Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro - Research Paper Example

Lecturer: Lives of girls and women by Alice Munro Overview Published in 1971, Lives of girls and women is a collection of well integrated short stories by the Nobel-prize winning writer Alice Munro (Magdalene and Thacke 196) that chronicles the life of one character, Del Jordan; this cycle of short stories is a bildungsroman genre. The cycle depicts the life of Del Jordan, growing up on the outskirts, and later in the middle of a small southern Ontario town, Jubilee; Del, like her mother who seeks to expand her mind beyond the confinements of Jubilee, is unsatisfied with the small town life. Every story reveals more about Del’s experiences from being a young, innocent girl to becoming an adult, living with her family that comprises of her parents, younger brother, and Uncle Benny; the work focuses mainly on issues of girls and women, thus the prominence of female characters and its feminist bias (DeFalco 377). In this analysis, I propose that the repeated crises encountered by Del in Alice Munro’s Lives of girls and women, are partial illusions camouflaging a looming decay, and that everyday life is a grand illusion. Structure Dell narrates the stories from a first person’s point of view, and the whole cycle is structured in eight chapters, each detailing a self-contained tale that espouses additional facts concerning Del’s evolving identity. The cycle opens up with a fundamental retrospective focus on Del’s childhood when she is first awakened to the romance of everyday, surrounded by chaotic and eccentric misfits (Awano 91), the likes of Uncle Benny, whose concept of the world was a distorted reflection of reality. From these early experiences, Del learns to focus on the deeper meanings and details of life rather than merely on the shadows and reflections that individual lives often cast as she sharpens her wits and senses for a future career as a writer (McDonald). Through the subsequent chapters, the writer portrays various models of womanhood that come into constant interaction with Del as she grows up, from Naomi, Del’s best friend who lives up to the expected role of ingenue, wife on one end, and her mother Ada who sometimes speaks for ‘the world’ and on others for what “the world” fears and despises. Text Analysis In the first chapter, the Flat Roads, Munro establishes a symbolic geography in which she thoroughly contrasts the town of Jubilee, the epitome of society, sociability, and propriety, from the Flats Road, where drunkenness, sexual looseness, dirty language, haphazard lives, and content ignorance are the norm of everyday (McDonald). Del, still a child, grapples with the assimilation of Munro’s two countries but is yet to encounter the lurking struggle to belong to both worlds and the subsequent inner conflict due to a split personality. The distinctions between the town of Jubilee “the world” and the Flat Roads “the other country” are clear, but Uncle Benny, who represents the “other country,” espouses both a sense of potential for chaos in the world, and a hope for change through ecstatic faith, unlike the garrisons through the allusion of the ark (Monro 27). The title of the chapter suggests Del’s compromise by unconsciously sharing Uncle Benny’s vision yet not forfeiting the security offered through her mother’s ordered perception. Chapter two, titled Heirs of the Living Body, Del herself confronts the dilemma of Munro’s two countries, the Garrison’s world, represented by Del’s two aunts, and Uncle from her father’s side; unlike Uncle Benny, Uncle Craig perceives a reassuring pattern of everyday events. Unlike the disordered setting of the Flat Roads, the garrison world is highly structured that no sense of chaos and potential terror is recognized in Ada’s viewpoint, and Craig’s sisters Elspeth and Grace who are bound in the domestic sphere represent a subtle yet profound aspect of the garrison for they are excellent housekeepers and adept socializers (McDonald). Unlike her mother who embraces directness and outrageousness, Del is sensitive is sensitive to the dangers of a world of many levels of conversation, where nothing could be stated directly and disapproval had to come “like tiny razor cuts, bewildered in the middle of kindness” (Munro 31). Del tries as much as possible to elude her mother’s simplistic thinking, by analyzing events further to arrive at logical conceptualization of the intricacies of the world around her; after Craig’s death, Dell encounters darkness, and the undeniable manifestation of chaos even as adults in her life struggle with some ordered defensive explanations. Ada denies the reality by merely perceiving death as the chemical