Paul Giles's Article "Landscapes of Repetition"

6213 Words25 Pages
STRUCTURE AND DETAIL IN LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN Rae McCarthy Macdonald In Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Lives of Girls and Women (1971), and Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1975), the central, dynamic tension of Alice Munro's vision consists of a perceived split in the world of men between social survivors and inhabitants of "the other country," the latter a place made up variously of idiots, seniles, criminals, the fatally ill, and men of faith and passion. As this vision develops throughout her work, Munro increasingly recognizes the difficulty of defining the two sides of the split, of drawing a sharp boundary. Yet her perception of "the world" (a garrison of survivors) and of "the other country" (a land of misfits) remains central.1 Lives of Girls and Women 2 is especially fascinating in terms of this bipartite vision. Made up of a series of individual but interrelated stories that form a novel, the main action of the book, paralleled from chapter to chapter, focuses on the protagonist's struggle to commit herself neither to the one side of the dialectic nor to the other. Del Jordan is, in her own words, "a chameleon," and each chapter ofLives of Girls and Women depicts a different crisis in her search for a liveable compromise between "the world" and "the other country." Adding to the tension of the dilemma and subtlety of the novel is the reader's sense that Del is inevitably moving closer and closer to a final decision, made all the more difficult because the border between "the world" and "the other country" is becoming harder to identify. Finally, with some surprise, the reader perceives that the repeated crises may well have been a dangerous illusion, diverting attention from the real threat to Del's identity – the little details of day-to-day life that Munro amasses with such care. I wish to concentrate here on the parallel crises from
Open Document