Summary Of Alice Munro's Wenlock Edge

Intro: In a society where women are often left with the burden of children in failed relationships they turn to very irrational techniques to gratify the simplest of needs. If the connotation of being rational is a way of thinking that best helps you achieve your goals and most women want to be independent finding a sugar daddy would not be considered thinking rationally. In Wenlock Edge by Alice Munro we have 3 characters that participate in the world of sugar daddies and paid mistresses. Mr. Purvis is a possessive sugar daddy, Nina is a paid mistress and the narrator of the story is unknowingly, at first, a mistress for a night.

Body 1 : In Alice Munro 's story, Mr. Purvis can be seen as a sugar daddy. Not only do you suspect it by the

Purvis 's sexual company in exchange for a good meal. The quote shows the narrator dines with Mr. Purvis completely in the nude and even though they do not get physically close she is still gracing him with her nudity for his pleasure. She is unknowingly a paid mistress because she did not know she would need to be a sexual companion and we can see this by her discomfort displayed by the way she is hesitant in removing her clothes. She voices this discomfort throughout the experience, after whenever she obsesses over what happened and when she compares it to the unknown human capability of committing bad actions. We discover more about one 's capabilities of doing bad when she discovers that she had become a paid mistress that night. She realises this when she states
"I had not made up my mind what I would say to Nina when I got home. Would I ask her if she, too, was required to be naked in that house—if she had known perfectly well what sort of an evening was waiting for me? Or would I say nothing and wait for her to ask me? And, even then, would I say innocently that I’d eaten Cornish hen and yellow rice, and that it was very good? That I’d read from “A