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 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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