about the new struggles, women’s battle for votes and places at the universities? She might say, But that is not as God wills. And if Sophia urged her to get rid of this God and sharpen her mind, would she not look at her-Sophia-with a certain stubborn pity, and exhaustion, and say, How then, without God, are we to get through this life?”
This story is not simply a collection of feminist observations. It is a portrait of a particular woman’s life, and it is concerned mainly with her inner world. But this is as “feminist” as it gets – to represent women’s lives accurately, to portray them as full human beings, including the ways in which their lives are impacted by patriarchal society. Alice Munro has stated that she does not consider herself to be a feminist writer, but this may be what makes her such a great one; that she does not necessarily write with an agenda, but seeks to write about womanhood honestly and without obfuscation, including the misogyny women face, the ways that it functions and the effects it can have on their lives.