Mapping the journey: A study of maturing femininity in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women

Opposed to the anxiety of influence supposedly suffered by male writers with regard to their predecessors, Gilbert and Gubar (2000) propounded the concept of anxiety of authorship to hold true for female writers. According to this theory, women joined in a sorority with their literary foremothers in their efforts to prove their worthiness in taking up the male vocation of writing. In Alice Munro’s short story collection Lives of Girls and Women, the mother is ever-present in her daughter’s mind, and their relationship is instrumental in her maturation as a woman and a writer. In this paper, the relationship between the two women is explained in terms of some of the notions put forth in Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, namely the angel/monster dichotomy, the anxiety of authorship, female double consciousness, infection in the sentence, and the parable of the cave. Using these concepts, it is aimed to show that although these notions were proposed as a model for 19th century woman writers, the modern-day Del is yet to come to terms with the anxiety of authorship and its accompanying problems.