Lives of Girls and Women


Lives of Girls and Women. By Alice Munro. 254 pages.

Lives of Girls and Women is marketed as a novel, but it’s more of a collection of interlinked short stories with no overarching plot. Alice Munro focuses on the ordinary in these stories, following Del Jordan as she grows up in the small town of Jubilee, Ontario, shortly after World War II. Jubilee’s population is quite parochial; they do not think much of ambition, those who violate social norms, or outsiders. However, it does harbor its share of secrets and eccentrics, for the townspeople need something to gossip about. Characterization really stands out in the novel; Munro spends a lot of time developing her characters, and no-one is too insignificant for a personality.

As the title suggests, the book focuses on the lives of women in Jubilee. Many of the stories are driven by Del’s relationship with her mother, Ada. Not content to live a life of domesticity expected by gender roles, she is a relentless social climber, looking to move from the outskirts of the town (the Flats Road) to Jubilee proper. Ada is outspoken, writing letters to the newspaper about issues such as contraception, which Del finds embarrassing. Del often finds herself at odds with her mother; where her mother is an atheist and intellectual, Del seeks God and the sensual.

While embarrassed by her mother, Del also desires to protect her from the judgment of others, especially her aunts Elspeth and Grace. They criticize Ada for taking a job as an encyclopedia saleswoman, noting how a job leaves little time for ironing. The aunts believe that in addition to maintaining a household, a woman’s job is to keep up the appearances of their social class. Del notices how her aunts live and contrasts it to her poorer lifestyle:

They wore dark cotton dresses with fresh, perfectly starched and ironed, white lawn collars, china flower brooches. Their house had a chiming clock, which delicately marked the quarter hours; also watered ferns, African violets, crocheted runners, fringed blinds, and over everything the clean, reproachful smell of wax and lemons.

Aunt Elspeth and Grace easily align with stereotypical ideas of womanhood because they can afford to do so. They are quick to criticize and mock anyone for behaving lower-class, which comes from their own insecurity. Much as Del worries about her aunts’ judgment of her mother, they worry about the judgment of others, even the lower classes they look down on. Ada, however, realizes that their values are a trap for her and her daughter’s future. Munro uses the metaphor of a cobweb to describe this trap:

Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace wove in and out around her, retreating and disappearing and coming back, slippery and soft-voiced and indestructible. She pushed them out of her way as if they were cobwebs;

To Ada, the values of Jubilee are a spider web waiting to ensnare the unsuspecting. Ada desires an independent life, a life different from the expectations imposed on her. But it is not an easy struggle; Munro describes the webs being spun as indestructible. While Ada rejects many of the anti-intellectual traits of others around her, she does share their obsession with class. She is constantly striving to improve her social class and is contemptuous of the poverty she finds herself in, reminding her daughter that they don’t live on the Flats Road, but at the end of the Flats Road.

My mother corrected me when I said we lived on the Flats Road; she said we lived at the end of the Flats Road, as if that made all the difference. Later on she was to find she did not belong in Jubilee either.

Ada’s values lead her to look forward, at the expense of avoiding her past. She tells her daughter that she forgives her brother Bill for sexually abusing her as a child, instead focusing on how he is dying of cancer and that he left her $300 in her will. She is an active participant in her life, determined to leave the poverty she grew up in behind. But despite all her efforts, Ada’s desires do not come to fruition; she does not free herself from Jubilee. Her independent streak also isolates her. She attempts to connect with the other women of Jubilee but is judged for not living up to the feminine ideal. Ada never overcomes the feeling of being a failure, and it drives her to the sick bed. But all is not lost; Del will have the life of the mind she desires, the life of a writer.

While Del has her differences with her mother, she is more like her mother than she realizes. They both are rebels, defying the gender and social norms of Jubilee. Del is intellectually gifted and ambitious, an honors student who seeks a scholarship while her classmates drop out and get jobs. Intellectual pursuits are looked down upon in Jubilee in favor of the world of work and domestic life:

This was the normal thing in Jubilee; reading books was something like chewing gum, a habit to be abandoned when the seriousness and satisfactions of adult life took over. It persisted mostly in unmarried ladies, would have been shameful in a man.

Ada models the intellectual values the town disdains for her daughter; she connects with her through literature and science and encourages her curiosity. Del might wish her mother had not taken a job as an encyclopedia saleswoman, but she loves the encyclopedias themselves. Del devours the facts within, to the point where her mother uses her as part of her sales pitch; she has Del recite the facts she has learned, from American presidents to the capitals of South America. While Del does not appreciate being used as a prop in her mother’s job, she does take a quiet pride in her knowledge being useful.

