Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

First published: 1971

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: 1942-1961

Locale: Jubilee, Ontario, Canada

Principal Characters:

• Del Jordan, the protagonist and narrator
• Addie Morrison Jordan, Del’s mother, whose atheism and intellectual ambitions make her an outsider in Jubilee
• Naomi, Del’s best friend
• Jerry Storey, the class brain and Del’s partner in misery through high school
• Garnet French, Del’s first lover, a drinker and troublemaker until jail and religion changed him
• Frank Wales, Del’s first love
• Uncle Benny, Del’s eccentric and reclusive neighbor
• Art Chamberlain, a friend of the Jordans’ boarder, Fern Dougherty
• Miss Farris, the director of the operetta at Del’s school

Form and Content

Lives of Girls and Women is a connected group of stories following Del from the age of about eleven to just after high school graduation. Each chapter is a self-contained story that provides an insight into Del’s life: family, religion, sexuality, friendship, the imagination, and romance. The novel traces Del’s experiences, shows her ambitions, and highlights her coming of age in a time when roles for girls and women are in a state of transition.

Del is highly imaginative and likes to question traditional knowledge, as is indicated by her exploration of different faiths and her love of reading. Like other women in the novel (her mother, Naomi, Miss Farris), Del tries on different roles in her quest for fulfillment. She lives much of her life in her imagination. She is fascinated by the story of Uncle Benny and Madeleine, and by how the episode showed that alongside the ordinary world of school and family, Uncle Benny’s world was “a troubling distorted reflection, the same but never at all the same.” Her Uncle Craig’s funeral prompts her to wonder about life and death, and to realize that she is (sometimes unwillingly) linked forever to her family. After the funeral, her aunts ceremoniously present her with Uncle Craig’s unfinished lifelong project: a history of Wawanash County in minute detail. They hope that she will be able to imitate Uncle Craig’s style and complete the book. Del wants to go her own way, however, and is guiltily relieved when, years later, the manuscript is accidentally destroyed. Del’s next experience, a meeting with an uncle from the United States, reveals the different versions two people have of the same event. While Del’s mother saw her childhood as deprived by her own mother’s religious zealousness and neglect, Del’s Uncle Bill saw their mother as a saint who saw beauty in everyday life. Del’s early life is marked by her questioning of authority and her consciousness of the tragedy and darkness that can occur in the most mundane surroundings.

Del struggles to find a religion to suit her skeptical nature: this quest fails (but resurfaces again with her attraction to Garnet French). As a young girl, she is curious about boys but is aware that they hold an unequal share of the power in her world. During the school operetta, she becomes infatuated with Frank Wales, an outsider like herself, but the romance ends when the operetta does. Later, Mr. Chamberlain’s advances and his coarse treatment of both Del and Fern make Del realize that she wants to seize the power to make her own decisions and to take on worldly experience.

As Del goes through high school, she is presented with various ways of being female: renunciation of the sexual, immersion in academic study, drinking and rowdiness, indulgence in selfish sexuality. Her mother believes that love and sex are “nonsense,” but Naomi becomes interested in them to the exclusion of everything else. Soon Del’s friendship with Jerry Storey allows her to postpone any decision about the kind of woman she will be and lets her discuss the dream of escaping Jubilee. Later, Garnet French immerses her in a self-enclosed world of sex and romance. The night before her scholarship examination, Garnet takes her home to meet his family and then makes love with Del—an experience so momentous that Del’s exam seems unimportant. She spends the summer in a suspended time of making love with Garnet and trying not to think about failing her scholarship exam. Garnet assumes that they will marry and jokingly asks to baptize Del. Even though she knows that it is a joke, somehow she cannot agree. They struggle and fight in the water, and Garnet tries to force her under. Del leaves him. She realizes that she has turned Garnet into a fantasy and knows that it is time for her to go back to real life.

Del realizes that she cannot rely on romance for her happiness. The epilogue tells the story of one of Jubilee’s prominent families and shows Del’s imaginative ordering of real events. She ends by observing that lives “in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

Context

Although Lives of Girls and Women differs in form from Munro’s collections of unrelated short stories, it has a similar theme: the journey to adulthood of a young, intelligent, unsophisticated woman. One central issue in the novel is the repression and anger fostered by a small town’s inability to tolerate someone who is “different,” as Del, her mother, Jerry Storey, Miss Farris, and Mr. Boyce all are. Women in particular suffer from the narrowness of conservative expectations: Del’s mother has energetic but unfocused aspirations; Naomi is forced to marry because she is pregnant; Fern’s musical ability is seen as “showing off.” Munro details how other women, such as Del’s aunts, school friends, and grandmother, enforce these narrow standards—to their own detriment as well as Del’s. Munro questions throughout the novel the prevalent idea that romance, sex, and domesticity are sufficient “escape routes” for young women seeking dramatic change from the roles their mothers were forced to play. With humor and sadness, she examines the way in which Del is influenced by society’s vision of what a woman should be—and how Del eventually chooses to reject this standard in favor of “real life.”

Lives of Girls and Women was somewhat unusual when it was published because at that time realistic accounts of female coming-of-age were rare; it is significant that the novel is most often compared to American author J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, in which a young boy questions authority and becomes disillusioned with society’s prescriptions for happiness. Munro examines many of the same issues that Salinger does, but in an intensely gender-and class-conscious way: The “phoniness” of adults, the hypocrisy of religion, the effect of tragedy on a family, and a teenager’s awakening and often frustrated sexuality are microscopically analyzed by Del. Unlike Salinger’s, however, Munro’s work is distinctively feminist, and it includes details that are intrinsic to ordinary female life, such as worries over menstruation, details about clothing and hairdos, awkwardness over Del’s adolescent body and sexuality, Naomi’s announcement of her pregnancy, and the split in roles between Del and her brother.

The novel has paved the way for further examinations of female “heroic journeys” and short story treatments of female relationships, such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Along with the work of Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro’s novel and short story collections have brought Canadian women writers to a wide audience and have pointed out that personal issues such as Del’s are also political and universal.

Bibliography

Carrington, Ildiko de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989. Examines the development of Munro’s work: her major themes, metaphors, and uses of points of view. Argues that Munro’s work focuses on the use and abdication of power. Excellent primary and secondary bibliographies.

Howells, Coral Ann. Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970’s and 1980’s. London: Methuen, 1987. The chapter on Munro focuses on Lives of Girls and Women and The Beggar Maid and the role of female fantasy and the way in which women’s inner lives are connected to their aspirations. Examines the “Ontario Gothic” element in her work.

MacKendrick, Louis K. ed. Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts. Downsview, Ontario: ECW Press, 1983. Includes a lengthy and informative interview with Munro about her inspirations, work habits, and background, and critical analyses of her narrative techniques, her presentation of the ordinary as extraordinary, and her sense of the absurd. A fine collection of critical responses to her work up to the early 1980’s.

Martin, W. R. Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel. Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1987. A close and careful critical study of Munro’s body of work, including uncollected stories; argues that, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Munro makes the strange familiar and, like Wordsworth, she makes the familiar wonderful, through the concept of “doubleness.” Contains a chapter-length treatment of Lives of Girls and Women which includes information on its composition.

Rasporich, Beverly J. Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990. A full-length critical study of Munro’s pursuit of truth about women. Incorporates extensive interviews with Munro which illuminate texts later discussed in analyses of her stories and novels as feminist, ironic, regionalist, and female.