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Edina Szalay ([email protected]')
T H E G O T H I C A S A D O L E S C E N T F A N T A S Y : A L I C E M U N R O ' S
LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN
Abstract
The Gothic as a means of conveying the sense of the unsayable and invisible yet inherent and organic features of human existence constantly reemerges in Munro 's fiction. Lives of Girls and Women is speciál, however, because there is no other volume in the Munro canon where the analysis of the interrelatedness of Gothic fantasy and female psychology would have such a comprehensive and overarching significance from the point of view of the collection as a whole, i.e., it does develop into a theme on its own. In my analysis I intend to focus on how Del's relationship with men and sexuality in generál are influenced by the Gothic patterns of her fantasy, which are rooted in her excessive reading of such novels. Munro, however, also carries out a "re-visionary" study of the genre, to apply Adrienne Rich's term, when, through mapping out Del's budding sense of independence, she systematically undermines the validity of Gothic discourse. In this way, the Gothic, revisioned by Del in her reading and writing practice, gradually comes to sink into artificiality, and finally proves to be inadequate to provide role models for this teenager—autonomous women being commonly absent from Gothicfiction—who becomes aware of the need to overcome the traditional myths ofwomanhood.
Résumé
Le gothique comme le moyen ďexpression des expériences inexprimables et invisibles est présent continuellement dans la prose ďAlice Munro děs le commencement. Dans le volume Les Destins: Filles et Femmes, qui est considéré par certains comme recuil de nouvelles et par ďautres comme roman, Munro observe de trěs pres les types de caractěre et les moděles de comportement du gothique, nottament ceux de la romance, ťauteur ťintéresse premiěrement comment 1'ensemble de la fantaisie gothique et de la psychologie féminine peuvent se lier, trěs concrětement, la connaissance des formules de la romance gothique—qui s'y rapporte—quelle influence peut exercer sur la formation de la personnalité de V adolescente, ťobjet de mes recherches est de savoir comment 1'état gothique de Del Jordán influence ses sentiments liés aux hommes et á la sexualitě qui est typique dans ce type de romance.
1. Alice Munro and the Gothic mode
In interviews Munro has claimed a fascination with the Gothic already as a child; the most influential book of her early years was Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights which inspired her to wríte her first novel while still at high school. This book, Charlottě Muir, is later described by Munro as "strange and occult, all about love that is stronger than death" (Blodgett 3), that is truly Gothic in nátuře. In " A Conversation with Alice Munro" John Metcalf asks Munro about her early stories, which he finds excessively
violent and romantic at the same time. Munro's response is in the affirmative: "I was all very sordid. I only became commonplace Iater on" (54).
At the core of Munro's insight is the recognition that the ordinary always contains the extraordinary, the surface is nevěr coherent without what is under it. Nor is there a clear-cut border between these entities, rather each seems to be a natural extension of the other. Although they may appear as basically different realms, the ordinary and the extraordinary-the experiential and the surreal-are woven together by mostly invisible threads. The exploration of the surreal works in a circular pattem: Munro enters the domain of the extraordinary not with the intention of leaming about an "other" world of human existence, but with the aim of obtaining clues and adequate knowledge that will bring her back to the ordinary to see it in its full complexity. Consequently, as Ajay Heble points out, Munro's writing "reveals itself to be maintaining and undoing reality at one and the same time [.. .] ordinary objects in Munro's world can, at any moment, become sinister or threatening; they can become charged with possibilities taken from what we might call a potential or absent level of meaning" (4).
To gain access to the extraordinary is not an easy task: it requires mental flexibility, sharp eyes, and the freedom of one's imagination. Munro, especially in the early period of her career, often depicts the extraordinary in terms of the grotesque and the bizarre, thus utilizing the discourse of the Gothic as the means of both conducting this fascinating investigation and presenting her findings. However, the question may arise: how can the Gothic become such an important tool for a writer like Munro, who is generally considered to be more concemed with the faithful mirroring of everyday life than with journeying in nightmarish worlds of obsessive fantasy, a domain generally associated with the Gothic mode. If we study the question more closely, though, we come to see that there is no contradiction here. It seems that the importance of the fantastic as an inherent, organic component of everyday life—a belief centrál to Munro's ars poetica-makes it inevitable for her to explore this often feared, and consequently ignored, territory.