breakdown of the human body while Del, though not as simplistic as her mother, also seeks the protection from knowing, but failing that too, she avoids viewing the body and bites her retard cousin when she attempts to force her. This act of defiance signifies the choice Del has to make between the garrison world and ‘the other country’ because, according to her, it places her above the pale of family approval and will, thus, she becomes a renegade from which order and normalcy are least expected. However, this defiance does not free Del from the garrison world but marks the beginning of her real struggle as the family’s borderline case; she gains a vision of humiliation, confusion, obscenity, and helplessness even as she is confirmed in the garrison. She defiantly declines to accept the perceptions of the garrison’s norms by remaining ironic and skeptical, and accepting Uncle Craig’s manual is mere lip service to the acceptance of the garrison family’s demands because she did not intend to complete it. According to Del, the manual was a mistake from start to finish because Craig was a terrible, silent, and indifferent conductor of forces that could flare up burning all reality and leaving them in the dark (Munro 49). Chapter three shifts focus to Ida, but maintains a keen follow up on Del’s dilemma; Ada’s struggle with acceptance and her inability to conform to the limitations of the garrison is similar to Del’s woes, only this time an adult’s version. Ada’s connection for the garrison is due to her fear of emotion as seen when she denies painting her husband’s picture out of love; her remark that she didn’t want it to hang where people would see indicates her struggle with acceptance (Munro 60). However, she grudgingly accepts that she married Del’s father out of love and she associates her younger brother Bill with memories of unspeakable, unapproachable childhood sex-play; passion and sex are representations of chaos and darkness in the outer world, particularly because they are uncontrollable. The garrison rejects emotions of sex and passion altogether, and that is why Ada, is a typical garrison figure, despite that she is enthusiastic about knowledge, and she sells encyclopedias in Wawanash country, fitting Munro’s symbolic geography. Ada and Del rent a house in town and defiantly attempt to assault the garrison world in vain, and Ada remains a sympathetic and eccentric misfit who cannot be accepted by ‘the world’ but ignores the joys of “the other country.” Ada’s account of her childhood shades light on her limited perceptions as she grew up seeking knowledge against all odds with her mother who was a religious fanatic pulling her back. As the chapter progresses, Bill reappears, now old and dying of cancer but still he stands out as a character who transcends the garrison; his physical illness is a reminder of disorder and lack of control that usually compels a character back into “the other country” in Munro’s vision. Through Bill, Ada’s deficiencies are highlighted to great extents; her limiting garrison views blinds her so much so that she only sees the dark side of life as reflected in her question of what is so good in nature to Bill. According to Ada, nature is nothing but a lot of waste and cruelty from a human point of view (Munro 73); unlike Ada, Bill has a very intuitive perception of life as revealed in his positive memories of their mother whose passionate faith took her outside “the world”. The complexity of Ada’s character in this chapter, to some extent, mirrors Del’s own complexities, though, Del clearly sees the inadequacy of her mother in the eyes of “the world” and her own shame by extension; she admits she was not so different from her mother but she concealed it knowing the dangers of not doing so. Del achieves yet another milestone by taking a precarious stand that neither commits her to the confinements of garrison nor exposes her to the risk of ridicule and vulnerability associated with “the other country.” Chapter 4, “Age of Faith,” dwells on the question of God and her own split personality fuels Del’s dilemma further; unlike the more secure garrison members, she refuses to be ignorant of the chaos looming outside. Del seeks spirituality as the only true defense against the terrors lurking immediately beneath the surface of things (Munro 48) because it was “the only way the world could be borne”; her need for God equals his faith in the meaning of rainbows. Unlike Del, who believes in the possibility of a greater power, Ada is reluctant to accept the possibility of some godlike design or order and she uses the conventions of faith to hold off confrontation with the outer darkness. In this chapter, Del learns that a