Narrative

On the copyright page of Lives of Girls and Women, published in 1972, author Alice Munro has included a caveat: "This novel is autobiographical in form but not in fact" (iv). While Munro's note clearly encourages analysis of the novel in terms of its dependence on and challenge to a traditional Künstlerroman structure, it also invites attention to the way protagonist Del Jordan's apprenticeship as a writer, as well as Munro's procedure of enacting an autobiography, is constructed in terms of a confrontation with form, particularly the formal differences traditionally attributed to men's writing and women's writing. In "Heirs to the Living Body," for example, Uncle Craig's methodic composition of a history of Wawanash County, as well as his work on the family tree, is contrasted with the energetic and fragmented storytelling of Aunt Elspeth and Aunt Grace. Craig's techniques reflect a creed of objectivity: "To Uncle Craig it seemed necessary that the names of all these people, their connections with each other, the three large dates of birth and marriage and death, or the two of birth and death if that was all that happened to them, be discovered, often with great effort and a stupendous amount of worldwide correspondence (he did not forget the branch of the family which had gone to Australia) and written down here, in order, in his own large careful handwriting" (Munro 26).

On the other hand, the Aunts "told stories" (Munro 28); rather than describing their style, Munro depicts the gossipy tone of their overlapping dialogue, in which the two voices alternately blend together and reverberate off one another, and whose focus is the recollection of sensory detail. Del is initially irked to inherit Uncle [End Page 163] Craig's manuscript, choosing to store it in the cellar where it is eventually ruined when the basement floods. She becomes similarly disenchanted with the "ridiculously complicated language" (Munro 50) of Aunt Grace and Aunt Elspeth. In the epilogue, however, Del attests to having been the beneficiary of both her uncle's and aunts' formal approaches to narrative:

Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin's Bend, writing his history, I would want to write things down.

[. . .] And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought.

(Munro 210)

Though it remains unwritten as to whether or not Del returns to Uncle Craig's genealogical project, it is clear that the impulse toward list making credits his exertions towards familial "order" as basic to her creative response. Craig's ordering principles are supplemented by "layering" principles, inherited from the aunts, as Del realizes that the connections among items on a list are multiple and that the representation of a continuous history must be informed by potentially disruptive "stories".

That Del's journey culminates with a writer's meditation on her formal inheritance is in keeping with a dominant theme for many of the novels written by Canadian women during the 1970s and 1980s, which is the desire to find an authentic voice. In Private and Fictional Worlds, Coral Ann Howells' study of Canadian women novelists of this period, including Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Munro, Marian Engel, and Joy Kogawa, she notes that "Many of [their] novels have women writers as protagonists engaged in a struggle with language and inherited literary conventions to find more adequate ways of telling about women's experiences" (Private 5). Howells' study cultivates an idea still of great interest to many contemporary critics, and is associated with the way genealogy is represented in Canadian women's writing. She states that, "If we are looking for distinctive signs of Canadianness in women's novels of the 1970s and 1980s, I suggest that the most important of these may be found in the wilderness which provides the conditions of possibility for the emergence of Canadian women writers" (Private 12), asserting that "The wilderness as the pathless image beyond the enclosure of civilized life was appropriated by women as the symbol of unmapped...