Charted Territory: Canadian Literature by Women, the Genealogical Plot, and Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe

Abstract

On the copyright page of Lives of Girls and Women, published in 1972, author Alice Munro has included a caveat: This novel is autobiographical in form but not in fact (iv). While Munro's note clearly encourages analysis of the novel in terms of its dependence on and challenge to a traditional Kiinstlerroman structure, it also invites attention to the way protagonist Del Jordan's apprenticeship as a writer, as well as Munro's procedure of enacting an autobiography, is constructed in terms of a confrontation with form, particularly the formal differences traditionally attributed to men's writing and women's writing. In Heirs to the Living Body, for example, Uncle Craig's methodic composition of a history of Wawanash County, as well as his work on the family tree, is contrasted with the energetic and fragmented storytelling of Aunt Elspeth and Aunt Grace. Craig's techniques reflect a creed of objectivity: To Uncle Craig it seemed necessary that the names of all these people, their connections with each other, the three large dates of birth and marriage and death, or the two of birth and death if that was all that happened to them, be discovered, often with great effort and a stupendous amount of worldwide correspondence (he did not forget the branch of the family which had gone to Australia) and written down here, in order, in his own large careful handwriting (Munro 26). On the other hand, the Aunts told stories (Munro 28); rather than describing their style, Munro depicts the gossipy tone of their overlapping dialogue, in which the two voices alternately blend together and reverberate off one another, and whose focus is the recollection of sensory detail. Del is initially irked to inherit Uncle