true faith will involve a passion and a tradeoff that would exclude her from “the world”; however, Del does not have Uncle Benny’s unconcern for “the world” and cannot surrender to an overwhelming conception of God as his, of a real God that is all-powerful. Grasping the concept yet denying it even as her little brother Owen, a pupil of her religious questing kneels and prays, highlights her differences with the garrison that she hides; she recognizes her emptiness and acknowledges that it was difficult to see someone have faith, and her precarious compromise secures her within the garrison despite its invisible toll. The sixth chapter of “Changes and Ceremonies” highlights art as the allure to “the other country,” and like great faith, it also requires an enthusiastic commitment that does not question the intricate, cautious rules of the garrison. The school’s annual operetta is the central image of art, and Miss Farris, its director represents “the other country” because all her details from her whimsical house to her costume-like clothes manifest her romantic and imaginative nature, things the garrisons ridicule and do not understand. Del understands that art undermines the artificial, self-perpetrating garrison order, and as such, Miss Farris fails in garrison terms; Dell remains camouflaged within the garrison despite her affinity for art and its passions, which she could not give up (Munro 100). Failure to conform to the garrison conventions exposes one to dangers as confirmed by Miss Farris who commits suicide by drowning in the Wawanash river; Munro uses this act to show that life within its confines is not as safe as it may look. This chapter reveals Munro’s vision of the hidden, inner damage that espouses through Miss Farris, and justifies Del’s camouflaging for social survival. Through chapters six and seven, “Lives of Girls and Women” and “Baptizing” respectively, Munro presents two more dilemma’s that arise from Del’s double personality; temptation to step outside the confines of the garrison take the form of sexual passion (McDonald). Whereas chapter six depicts the dark, repugnant side of sex, chapter seven reveals the other side of the hook, the ecstatic side; however, as it is always the norm when passion is concerned, the garrison world admits none of these sides. Sex as a necessity has no place in the garrison world, yet Dell is often pulled to a more intense experience outside the conventions of the garrison; the limits of “the world” and “the other country” become increasingly elusive as soon as the issue of sexuality is introduced in chapter seven. Del surrenders to her sexuality and desire for knowledge by submitting to a rendezvous to step into “the other country” where the beauty of sexuality is glorified but she fails to break away from the garrison. She begins to appreciate the intricacy of garrison confines, the rifeness of mere appearances and the difficulty of identifying boundaries, and confronted by the choice of two worlds, she camouflages by hiding her intimations of “the other country” by externally complying with garrison conventions (Thomas 174). However, in the final chapter, “Baptism,” Del wanders even further outside the conventions of the garrison into “the other country,” and faces the worst of her dilemmas; she explores her sexuality by hooking up with Garnet and experiencing the glory of the peacock, thereby completely releasing herself from the garrison mediocrity. However, this newfound freedom is short lived as their passion soon takes a turn and she rejects baptism into “the other world” and remains tenuously between the extremes of her personality. In the epilogue, the ramifications of Del’s camouflaging are suggested, through the subsequent crises where she has to choose between “the world” and “the other country,” she inevitably falls in a compromise situation that that dulls her shine as she camouflages, thus the ultimate decay (McDonald). Works Cited Awano, Dickler Lisa,“Appreciations of Alice Munro,” The Virginia Quarterly Review, 82(3), 91-XI.  DeFalco, Amelia. Caretakers / caregivers: Economies of affection in Alice Munro. Twentieth Century Literature, 58(3), (2012): 377-III.  Magdalene, Redekop and Thacker, Robert. "Mothers & Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro." Journal of Canadian Studies 33.2 (1998): 196-210.  McDonald, McCarthy Rae, “Structure and detail in Lives of Girls and Women,” Studies in Canadian Literature, 3(2), (1978). Munro, Alice, “Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel,” New York: Random House, Inc., 2001. Thomas, Sue. "Reading Female Sexual Desire in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women." Critique 36.2 (1995): 107. Read More