Reading Alice Munro with Jacques Lacan by Murray Jennifer;

Author:Murray, Jennifer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773599857
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2016-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

“Too Much Happiness”

Feminine Jouissance

Like “Eskimo,” “Too Much Happiness” is a story of travel – a train journey interspersed with memories. It is written in a dreamlike way, with an impression of uncertainty shaping the very syntax of the focalizing Sophia Kovalevsky’s thoughts. Following the meanders of the story’s journey, we will listen for its “other” knowledge and, along the way, give resonance to some of the echoes of this Other, feminine jouissance to which so many of Munro’s stories bear witness.

“Too Much Happiness” departs from the Ontario-based fictional character typical of Munro’s stories, taking as its protagonist the historical figure of the Russian mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky.1 Kovalevsky’s life is Romanesque in its outlines: born in Moscow in 1850, she excelled in mathematics but could not complete her studies in Russia, where women were not then permitted to attend universities. Nor could she leave Russia to study abroad without the permission of her father (an officer in the Russian army), or in the case of marriage, of her husband. As her father would not grant her leave, Sophia concluded a “fictitious” marriage with Vladimir Kovalevsky, a palaeontologist who would later become known for his work association with Charles Darwin, and the couple left Russia together in 1867. Sophia pursued her studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and was later taken under the tutorship of reputed German mathematician Karl Weierstrass, becoming the first woman in Europe to hold a doctoral degree in mathematics. Her publications on complex mathematical problems earned her the reputed Bordin Prize, and she was eventually given a professorship at Stockholm University. In the meantime, her marriage with Vladimir (which took on more consistency than its original fictitious status had intended) had weathered his political engagement in the Paris Commune, the couple’s immense financial difficulties, and the birth of their daughter Sophia (called FuFu). Indeed, it lasted until her husband’s suicide in 1883.

Munro deals with these historical markers in gentle brushstrokes, allowing them to emerge progressively in the course of her protagonist’s physical, reflective, and emotional divagations. The structure of this historical fiction hinges on a train journey: after walking in a cemetery on the first day of January 1891 with her new fiancé, Maksim Kovalevsky, a distant cousin of her late husband Vladimir, and referring to the ominous superstition that their presence in a graveyard on the first day of the year means that one of them will die within the year, Sophia boards a train.

The journey takes her from the sunshine, melting snow and “soft air” (254) of the south of France to the bitter cold and deep snow of Stockholm where she is to resume her teaching after the holiday break. The voyage will be interrupted by two detours: one to Paris to see her brother-in-law and her nephew, Urey, the only child of her now-deceased sister Ann; and one to Berlin to see her former tutor, the now aging Weierstrass. Each departure, arrival, encounter, and interval becomes an occasion for the emergence of

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