Alice Munro

Brenda Pfaus

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 1984
• ISBN:
  9781459715646
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Alice Munro, recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, is undoubtedly among Canada's greatest living writers. In this unique, intriguing collection, Brenda Pfaus gives fresh insights into some of Munro's most enduring works: Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), and The Moons of Jupiter (1982). This collection of essays reaches from the early years of Munro's career through her prime as a writer, when she penned her most influential works.

Lives of Girls and Women (1971)

“Now at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, convents, lovers, I supposed I would get started on my real life.”

“Baptizing”
p. 201

Lives of Girls and Women (1971) has been called variously memoir, autobiography, novel, and collection of short stories. Munro believes that Lives of Girls and Women is a novel because the sections, while inter-linked by having the same character throughout, are with the exception of two, not self-contained units that can stand completely on their own. (However, one story, “Baptizing,” was successfully dramatized by the CBC in 1978, featuring Munro’s daughter Jenny in the role of Del.) She also feels that the sections are too long, too diffuse and too lacking in an essential tension to be classified as short stories. Munro told John Metcalf “I am essentially a short story writer. That is why any novel I write will be said in some quarters to be short stories.”¹ However, in an interview with Graham Gibson in Eleven Canadian Novelists, Munro states:

. . .some people say, of course, Lives is only a collection of long short stories. This doesn’t particularly bother me, because I don’t feel that a novel is any step up from a short story. When I began to write Lives, you see, I began to write it as a much more, a much looser novel, with all these things going on at the same time, and it wasn’t working. Then I began pulling the material and making it into what are almost self-contained segments. I mean the sections could almost stand as short stories. They’re all a little bit loose, but this seemed to be the only way I could work and I think maybe this is the way I’ll have to write books. I write sort of on — like a single string, a tension string — okay? That’s the segment or the story. I don’t write as perhaps as some people say a true novelist does, manipulating a lot of strings.²

While there are many similarities between Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are? — single protagonists, carried through in a sequence of episodic, linked stories in a bildungsroman tradition, with each book culminating in an epilogue story, nevertheless, Munro sees Lives as a novel and Who as linked stories, because Lives explains enough for that period of Del’s life whereas Who doesn’t work as a novel because it doesn’t explain enough.³

Despite Munro’s disclaimer in the book that “This novel is autobiographical in form but not in fact. My family, neighbours and friends did not serve as models,” she explains that Lives:

could be called an autobiographical novel . . . most of the incidents are changed versions of real incidents. Some are completely invented, but emotional reality, the girl’s feelings for her mother, for men, for all is all . . . it’s all solidly autobiographical. I would not disclaim this at all.⁴

Munro’s story is told by Del who reflects back with the maturity of hindsight, on her growth from childhood to adolescence in the 1930s and 40s in Munro’s fictional town of Jubilee, the mythical setting of some of Munro’s stories in Dance of The Happy Shades and Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. There are fragments of high school trivia, visits with eccentric relatives, adolescent fantasies and romances. The short story as Munro writes it is a deliberate fragment with the story line more like rambling reminiscing with various anecdotes about characters and events, worked around a central incident such as Uncle Benny’s marriage in “The Flats Road” or the funeral in “Heirs of the Living Body.” Unlike chapters in a conventional novel, the narration in these linked stories breaks off at the end of each; we are never told whether Major is actually shot, or even how the visit with Bobby ends, but that is not what matters. What is of concern is the epiphany, the “seeing” by the narrator and in turn the reader of truths about “real life” in each of the seven segments.

Lives, typical of all of Munro’s writing, sets out to investigate the nature of reality; Real Life was in fact the original title intended for the book. Munro, through Del’s narration, wants to capture, “every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark, or walls; every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion held still, and held together — radiant, everlasting,” because as Munro says, “the thing I most want to do is look at things and see the way everything is.”⁵

Del Jordan’s growth, besides being an examination of contrasting options available to women, is an exploration of perceived realities. A series of self-contained, often mutually exclusive words are played against each other: Uncle Benny’s naturalistic world along the Wawanash River: the “tiny sealed off countries” of Aunts Elspeth and Grace; Ida Jordan’s intellectual, socially naïve world beyond the social garrison; the social clique of Naomi and the working girls. Throughout the book Del struggles against the paradoxical and disparate worlds and the dichotomy of selves that she envisages, in conflict constantly between self and soul, mask and will. The resolution of this conflict ultimately transforms her and gives her character its dynamic quality, enabling her to free herself from Garnet French and Jubilee, to move on assertively to “real life.”

Del’s ambivalent position in relationship with the different worlds is symbolized through the name that Munro gives her. Jordan is a river in Palestine, the one the Israelites cross into the promised land and the one where John the Baptist does his baptizing and “dell,” a small deep valley; a hollow. Also, the duality in Del’s nature is suggested by the irony in her position as the faith seeking daughter of Ida, the agnostic daughter of a religious fanatic, described by Ida in various “demented stages of Christianity.” It is no coincidence that the turning point of the book and Del’s epiphany occurs during the baptizing episode. Munro also uses the geographical settings of the book as an externalization of Del’s position. The Jordans live outside town on The Flats Road,⁶ a no-man’s land that is “not part of town . . . not part of the country either.” This is Munro’s “other country” where various eccentrics, bootleggers and idiots live. Ida Jordan by nature of her eccentricities will not be accepted by the social garrison in town, nevertheless she cannot accept relegation to “the other country” with its “sexually looseness, dirty language, haphazard lives, contented ignorance” and her walks to town represent her desperate futile struggle to be of “the world.”

