Heirs Of The Living Body, By Alice Munro

Despite being a book committed to depicting the mundane ordinariness of small town life, instances of violence against women are interspersed throughout Alice Munro’s Künstlerroman story cycle The Lives of Girls and Women. In this essay I will chronicle a few of these instances of patriarchal violence, exploring what they tell us about the patriarchal culture present in narrator Del Jordan’s mid twentieth century small town Jubilee. I will argue that the inclusion of these acts of violence, which Del’s perception of shifts as she comes of age, serve to emphasize her maturation into a woman set on defying the gender roles prescribed by Jubilee’s culture.

In “Heirs of the Living Body” Del’s naive understanding of the gang rape experienced

Again in “Baptizing” Del experiences domestic violence when her boyfriend Garnet responds to her refusal to get baptized into his church by violently shoving her underwater: threatening to drown her until she agrees to do what he wants. Del initially laughs off Garnet’s early attempts to forcibly baptize her, harkening back to the other times that violence against women has been treated as less than serious throughout the story cycle. Del begins to understand the real danger she’s in as Garnet becomes more aggressive and declares “you think you’re too good for anything. Any of us” implicitly threatening Del because of her deviance from the accepted gender norms of Jubilee (Munro 222). As Del needing to get baptized is framed as necessary only so that Del can be transformed into an acceptable wife for Garnet, it is possible to read this fight as about far more than whether or not Del is willing to get baptized. More than simply fighting against religion, Del has matured to a point where she overtly needs to fight against the patriarchal culture of Jubilee that wants her to abandon her defiant ways to instead become subservient to a man through marriage. This scene is a key turning point in Del’s maturation as she remarks “it seemed to me impossible that he should not understand that all the powers I granted him were in play” (Munro 222). By playing at conforming to patriarchal gender roles, Del is finally able to understand the real impact that they have on the world and understand that she could never possibly live a life that conforms to them. In choosing to fight, and even going so far as to end things with Garnet after this altercation, Del is declaring that not even the security and love promised by marriage can sway her from being anything but herself. Thus completing her maturation arc from a young girl interested in questioning gender norms to a young woman set on