Several critics have already referred to characteristic fealures of Munro's fiction that can be considered Gothic. E. D. Blodgett remarks on how Munro presents characters with the potential of hidden, unexpectedly errupting dimensions of the self. He also discusses Miss Farris in Lives ofGirls and Women as a significant-even if parodistic- model of costume Gothic heroines. Beverly Rasporich describes Munro's small town Ontario as essentially Gothic in nátuře. Ajay Heble argues that it is the engagement with the unimaginable and the unreasonable that lies at the core of Munro's fictional world. Magdaleně Redekop examines images of dismemberment in Lives ofGirls and Women. It is Udiko de Papp Carrington's Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro that contains the most comprehensive analysis of the power of sexuality and the power of death as the most dominant and paradoxically linked forces; the abundance of secrets (which often prove to be a combination of sex and death); the overwhelming violence of several stories; the recurrent metaphors of splitting which depict the outbursts of subterranean forces in characters as indicative of the Gothic in Munro's writing. She also notes the fact that Munro peoples her fiction with ghosts of accidentally killed children and dead mothers who are powerful enough, even in death, to control the life of the living.
and writing practice, gradually comes to sink into artificiality, and fínally proves to be inadequate to provide role models for this teenager—autonomous women being commonly absent from Gothic fiction-who becomes aware of the need to overcome the traditional myths of womanhood.
2. Early Gothic fascination: the weirdos of the Flats Road
The Gothic mode, whose world is characterized by the overabundance of the bizarre, macabre, fantastic and arabesque, that is~to apply an umbrella term~the grotesque, perfectly matches the intrícate and often unfathomable relationship of the ordinary and the extraordinary that is very much at the center of Lives. The grotesque becomes the keyword of Gothic sensibility as it incorporates the tension between the reál and the beyond-real~a tension which is always in the focus of the genre. As Wolfgang Kayser argues, the grotesque is not "only something playfully gay and carelessly fantastic, but also something ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally different from the familiar one~a world [.. .] where the laws of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid" (21).
Munro keeps the boundaries fluid, and the crítería for recognizing something as ordinary oř fantastic remain a matter of comparison. In this vein the Flats Road where Del lives appears to be a highly surreal world with its idiots and bootleggers if compared with the town of Jubilee that stands for order and normality. The Flats Road, however, comes to be seen as part of the reál when related to the world of Uncle Benny, a friend of D e l s family, who lives at the end of the Flats Road, on the edge of the wilderness. His is a truly Gothic world where "people could go down in quicksand, be vanquished by ghosts oř terrible ordinary cities; luck and wickedness were gigantic and unpredictable; nothing was deserved, anything might happen" (22). Uncle Benny's appearance is also that of a typical Gothic villain's with a "heavy black mustache, fierce eyes, a delicate predatory face" (2). Yet Del sees him as a reliable friend, who, despite his extravaganza, is easier to know than seemingly ordinary people are. It is, in fact, these "ordinary" people, as we will see in the case of M r. Chamberlain, for example, who prove to be the most dangerous, for they are like icebergs with only a tip above the surface while most of what they are (their dark side) remains invisible. Uncle Benny is more reliable in his extravaganza because what is seen as extraordinary oř strange about him is nothing but what we all accommodate to some degree, except that in Benny's case it seems monstrous since it is all on open display.
Del's relationship with Uncle Benny educates her to the darker side of reality introduced by such headlines on his favorite tabloids as F A T H E R FEEDS T W I N D A U G H T E R S T O HOGS or V I R G I N R A P E D O N CROSS B Y C R A Z E D M O N K S. Bizarre and out-of-the-ordinary as these titles may seem, they are reminders of the darker aspirations and fantasies of the human psyche. Del is so fascinated by the sensation of this world that she "feels bloated and giddy with revelations of evil, of its versatility and grand invention and horrific playfulness" (4). Yet, even on the Flats Road, Uncle Benny's reality remains only peripheral, and on her way home Del has to realize that "the nearer I got to our house the more this vision faded" (4). In this comparison the Flats Road, with its treasury of ghosts and idiots, seems to belong to the realm of the real whereas Uncle Benny's world is swallowed up by the surreal.
