The Bildungsroman Motif In Open Secrets

Alice Munro (1931-) is known in Canadian literary circle. She is the 13th female writer and the first Canadian writer winning Noble Prize in 2013. Munro focuses on writing short stories, which also promotes the development of Canadian short stories. Her works root in real life. It makes the works have the base of spaces. Meanwhile her works show a female writer’s special discernment, reflect female characters’ feelings and their complex, sensitive, distinct personality, and reveal the process of female’s growth.The short-story collection Open Secrets (1994) is the eighth book of Munro’s works and uses typical style of her southern Ontario series. Chinese researches on this book have not been appeared yet. As for foreign studies, researches are mainly about the book Runaway. Only few mention the book Open Secrets. The presentation of the researches focuses on the perspectives of feminism, psychology and culture. Among them, there is only one paper discussing the narrative in the short story "A Wilderness Station".This thesis, probing into the spaces in Open Secrets, divides the stories into three spaces referring to Edward WH Soja’s space epistemology, including realistic space, imaginative space and the third space. The first space epistemology is considered to be materialized physical space that tends to be objective and can be observed from exterior. The second space epistemology is built by discourse and mental activities, regarded as construction of spirit. Based on the traditional first and second spaces, Soja puts forward the third space epistemology. The third space achieves though the "real" material space and spatial imagination. It contains both the realistic space and imaginative space, and exceeds their sum. This space shows the logical relations among history, culture, identity and so on. It is a kind of creative combination and prolongation with infinity and openness.This thesis uses the spatial narrative to explore the bildungsroman theme from analyzing the dilemma that the ordinary women and girls face in their marriage, family and surrounding changes, while they just live in a small desolate and tranquil town. The thesis contains three main parts. The first part indicates three realistic spaces in the stories. They are windows, houses and the town Carstairs arranging from small to large as well as progressive containment, which work in concert with the successive conflicts of self, self and outer world, self and society. The second part analyzes three imaginative spaces Albania, spaceships and letters, expressing the characters’ struggles and growth in obstacles. The last part reconstructs and recombinants the realistic space and the imaginative space into the third space so as to discuss ideological changes, contradiction and combination between two genders, and traits of social history from individual, two genders and history. This thesis analyzes the process of self-promotion in the collision in different spaces of material world and mental world.