vandals homes geography

while houses are at the centre of Munro's art, they are often places of marginalization in her stories, especially with regard to the women who inhabit them. Accordingly, a consideration of the peripheral visions in Munro's fiction must take into account the connections between gender and space. Munro says that early in her career "there was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal. [...] I came to feel that was our territory, whereas the mainstream big novel about real life was men's territory. I don't know how I got that feeling of being on the margins; it wasn't that I was pushed there. Maybe it was because I grew up on a margin" ("Art" 255, emph. Munro's). The comment underscores Munro's persistent accentuation of the spatial aspect of concepts such as "territory" and "margin," which critics often deploy primarily as tropes. And, in "Vandals" and other stories, Munro extends the link between gendered and regional marginality to explore the peripheral enspacement of fiction it self, as well as the connections among stories, gender, and space. Munro asks readers to consider ways in which women might stage protest from the margins and what form that protest might take in fiction. Given Munro's house-fiction metonym, this request may even instigate a re-vision of contemporary spatial theory; which has tended to privilege tropes of mobility and deterritorialization. Munro's "Vandals" tells the story of a young woman named Liza, who, with her husband, Warren, visits the empty house of her older friend Bea and goes on a rampage, mutilating the house's interior for reasons that are initially unclean Through a series of flashbacks it becomes apparent that Liza and her brother Kenny used to visit Bea and her husband Ladner when they were children, and that Ladner repeatedly sexually abused them in the forest behind his house. At the most literal level, space is not simply a backdrop for the story; the traversing, invasion, and vandalizing of it are central. The narrative is especially rife with excursions and tours, which are by no means innocuous but which appear as tools of an oppressive masculinity that controls and orders space. Ladner's books, which include The Peninsular War and The Peloponnesian Wars, are reminders that space is not only a site of dispute but an object and tool of it, while Warren's name doubly puns on "warring" and "warren" to underscore further the kinship of space and conflict. In "Vandals' such hostilities arise when men enact their urge to define and dominate otherness through gestures of dividing and enclosing. In order for Ladner to define his own mobile subjectivity, he attempts to make the apiarian-named Bea like the dead animals he puts on display: inert and enclosed. Mobility represents agency in space, and in "Vandals" it is the privilege of men. Peter Parr brings Bea "into an orderly life" through his weekly driving tours (264), Liza's father moves his family nomadically from place to place, Warren drives "his snowmobile" whi le Liza rides (261, emph. mine), and Kenny notably dies in a car crash. Most conspicuously of all, Ladner uses his mobility and familiarity with land to assert authority and discipline others. The tour he gives Bea leaves her feeling lost and powerless; the two conditions often cognate in the story. Bea initially plans to introduce herself to Ladner with a story that she is lost, but her spatial helplessness becomes real when Ladner has her within his space: "He did not slow down for her or help her in any way" (270) and she "couldn't keep track of their direction or get any idea of the layout of the property" (272). Ladner takes pleasure in her vulnerability to a wilderness that he has subdued,...