However, even Uncle Benny can be overcome by more extravaganza—an indication that there are no definite boundaries to limit surreality: even behind the most
extraordinary and shocking can possibly lie an even more extréme domain. In Lives this extréme is introduced by Madeleine, Uncle Benny's wife, whom he found through an advertisement. She storms into the life of the Flats Road, then storms out leaving everyone stunned by her brutal treatment of bolh Uncle Benny and her own daughter, and by the incivility of her response to any attempt to establish a relationship with her. Although she threatens to crack a stove-lifter over Del's skuli, Del is surprisingly fascinated by Madeleine, not so much out of sympathy, but rather out of curiosity for the forbidden and the savage embodied by Madeleine. (Nevertheless Madeleine' s total resistance to conformity is anticipatory from Del's point of view, who will soon develop serious crises over conflicting sociál expectations and her personál aspirations). No matter how dangerous and disturbing this woman is, Del fmds something victorious about her: unlike most women Del knows, Madeleine has managed to break out of the socially imposed restrictions of her sex. Breaking with the ideál of domesticity, dependence on men, and passivity, she serveš as an early if extréme role model for Del, who will also fight against similar expectations during her adolescence. Although her character is not wholly satisfactory as a possible remedy for Del's problems, Madeleine seems to echo an important heroine type of the Female Gothic, the mad wife, who manages to escape the authority of society represented by her husband, but has to pay the incredible príce of insanity for her freedom.
It is the Flats Road that functions as the bridge between the civilization of the town and the wilderness surrounding Uncle Benny's house. Although connected with both, the Flats Road has distinguishing features that map its pláce somewhere between the two. True, one cannot overlook people like Mitch Plim whose house in Del's imagination "seemed to embody so much that was evil and mysterious that I would nevěr look at it directly" (6), or Šandy Stevenson whose marriage is commonly believed to have been destroyed by the ghost of his wife's first husband. Nevertheless, Del can still find balancing normality in the shade of her home, a closed world "as small and shut up as any boat is on the sea, in the middle of a tide of howling weather" (22). Although fascinated by the surreality of Uncle Benny's pláce as well as the Flats Road, as a child she still needs the safety of normality provided by her own home.
As Del is so genuinely responsive to the darker side of life, a daily contact with the eccentrics of the Flats Road proves to be a treasury of experience for her. The accumulation of these outcasts introduces her early to things disapproved of and rejected by the ordinary citizens of Jubilee. When she later has serious problems coming to terms with sociál regulations, this early childhood milieu will provide both ammunition of strange and lovable characters like Uncle Benny against rigid accomodationism, and also examples that warn Del of possible consequences of deviation from the norm of what can be regarded as the reality principle.
- The vicissitudes of Gothic fantasy: de-jubilee-ed in Jubilee
Yet the Flats Road is not the only dwelling pláce of "weird" people. After she moves to Jubilee with her mother, Del comes to realize that the town, which at first sight looks so homogeneous, contains no less layers of the extraordinary than the Flats Road although in countless forms of disguise. As a teenager, Del quickly develops a keen interest in sexuality, the domain often considered to be the darkest and most dangerous; her personál joumey from childhood to adulthood circulates primarily around her sexual experiences. The stages of sexual initiation are clarified through Del's relationship with three men: Mr. Chamberlain, a friend of her family; Jerry
bestial act, that I could not imagine" (127). Being a whore, the priestess of sexuality, means in Del's eyes the possession of some knowledge not available to others. Therefore it is both adolescent fantasy and the urge to acquire knowledge, the hallmark of Del's personál aspirations, that make her fascination with the forbidden in the form of sexuality inevitable.
3.1. Chamberlain
The first bold step towards real-life experience is taken by Del's acceptance of M r. Chamberlain's offer to have a ride to the outskirts of the town. She is all excited about the unpredictability of what might happen to her; being deeply involved in her own fantasies, she even forgets about the possible dangers she might encounter. Instead, she is completely carried away with the feeling of being introduced to the sexuality of her imagination. Mr. Chamberlain appears for her as someone who knows and is willing to take her into his good graces by sharing his knowledge with her. Del's excitement is projected onto the countryside that looks "altered by his [Mr. Chamberlain's] presence, his voice overpowering fore-knowledge of the errand we were going on together [.. .] I saw that the whole nature became debased, maddeningly erotic" (140).Yet Del soon has to realize that Art Chamberlain is not the all-knowing "mentor" she imagined him to be. Instead of coming to experience an act of the forbidden but magical, she is shocked by the vulgar way this man exposes himself to her. His not at all "extra" but ralher ordinary penis is not the voluptuous organ she imagined it to be; instead it "looked blunt and stupid [. ..] raw and [. ..] ugly-coloured as a wound, it looked to me vulnerable, playful and naivě" (141). It is exactly the power, the secret knowledge, and the menacing potential to be dangerous expected by Del that are missing. Although M r. Chamberlain still entertains the idea of being the man who initiates Del into adult sexuality, she switches, in her utter disappointment, to the role of the spectator of his performance "imposed, fantastically and predictably exaggerated, like an Indián dance" (141). The whole scene appears to her more ridiculous than exciting, even the landscape looks "postcoital, distant and meaningless" (142), not the extatic countryside of extréme Gothic fantasy radiating secrecy and eroticism. The spell is over. M r. Chamberlain is instantly discredited from Del's fantasy when he turns out to be just another ordinary, petty man who enjoys exposing himself to young girls. He is no longer the hero/villain or the Jekyll and Hyde of Del's fantasy.