The Flats Road was the last place my mother wanted to live. As soon as her feet touched the town sidewalk and she raised her head, grateful for town shade after Flat Roads sun, a sense of relief, a new sense of consequence flowed from her.

(Lives, p. 6)

Eventually Ida moves the family into town (although, “later on she was to find she did not belong in Jubilee either”) to a house on River Road with its symbolic connotations of mobility. Del is torn between the two worlds. In town she reminisces about the old house “with a forlorn, faintly guilty, tender pain” missing the nearness of the river and the swamp, “the real anarchy of winter blizzards that shut us up tight in our house,” “the order, the wholeness, the intricate arrangement of town life.” Del’s father spent weekends in town, returning weekly to the fox farm and Uncle Benny’s world because unlike his wife

He felt comfortable here, while with men from town, with any man who wore a shirt and tie to work, he could not help being wary, a little proud and apprehensive of insult, with that delicate, special readiness to scent pretention that is some country people’s talent . . . Flats Road would do for him.

(Lives, p. 7)

Eventually, her father, her brother Owen and Uncle Benny stay permanently on Flats Road.

Chief among the eccentrics of this symbolic “other country” is Uncle Benny, “the sort of man who becomes a steadfast eccentric almost before he is out of his teens.” Like many of Munro’s eccentrics, Uncle Benny has gifts denied to inhabitants of “the world.” The most important of these is passion, the ability to feel strongly and spontaneously:

In all his statements, predictions, judgements there was a concentrated passion. In our yard, once, looking up at a rainbow, he cried, “You know what that is? That’s the Lord’s promise that there isn’t ever going to be another flood.” He quivered with the momentousness of this promise as if it had just been made and he himself was the bearer of it.

(Lives, p. 2)

Del recognizes that Uncle Benny’s world, “was like a troubling distorted reflection” of the world, “the same, but never at all the same . . . nothing was deserved, anything might happen”; yet she is a half-way character between her mother and father’s worlds, typical of Munro’s protagonists who recognize the freedom and naturalism of “the other country” yet aspire to the social garrison. “I myself was not so different from my mother, but concealed it, knowing what dangers there were,” Del reports. Later in the book Del is offered “perfect security” and love from Garnet French, another character who lives significantly outside of town on a farm inhabiting a world “dense and complicated but appallingly unsecretive,” a world not far from what she thought animals must see. Despite the fact that there is no denying she was happy in his house, she rejects his offer for marriage. Earlier her mother had warned her she

had gone addled over a boy. You with your intelligence. Do you intend to live in Jubilee all your life? Do you want to be the wife of a lumberyard worker? Do you want to join the Baptist Ladies Aid?

(Lives, p. 183)

Del’s answer is obviously, “no.” The book ends with Del going out into the world, aware later that her attitude toward everything her mother said had become one of skepticism and disdain because Del feels “probably closer to the truth than she was.” Consequently the reader can discern a symbolic physical movement related to the book’s geographical detail that unifies the structure of the entire book and parallels Del’s growing awareness.

From her anomalous position, Del observes the lives of girls and women in the context of these worlds. The lives of men, such as her father, Uncle Benny, and Owen fade into the background as the narrative progresses. Munro says originally she didn’t tend to do this:

. . .but I found that my emphasis, my interest was shifting so much to the mother that I had to be able to deal with her alone. I couldn’t deal with both parents. I have a fairly narrow focus or something so the father tended to sort of fade away.⁷

Other men — Mr. Chamberlain, Frank Wales, Jerry Storey, Garnet French are presented through a limited female vision as they affect the lives of girls and women in the book. Munro says she doesn’t try to make “real characters” out of men but instead she makes “the appearance character, the way the woman sees them.”⁸ Munro, however, gives women’s lives full scope and range delving into the intimate detail of women’s relationships and understanding with each other, with men and with their inner selves through the vehicle of Del’s narrated perceptions of such women as her mother, Aunts Elspeth, Moira and Grace, her best friend Naomi, Miss Farris — the grade 3 teacher, and Fern Dogherty — her mother’s boarder.

Auntie Grace and Aunt Elspeth’s, the two maiden aunts, lives revolve around being dutiful, self-sacrificing; their homes become “tiny sealed off countries” where honesty, intellect and overt sexuality are forbidden. Instead these women, like Aunt Lou and Aunt Annie in “The Peace of Utrecht” live an ordered life of intricate domestic and private social ritual, of elaborate verbal games or childish pranks. Del sees this traditional passive role supporting a grotesque masquerade made clear to her after Uncle Craig’s death when their lives become ones of stagnant disorientation:

They told the same stories, they played their same jokes, which now seemed dried out, brittle with use; in time every word, every expression of the face, every flutter of the hands came to seem something learned long ago, perfectly remembered, and each of their two selves was seen to be something constructed with terrible care; the older they got, the more frail and admirable and inhuman the construction appeared. This was what became of them when they no longer had a man with them, to nourish and admire, and when they were removed from the place where their artificiality bloomed naturally.

(Lives, p. 50)

Munro externalizes the spiritual decay of the two aunts in the picture of physical decay presented of the married Aunt Moira who wore “some statel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Alice Munro
• Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)
• Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974)
• Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
• Who Do You Think You Are? (1978)
• The Moons of Jupiter (1982)
• Selected Bibliography