Comparative Study on Depiction of The Teenage Love in Red Dress and an Ounce of Cure

Teenage Love What is love? An intense affection and warm feeling for another or a strong sexual desire for another person. In "Red Dress" and "An Ounce of Cure", the author Alice Munro explores the theme of teenage love and curiosity which causes each teenage girls to lose her innocence. This theme is effectively explored through flashback and foreshadowing. The loss of innocence helps teenagers learn from their mistakes and gain more knowledge, and this leads them to grown-up as an adult. By comparison of "Red Dress" and "An Ounce of Cure", the two teenage girls in both stories are very interested in love, and want to fall in love. Both narrators were very interested and were very curious about them. In "Red Dress" the narrator and her friend Lonnie were always talking about boys. They were also doing all the questionnaires in magazines to find out whether they had personality and whether they would be popular.

In fact, the narrators in both of the stories were accepted and were liked from boys, which they were surprised about that. As one can see in "Red Dress", "Mason Williams was one of the heroes of the school; he played basketball and hockey and walked the halls with an air of royal sullenness and barbaric contempt. To have to dance with a nonentity like me was as offensive to him as having to memorize Shakespeare" (Munro 79). Similarly, in "An Ounce of Cure" the narrator was not accepted either. For instance:Martin Collingwood had given me a surprised, appreciative, and rather ominously complacent smile in the school assembly a few weeks after that he took me out for the first time, and kissed me on the dark side of the porch - also, I ought to say, on the mouth; I am sure it was the first time anybody had ever kissed me effectively. (103)As proof, the two teenage girls are very interested in love, which would then leads them to lose their innocence. Once the narrator in both stories were accepted and were liked by boys, the turning point in the stories then took place. This was the time where the rejection comes by and leads them to lose their innocence. In "Red Dress", when the narrator attended to her first school dance, there was a popular boy named Mason Williams who was asking her to dance. Throughout the dance, she was really surprise and happy that someone asked her to dance.

However, during half of the dance, Mason was exchanging looks of dismay with his friends, took his hands away from her waist, causing her arms to drop down, and walked away (79). Similarly, in "An Ounce of Cure", the narrator also got rejected by Martin because he had fallen in love with another girl. Although both of the narrators got rejected, in the end they were not surprised at all. It was because they are already fulfilled their desire of having a boyfriend. On the other hand, the rejection caused the narrator in "An Ounce of Cure" to loses her innocence. This was the time where Alice Munro was using foreshadowing to explore the theme. My parents did not drink. They weren't rabid about it, and in fact I remember that when I signed the pledge in grade seven, with the rest of that superbly if impermanently indoctrinated class the same nature that caused my mother to look at me, on any occasion which traditionally calls for feelings of pride and maternal accomplishment with an expression of brooding and fascinated despair, as if she could not possibly expect, did not ask, that it should go with me as it did with other girls. (103)

This theme is effectively explored through foreshadowing, it catches the reader's attention, and gives the readers a hint or warning that something will happen later. This leads to show how the teenage girl loses her innocence after. She was trying to kill herself by taking six aspirins because of the rejection.

However, she did not succeed. She was so depressed, so she drank and then got drunk. Unfortunately she was not suppose to get any drink in her town, because she had already signed the pledge of not to drink. Compared to the narrator in "Red Dress", she did not try to kill herself or do anything that will hurt herself after the rejection. She was not surprise or upset either, because she did not think she would have a boyfriend ever.

As evidence, when rejection comes in, it causes the narrators in both stories to lose their innocence. When the loss of innocence takes place, the end result was that the narrators gained more knowledge. From then on, they would not face the same mistakes again. In this case, when the narrator in "An Ounce of Cure" attended to her friend's funeral at last, she came face to face with her first boyfriend. I saw him looking over at me with an expression as close to a reminiscent smile as the occasion would permit, and I knew that he had been surprised by a memory either of my devotion or my little buried catastrophe. I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look in return. I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes. (112)

As proof, Alice Munro explores this theme through flashback, because when the time the narrator met back Martin in the funeral. She thought back how she was so immature in the past, and now she is a grown-up woman. Thus, we see that the narrator in "An Ounce of Cure" had been grown-up, she had become more mature and she knew what she is doing now. This shows that the rejection and the loss of innocence had leaded her to became more as an adult and gained more knowledge from this. Likewise, the narrator in "Red Dress" did gained back knowledge from the rejection too. She now has a new understanding of her life, and her feelings as consequences. At this point, both the narrators are more cynical about world, not as immature as they were in the past. In "An Ounce of Cure" and "Red Dress", both narrators in the two stories were immature in the past.

Nevertheless, after they had gone through the problems in their life that causes the loss of innocence to come in, they gained back the knowledge and lead them to become more mature.