The idea of subworlds described by William James in Principles of Psychology proves applicable to this seminal experience in Del's life. According to James, a subworld is an entity that has "its own speciál and separate style of existence"; furthermore, "each world, whilst it is attended to, is reál after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention" (qtd. in Goffman 291, 293). As long as Del sustains the image of M r. Chamberlain as a dramatic and exciting lover, he inhabits this subworld of her imagination. However, when he fails to Iive up to the expectations of his role, and Del consequently loses interest, this subworld disappears from one moment to the other. It is important to note that the creator of a subworld, in this case Del, has omnipotent power over recreating oř discrediting it. If we relate this idea to the episode with Mr. Chamberlain, we come to realize that even at this early stage of maturation Del already has substantial control over incidents of her life, not over what happens to her but over how she reacts to these incidents, no matter what others, especially men, may think. The ultimate discovery is that Del's life, just like everyone else's, is made up of all possible subworlds: her relationship with her friend Naomi oř with her mother, her sexual fantasies, and her brilliance at school are all layers of the multiple realities of her life that function relatively independently of one another.
3.2. Jerry
Not being beautiful or boringly kind but having a "weird" interest in reading and learning for which she is discarded from the circle of ordinary girls, Del comes to enjoy the speciál status of the intellectual, a shameful perversion in the eyes of Jubilee people, that she shares with Jerry Storey, another such outcast. Although intellectual curiosity is incompatible with a small-town mentality and thus often results in isolation, it also provides Del with an amount of freedom not available to ordinary girls who are bound by internalized conventions. The basis of Del's fríendship with Jerry, then, is both their mutual fascination with learning and knowing, as well as their excommunication. Yet, in špite of their similar status, their relationship is undermined by the traditional discourse of the sexes present mostly in Jerry's thinly disguised sense of authority based on his belief in women's biologically determined inferiority—a conviction that the whole town of Jubilee cherishes. His critical words are long stuck in Del's mind: "What I possessed, he told me frankly [.. .] was a first-rate memory, a not unusual feminine gift for language, fairly weak reasoning powers, and almost no capacity for abstract thought" (163). Jerry, who assumes the power of superior knowledge, always "looks ahead to prodigious catastrophe. Soon, too" (165). Meanwhile, Del responds with "conventional horror, tentative female reasonableness, which would excite him into greater opposition" (165). It is ironie that even this micro community of two has to be layered along notions of gender. Soon Del comes to see that there is at least as huge a gap between Jerry' s world and her own as the one distinguishing theirs from that of the other students'. While she deseribes Jerry as one who is "in touch with the real world, he knew how they had split the atom" (165; emphasis added), she also claims, with a hint of shame, that "the only world I was in touch with was the one I had made, with the aid of some books, to be peculiar and nourishing to myself" (165). Although it takés her some time, Del finally realizes that Jerry's sterile and unfriendly world of precision, which she compares to a circus tent, is no more valuable, or more real for that matter, than the one of her own creation.
In contrast with Del's rich fantasy, the sexual experience offered by this relationship seems to be far from satisfactory. Although they make some futile attempts to practice rituals of love, they fail to succeed in anything revelatory: "our bodies fell against each other not unwillingly but joylessly, like sacks of wet sand. Our mouths opened into each other, as we have read and heard they might, but stayed cold, our tongues rough, mere lumps of unlucky flesh" (168). Jerry, perhaps out of some unconscious sense of inadequacy, detests the instinctual nature of sexuality because for him it represents both vulnerability and a lack of mental control. In this way the only occasion of excitement for Del is their "experiment" when Jerry asks her to remove all her clothes so that he can see, from a distance, a naked woman. Although Del can associate this experience with her secret desire of showing off her body to somebody, the whole situation is still strikingly similar to the earlier episode with M r. Chamberlain: the ultimate solitude of man and woman in sexuality lies at the core of both cases.
