Alice Munro :: Biography Biographies Essays

Alice Munro Alice Munro’s fiction receives its strength from her vivid sense of regional focus, the majority of her stories take place in Huron County, Ontario, and through the sense of her narrators she illuminates and gives personal significance to each story. Many of Munro’s themes are centered around adolescent girls dealing with the ideas of loving, growing up, and losing innocence in a small town. Munro steps away from the adolescent girl and in her most recent work focuses on problems of the middle aged, such as women alone and those of the elderly. Munro is most famous for her works that deal with the adolescent girl and it has been said that Lives of Girls and Women is nearer her autobiography than it is a work of fiction. Munro has been known to say it is "autobiographical in form, but not in fact." As mentioned above many of Munro’s themes are centered around young girls, but the overlying theme is power. Munro defines the power of her artistic vision as the direc t result of her lack of power as a woman. Munro state’s "A subject race has a kind of clarity of vision and I feel that women have always had a clarity of vision which men were denied. And, in a way, this is a gift, it goes along with lack of power." At the end of Lives of Girls and Women, Del, the narrator, is trying to write fiction but finally rejects her unwritten novel as an "unreliable structure." The Lives of Girls and Women is a novel that focuses on the young Del Jordan, who is struggling with the problems of becoming a young woman. Munro takes the reader through Del’s carefree childhood to an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience. Munro’s ability to use Del as the narrator and to capture the perfection of local speech makes the reader feel that it is not Del’s life that is being told, but every young adolescent girl’s. In Lives of Girls and Women, Munro uses metaphors to organize the sequences of the fiction into a larger picture.. Metaphors of fire and electric power are used to associate fleshly humiliation of death and in Lives of Girls and Women are associated with sexual experience as in the climatic chapter "Baptizing." The most pronounced metaphor Munro uses is that of drowning. Munro uses a splitting metaphor to describe two kinds of power, sexual power and the power of death.