“And now another story surfaced”: Re-Emerging Voices, Stories and Secrets in Alice Munro’s “Family Furnishings”

Like many stories by Munro, “Family Furnishings” (from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) testifies to a paradoxical relationship to the past that involves denials, rejection and appropriation. I propose to analyse the role played by two apparently unconnected embedded stories in the resurfacing motif at work in “Family Furnishings.” As both stories resurface, they bring about the return of the past, but while resurgence is made synonymous with birth and creation with the family tale, the resurfacing of the childhood tale will reveal that resurgence also means the return of the repressed. Since these two resurfacing stories will force the narrator to negotiate with the past, and its role in her life as a writer, they play an important part in the metafictional dimension of “Family Furnishings.”