3.3.Garnet
The man who tums out to be the most instrumental in Del's development is Garnet French, a character diametrically opposed to Jerry Storey. With Garnet, Del experiences a new reality of "something not far from what [.. .] animals must see, the world without names" (184). Their accidental meeting at a church revival is narrated by Del as if it were quoted from a good old Gothic novel with a young innocent virgin
The power game between these archetypal two, the one who knows and the one who wants to know, becomes even more sinister when Garnet fínally adds Del's name to the list; instead of an X he carves stars around her name, and, drawing a line undemeath, indicates that he has decided to add no more names to the list.
This decision, made without Del's consent, will reemerge in its full ambiguity at the climax of the story when Gamet tries "to baptize" her, foreshadowing an end that would possibly echo the Bluebeard story, i.e., the captor imposing his rules on the captive maiden even at the price of destroying her. The whole scene opens as a happy game between the two as they splash in the lake after making love, but things soon turn serious with Garnet repeatedly bobbing Del underwater against her will and so "gradually with the struggle, laughing stopped, and the wide, determined, painful grims on [.. .] [their] faces hardened" (197). "Baptizing," the title of the story as well as the name of "the game" they play, is obviously used in a strongly figurative sense, both Del and Garnet are intensely aware that what they are engaged in is an undisguised manifestation of the power game between man and woman. Through the rituál of "baptizing" Garnet attempts, not at all kindly, to initiate Del into "normál" womanhood, that is into accepting her dependence on him. He desperately tries to pull down the barrier between the reality of their relationship and Del's own, fínally sensing that whatever experience they share, it can nevěr be more than a subworld of Del's existence. The fact that Del can walk to him through this imaginary wall any time, whereas for him the wall is relentlessly solid, depriving him of the possibility to reach over, further infuriates him because it forces him to realize his own helplessness- -a circumstance totally unacceptable for him. Del, however, is determined to fight with all her strength against Garnet's attempts to bend her to conform to his rules. By rejecting victimization by male aggression, she discredits the conclusion of the Bluebeard story.
There can be only one winner in this game. Del recognizes her unwillingness to adapt to other people's expectations, and she already knew this deep in her heart although she often felt uneasy about it. Throughout their relationship she kept the world of sensation she shared with Garnet and other subworlds of her life carefully apart, in an attempt to attain some kind of balance between them. Now she is shocked to discern that Garnet was unaware of this: "I was too amazed to be angry, I forgot to be fríghtened, it seemed to me impossible that he should not understand that all the powers I granted him were in play, that he himself was—in play, that I meant to keep him sewed in his golden lover's skin forever" (197-98).
Although Del is distinctively shaped by Gothic fantasy and its matching gender stereotypes, there is an instant reversal of the traditional Gothic plot here. It is the heroine who—as opposed to the passive female of Gothic conventions-turns out to be in charge for the simple reason that both the fear and the attraction she feels for the villain are sustained by her own unconscious wishes and colorful imagination, not by the very character of the villain. Garnet is only an ordinary boy if deprived of the rich garments of Del's Gothic fantasy and he ultimately proves his powerlessness in his inability to comprehend the rules of this game. What also follows from the reversal of roles is that it is Gamet who now appears to be the victim—a victim of the common male myth that regards sexuality as a means of mastering the woman, who is considered incapable of resisting male charm and power and allegedly wants to be overcome by domineering male sexuality. Del, on the other hand, sees things differently, coming to understand that sexuality is about surrender, though not "the woman's to the man but the person's to the body" (181-82). It is her own desire to
indulge in the "clear and warm and irresistibly moving water" (181-82) of instincts uncontrolled by the mind that is at the core of female sexuality and, thus, at least in Del's eyes, sex itself becomes a highly individual and independent act.
With this insight, the revision of the Gothic plot has come full circle, Del now possessing the egoism, that is the power traditionally associated with the Gothic villain, which ensures independence. The Gamet experience embodies the most important first crack in Del's attachment to the Gothic. Her further discovery of the unsatisfactory nátuře of the mode for her own aspirations, námely the huge gap between her personality and the restrictive roles offered by the Gothic, will mark the next major step in her development into an authentic person.
4. Contiguity and discreditation: vision, re-vision, and revision of the Gothic
What makes Del different from other women she knows in Jubilee is not so much her rejection of the traditional myth of sexual roles, for she does enjoy journeying into the most traditional sphere of those myths, the Gothic, but rather her ability to distinguish her fantasies from other layers of her identity. Yet, Del nevěr becomes totally independent of these fantasies and, although most of the time she can indulge in them as fantasies, as Coral Ann Howells points out, her desire "to be ravished and transformed is always contending with her double recognition of her independent self" (83). Del's discovery of her actual self as the real source of power disproves the old plot of woman's transformation through sex. The person who can save the heroine is not the hero, who will many her, but the heroine herself if she is brave enough to confront the internalized and comforting dream of being rescued by another.
