Content area
Full text
DAUGHTERS AND MOTHERS IN ALICE MUNRO'S LATER STORIES Deborah Heller Seattle: Workwoman's Press, 2009
REVIEWED BY GISELA ARGYLE
In Alice Munro's early cycle of stories Lives of Girls and Women (1971) the protagonist and narrator Del concludes from her family's and community's stories that "[S] tories from the past could go like this, round and round and down to death; I expected it" ("Princess Ida"). Particularly women's life stories, which rhyme "womb" with "tomb," words that Del "got . . . mixed up" ("Heirs of the Living Body"). However, the heroine of this autobiographical Bildungsroman - Munro called the book a novel - escapes in each of the sections from another set of models and norms that would confine her to such a circular fate. Instead, she will transcend it by transforming her experiences of girls' and women's lives into fiction - the creative move that Margaret Atwood defined a year later, in Survival (197 2), as the only route of escape from typical victimhood in Canadian literature.
Deborah Heller's study focuses on a daughter's guilt about her filial failings towards her mother. Holding the present ransom to the past, this circular force is not a theme in Lives of Girls and Women, and Dels mother is hardly more prominent than other characters and...