Coming of Age in "Lives of Girls and Women".
"Lives of Girls and Women", written by Alice Munro, explores the lives of women in the semi rural and Protestant backcountry of southwest Ontario. It is put together as a set of linked stories, recounting the life of the narrator, Del Jordan, whose rural upbringing reflects that of Munro's. In this sense, the book can be seen as a semi- autobiographical account. There is much exploration into the challenges facing Del as a woman in a patriarchal world. Descriptions of the lives of Canadian girls and women during the 1920's and 1930's fill the book and prompt the conclusion that these years really saw no discontinuity with the past in Canada. (Before women gained the right to vote) Munro involves the conflict between a woman's independence and domesticity, the subtleties of class distinctions, coming of age, and the intricacies of women's sexuality throughout the novel.
This traditional coming of age story, Dell Jordan continuously struggles with her identity from childhood to young adulthood. She is torn between her own passions and intelligence, and the guide of her intellectual mother, and the conventional house wife role that her best friend Naomi so strongly adopts. We also meet Dells Baptist boyfriend and a suicidal music teacher. Del's description of her mother reveals Del's feeling of discomfort at her own place within Jubilees hierarchy and environment. Del wants to fit in, and her mother represents the unusual within her own self. Despite the narrators disgust and her reputation as a social outcast, Del's mother seems admirable, after pulling herself from the struggles of poverty, putting herself through school, and starting her own business in conservative postwar Canada. .
In the 1930's the economy went through a change from production and thrift, to consumption and credit. Very few Canadian women conformed to popular ideas, and the change was strongly resisted.
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