Yet, Del's story of coming to terms with her own uncertainties, desires and aims is contiguous with the Gothic plot at several points. Like her fellow heroines, she has to go through the circular plot primaríly associated with the Female Gothic: she descends into the underworld of abuse and sexuality, risks the lotal disintegration of the self, then retums in a kind of revival to her own life by recognizing her actual self as opposed to her ideál (Gothic) self. The Gothic plot ususally ends with the handing over of the biggest prize the heroine can hope for: the marriage to the hero, her rescuer. While Del shares the common terrors of the Gothic, "the fear of terrible separateness and the fear of unity with some terrible Other" (DeLamotte 22-23)--most převalení in her sexual adventures—she also undermines the Gothic discourse in several ways.
Most importantly the role of the Gothic heroine exists for Del only as one of the subworlds of her life. Although her men may be blind to this fact, the notion of female submissiveness in which she occasionally absorbs herself is only a "make-believe," to apply Erving Goffman's term. Goffman defines "make-believe" as "an activity that participants treat as an avowed, ostensible imitation [.. .] a pastime or entertainment" (48; emphasis added). While true Gothic heroines are trapped in their miserable circumstances and are primarily dependent on the help of the hero, Del is a free agent in shaping events, she is relatively free to step out of a situation whenever she wishes.
Lives does indeed have women like Miss Farris and Marion Sherriff, who have the distinguishing features of a Gothic heroine. Though Del may enjoy sharing some of the sensations of their lives through her imagination, what essentially distinguishes them from her is that they prove to depend too much on the help of men and thus fail to develop an autonomous self. They cannot fínd their pláce in the world because they are disconnected from their actual self. What they are trapped in is their Gothic vision, a
the Photographer she suddenly ceases to behave as a villainess; instead she becomes the embodiment of the Gothic heroine who, after discovering that she is abandoned and pregnant, drowns herself in the Wawanash River.
Del piles up all the possible Gothic clichés of mysterious house, the summer of "white, brutal heat" (205), love and death, but eventually finds herself unable to write the novel. Páral lei with her increasing self-awareness is Del's realization of the fake nátuře of the Gothic plot. The more she tries to copy the traditional story-line of the Gothic, the more artificial her novel seems to become, and this development necessarily disappoints Del, who already knows that what she attempts to do when writing is to unfold the secret subworlds of reality. The Gothic plot may prove unsatisfactory for this purpose, nonetheless, Gothic sensibility-its awareness of the grotesque and the weird in the ordinary, and its avoidance of any straightforward consideration of the way things are-does remain essential for Del. Thus she can conclude that, as much as sensibility is concerned, the story "seemed true to me, not real but true, as if I had discovered, not made up, such people and such a story, as if that town was lying close behind the one I walked through every day" (206).
A l l in all what Munro seems to say with her revisional re-vision of the Gothic vision is that the Gothic turns out to serve an important purpose for adolescent girls by setting free their imagination. However, it is an important precondition of unhindered personality development to break with the restrictive ideals of the genre on entering adulthood. Del does exactly this by rejecting the inherited role models. The case of Madeleine, the mad wife, is a warning that Del must try to achieve independence without sacrificing her mental and emotional integrity. Madness, although revelatory at times, is a dead-end where the príson of patriarchy is exchanged for the príson of insanity. Gothic heroines of asexuality and passivity, just like the villainesses of excessive sexuality, also fail to serve as satisfactory models because these types are exaggerated and alien to real liveable life. We have also seen how Del's understanding of things, that is Munro's revisional Gothic narrative, undermines the Gothic plot step by step. And yet, the Gothic sensibility, which uncovers layers of the forbidden and the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary, proves to be a fundamental epistemological tool (take Del and adolescent psychology) and artistic device (for Munro) as regards developing a fuller sense of the nature of human existence.
Works Cited DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, M A : Harvard UP, 1974. Heble, Ajay. The Tumble ofReason: Alice Munro 's Discourse of Absence. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. Howells, Coral Ann. Priváte and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s. London: Methuen, 1987. Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literatuře. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. Gloucester, M A : Peter Smith, 1968. Metcalf, John. " A Conversation with Alice Munro." Journal of Canadian Fiction 1. (Fall 1972): 54-62. Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. 1971. New York: Signet, 1974.
