Alice : examination of the mother-daughter relationship

Abstract

Fiction: Alice. Exegesis: The Mother-Daughter Relationship in Lives of Girls and Women. This thesis consists of a creative fiction component, Alice, and an exegesis that is a literary analysis of the mother-daughter relationship in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. Alice is a collection of nine short stories that looks at both the mother and daughter's perspective of their relationship. The location is Crookwell, a small country town in New South Wales, set in the period following World War II until the 1970s. The exegesis examines the representation of conflictual patterns in the mother-daughter relationship - in Lives of Girls and Women - at a time and within a society that is on the cusp of change. It also examines the unconscious influence of the Second Wave feminist movement on Munro's thinking. Like many regions of rural Australia, there appears to be no fiction set specifically in the Crookwell district. In a fashion similar to Munro, in Alice I seek to illuminate a bygone period and lifestyle. The short story cycle allows me to depict glimpses of ordinary everyday life and to capture attitudes within the community that influence the mother-daughter relationship of the central characters. Of special significance is the effect of organised religion and its influence on motherhood. Munro describes a community that enforces the 'institute of motherhood,' as described by Adrienne Rich (1995), the structured concepts demanded of men and women in the 1940s and 1950s, and the subsequent tensions that emerge between mother and daughter as an apparent consequence of these social expectations. The exegesis examines why Munro's presentation of the mother-daughter relationship in Lives of Girls and Women is still relevant, and argues that, regardless of the social, cultural and contextual forces that moderate this relationship, there remains an ongoing primal tension between mother and daughter as the daughter seeks to differentiate herself and the mother struggles to be heard. By setting Alice in the Australian rural community of Crookwell, between the 1950s and 1970s, I seek to similarly explore the particular attitudes and tensions that arise for mothers and daughters away from the major cities. It is a theme that has been largely neglected in Australian literature to date.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English