Lives Of Girls And Women And The Social And Literary Marginality Of Alice Munro

This thesis investigates the relationship between Alice Munro’s multi-marginal identities and the marginal writing in her only full-length novel,Lives of Girls and Women:A Novel,in light of the theories of marginality and feminism.The author’s early life experience in a small town in the southwest of the Province of Ontario in Canada exerted a major influence on her options in life and writing.Munro has been highly conscious of her marginal identity which in turn impacts on the marginality of the female characters in this novel,especially the female protagonist Del Jordan.There is a keen and interesting interaction between the author’s ideas of marginal creativity and the heroine’s marginal growing-up experience.Marginality is characteristic of Munro’s life and her writing.Her marginal identity is seen in three respects:she is a common girl in a small rural Canadian town,she is a living woman in a male-dominated society,and she excels in short story writing rather than in full-length novel writing.These marginal identities double the pressureon her life and writing.The writing of Lives of Girls and Women gives the author an opportunity to explore and reflect upon her three-fold marginal identities,and through this process she is able to offer to the public her thoughts on gender identity and marginal writing.Alice Munro is the only writer in Canada who has won the Nobel Prize for literature;to find out how she deals with the marginal issues while writing her seminal work Lives of Girls and Women may deepen our understanding of this unique marginal work.The marginality of Lives of Girls and Women is seen in three respects.(?)stly,the novelis not affected by contemporary women politics,such as the second wave of women’s liberation movement prevalent especially in north America in the 1960s and 70s.The novel does not focus on women’s liberation or gender equality;instead,it gives full attention to the daily life and social existence of small-town women(girls as well as women)in a less noticed part of Canada.Secondly,Lives of Girls and Women is Munro’s only novel in her entire writing career,yet as such it deviates from the usual expectations of a novel.The design,structure,and plot of the narrative break the norms of the traditional lower-case novel.This novel constitutes eight inter-linked but independent and self-integrated stories.There is no complicated plot or intricately dovetailed structure.Thirdly,although the author intends the work as a Kunstlerroman type of novel,the outcome is not.It is not a portrait of an artist as a young woman;rather,it is a portrait of an artistic girl maturing into a woman.Munro’s novel somehow fails to follow in the steps of the established form of traditional Kunstlerroman;the narrative does not really explore the relationship between art and the female artist’s life;instead,it records the would-be female artist and the society she lives in.The real-life conditions of girls and women and their ever-changing consciousness take the limelight.The afore-mentioned kinds of marginality interact with one another and achieve an ideal confluence,which combine to contribute to the special artistic charm and gender considerations of the novel.As an ordinary girl from a small town,Del experiences the growing pains like other girls of her age as a result of the conservative and rigid social environment.Her family up-bringing and the social pressure she has to face pose a number of challenges for her.The difficult but crucial choices that Del faces also confront Munro.It is fair to say that Del’s maturing process reflects the maturing process of her creator;the enlightened author guarantees the success of the marginal writing of Lives of Girls and Women.While researching this thesis,I had the good fortune of being awarded a one-year scholarship by the China Scholarship Council to study abroad.With this funding,I was able to work between August 2015 and September 2016 at the University of Calgary to consult the rich archival materials in the Alice Munro fonds.The University of Calgary has obtained nearly all materials related to Munro’s writings through an agreement signed jointly by the author and the University as early as 1980.The archives contain manuscripts,holographs,typescripts of stories,proofs sent by publishers,letters to the editors,unpublished fragments of memoir,and textual versions of several interviews.All primary sources used in this thesis come from the Alice Munro Fonds in the Special Collections Department of the University of Calgary.The thesis consists of 5 chapters.Chapter 1 gives a general introduction to Alice Munro,which includes literature review.It also explains the construct of the theory of marginality,the marginal identity of Alice Munro,and the marginality of Lives of Girls and Women.Chapter 2 examines the marginality of Munro’s life experience and her writing experience,and discusses the geographical,social,personal,and literary significances in relation to the conception and execution of her only novel Lives of Girls and Women.The unpublished memoir fragments and published interviews are key references for this portion of the discussion.Chapter 3 analyzes Munro’ s tortuous writing process under the constraints of her marginal identities.The impact of such constraints may be traced to the theme,form,and style of Lives of Girls and Women.The novel as the literary product through the political,social,and artistic engagement by the author illustrates vividly the journey Munro has taken,the pressures and dilemmas she has faced,the process of metamorphosis from a socially and artistically diffident author to one sure of herself and certain of her goal.Munro depiction and examination of women living in marginal places in Canada,and her insistence on non-traditional way of writing the novel mark her as an exceptionally creative writer of her age.Mail correspondence with her editor and publisher while writing Lives of Girls and Women,and the author’s reflections on this particular novelistic project voiced in the interviews after the publication of this novel are consulted for the discussion in this chapter.Chapter 4 focuses on the artistic expression of "marginality" in Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.It analyzes the influences of the marginal environment on Del’s character and the influences of her marginal identity on her life choices.Lives of Girls and Women may be seen as a novelistic reflection of Munro’s own life.Holographs,early manuscript,revised manuscripts,the final draft,and the published versions of the novel are consulted for the analysis in this chapter.Chapter 5 is conclusion.