Of course, as a rebel, Del must also defy her mother. Each of the stories in the novel involves Del exploring her identity through new experiences, often conflicting with her mother in the process. In the story Age of Faith, mother and daughter clash over religion. Del has an intense desire to experience God. Ada, on the other hand, suffered under her religious mother and is a staunch atheist/agnostic. When her daughter goes to an Anglican church, Ada goes on a tirade:

“God was made by man! Not the other way around! God was made by man. Man at a lower and bloodthirstier stage of his development than he is at now, we hope. Man made God in his own image.”

Del visits the church anyways, hoping to get a glimpse of what it means to live as a person of faith. It does not last; Del drops her interest in religion. She needs proof of God and does not find it, saying that “The question of whether God existed or not never came up in Church”.  This frustrates her to no end; from her perspective, the church focuses too much on what God approves of, or more often, what He does not approve of. Even when the minister touches on Jesus’s moment of doubt, Del desires more:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Briefly, the minister said, oh very briefly, Jesus had lost touch with God. Yes, it had happened, even to Him. He had lost the connection, and then in the darkness He had cried out in despair. But this too was part of the plan, it was necessary. It was so we should know in our own blackest moments that our doubts, our misery had been shared by Christ Himself, and then, knowing this, our doubts would all the more quickly pass. But why? Why should they all the more quickly pass? Suppose that was the last true cry of Christ, the last true thing ever heard of Him? We had to at least suppose that, didn’t we? We had to consider it. Suppose He cried that, and died, and never did rise again, never did discover it was all God’s difficult drama? There was suffering. Yes; think of Him suddenly realizing: it was not true. None of it was true. Pain of torn hands and feet was nothing to that. To look through the slats of the world, having come all that way, and say what He had said, and then see—nothing. Talk about that! I cried inwardly to the minister. Oh, talk about that, drag it into the open, and then—defeat it!

Atheism is not the only thing mother and daughter disagree on. As Del grows up, she increasingly becomes interested in relationships with others, especially boys. Ada is not a fan of sex, seeing it as a tool of women’s oppression:

my mother, who would publicly campaign for birth control but would never even think she needed to talk to me, so firmly was she convinced that sex was something no woman—no intelligent woman—would ever submit to unless she had to.

Del, however, is relentlessly curious about it, picking up any book or magazine that discusses the subject. She constantly thinks about the sex lives of others, using them as a model for her own relationships. Del also begins exploring her own sexuality, desiring others, and wanting to be desired. Some of these experiences are not necessarily good for her. In the story Lives of Girls and Women, Del is molested by an older man. Munro does not depict it as unambiguously bad - Del is excited by it and wants it to continue. She does not realize he is taking advantage of her naïveté.

I have mixed feelings about this story, especially in light of the allegations made by Munro’s daughter. Reading it, it does not surprise me that the author apparently ignored the sexual assault of her daughter by her husband and may have even believed that her then-nine-year-old daughter was inviting it. Del goes out of her way to create opportunities for the man to touch her and craves his attention. On the other hand, Munro does not portray Del’s molestation as unambiguously good either; a major theme of the story is sexual exploitation of others and Del’s naïveté towards it. In the story, the molester discusses his war experiences in Italy with her mother, mentioning that he saw girls being sold as slaves. Del fantasizes about herself being exploited in such a way, allowing her to act out her sexual fantasies while being blameless for what happens. She does not consider if those slave girls like their position or appreciate being used.

Del’s other relationships are more age-appropriate. In Baptizing, she meets Garnet French at a baptist religious revival. She is smitten at first sight, and they begin a courtship. The relationship quickly becomes the focus of her life, and she ignores the advice by her mother not to let her life get sidetracked by a boy:

“There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It’s true.”

Her mother’s fears come to pass; Del is distracted by Garnet and stops studying. As a result, she does not pass her test for the scholarship that she has been working her whole life for. She still becomes a writer, but does not reach the heights her mother imagined for her.

By the end of the novel, Del achieves a level of understanding and acceptance of her mother. While she has carved out her own path and beliefs, she appreciates the foundation Ada provided for her life. Their relationship matures into one of mutual recognition and respect, with both characters acknowledging each other’s complexities and the role they play in each other’s lives.

I usually find the picks for the Nobel Prize in Literature pretentious and boring. In contrast, Alice Munro clearly deserves the prize - she has a singular talent for building characters and capturing their inner thoughts. This collection of short stories perfectly captures a mother-daughter relationship as a girl grows up and discovers herself. Del’s quest for identity in a world that seeks to limit her will resonate with a lot of readers. This book is a crowning achievement of literature and cements Munro’s reputation as master of the short story.

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