Royal Beatings by Alice Munro

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Royal Beatings by Alice Munro
Alice Munro’s “Royal Beatings” revolves around a family and its complicated
relationships. There are intense emotions of love and hate in the story that is short but not simple.
The protagonist of the story is Rose who lives with her father, stepmother Flo and a younger
half-brother, Brian. Rose, the protagonist of the story is conditioned by his or her physical and
social environments.
The plot of the story is set against a complicated time during the Depression years and
among the poorest sections of the society. Rose lives with her family behind their grocery and
furniture repair store. Her father works in a shed as a furniture restorer, and his earnings are
barely sufficient to meet the needs of his family. Their neighborhood is too cramped to provide
any private space. The story takes place during the Depression that only adds to the harshness of
the physical environment for the family. Rose has seen only poverty and bleak conditions of life
around her as they lived in a poor part of town, where there were only factory workers and
foundry workers, bootleggers and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves (Munro 120). The author
paints a grim description of the town with “dirt roads and boggy places, front yard dumps and
strange looking houses” thieves (Munro 121). Rose finds herself surrounded by a legendary
kind of poverty that has no place for her aspirations and dreams. Like her, the other characters of
the story too must have been conditioned by their physical environment.