In “Royal Beatings,” the first in a series of stories Alice Munro wrote about Rose and her stepmother, Flo, one central theme is the young Rose’s developing awareness of the complexity of human nature and the impossibility of truly knowing or understanding anyone by their outer appearance, actions, or words.
Munro develops this theme in various ways. First, Rose knows that her father has an unknown inner life because of the words she hears him speaking in his shed when he thinks no one is listening:
The person who spoke these words and the person who spoke to her as her father were not the same, though they seemed to occupy the same space.
Secondly, although Flo married her father when Rose was only a baby and has been the only mother Rose has ever known, Rose is very aware that Flo had a life before that time—a life that Rose views as interesting, mysterious, and even somewhat dangerous. Rose realizes that Flo is emotionally complex: she can call on Rose’s father to administer the “royal beating” but then regret her actions and bring Rose cold cream and her favorite food because she is a human being with complications and an inner life.
The final scene, in which Rose hears Hat Nettleton on the radio years later, is another confirmation that even the horse whippers of Flo’s story (who seem like one-dimensional characters) have lives that have nothing to do with their actions on the long-ago night they whipped Tyde. It seems poignant that when Rose hears him on the radio, the person she wants to tell is Flo, who because of her age has stopped talking and retreated completely into an unknown inner life.
While one purpose of “Royal Beatings” is to establish the basis of a complicated relationship between two women (Rose and Flo), another is to portray the young Rose’s realization and growing awareness of how complex and sometimes contradictory people can be. This develops over the course of the story and will continue to inform the other stories in Munro’s collection The Beggar Maid.
The theme of "Royal Beatings," a complex story with multiple shifts in time (as Rose looks back many years later on her childhood), is the cruelty lurking beneath the surface in relationships and the way that cruelty can come to the surface so quickly. At the end of the story, Flo, Rose's stepmother, administers a "royal beating" to Rose on a Saturday when Flo can't go to town. Munro writes of Flo's emotions that day, "The wrangle with Rose has already commenced, has been going on forever, like a dream that goes back and back into other dreams." Flo's reasons for beating Rose seem to arise partly out of her own frustration, with her restive feelings in early spring and her anger over customers' unpaid bills, but Flo's rage also seems to arise almost out of her unconscious, like a dream. The story recounts the horrific yet mundane ritual in which Flo asks Rose's father to beat Rose and then makes up for the beating with a tray of delicious and lovingly prepared foods.
In a similar way, the story tells about the senseless beating the butcher, Tyde, receives from young men in the town because they hear the rumor he impregnated his daughter, who is deformed from having had polio. They beat and whip him until his night clothes and the snow around him turn red, and he dies shortly thereafter. The men in town are moved to extreme violence by the whisperings of a rumor, which is almost definitely false. A year after they are convicted, the young men who carried out the beating are set free.
The purpose of this story is to reveal the violence that lurks behind the surface of ordinary lives and the ways people use violence to vent their own frustrations. Flo vents her frustrations on Rose, yet she clearly also loves her stepdaughter; the "useless young men" in town beat the butcher, even though they don't even particularly care what he did with his family. People resort to beatings and violence with little provocation or reason.
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