Women's Writing In The Short Stories Of Alice Munro

As a Canadian female writer with 60 years' devotion,Alice Munro has published 14 collections of about 200 short stories.Munro focuses on ordinary people,especially on ordinary women in small towns,depicting their everyday life.Their life seems dull and plain,but under the "surface of an ordinary world" are embedded their emotional changes---women's subtle and complex psychological changes.Good at depicting ordinary women's psychological changes,Munro not only reveals in her writing her distinctive female characteristics,but creates quite a different fictional world in her unique feminist view.Munro's writing attitudes are influenced by Women's Liberation Movement and feminist trend in the middle 20th century.As a woman writer who has experienced several stages of feminism,her female writing probes into and reflects upon many women's problems both historical and realistic,thus forming her distinctive view of gender.Munro's rich personal experience endowed her with a thorough understanding of the predicament women encounter while providing inspiration and materials for her writing.Munro's personal identity and Canada's multicultural society contribute a lot to her literary creation with complexity,profundity and multiplicity.Based on Munro 's short stories,this dissertation aims at exploring the relationship between feminism and Munro 's literary career.By analyzing her feminist viewpoints,female images in her short stories and the themes of her female writing,it fully interprets the profound connotation of Munro's writing.The major content is as follows:Introduction expounds on major points and objectives of this dissertation after analyzing Munro 's literary career,reviewing studies on her short stories,and discovering existing problems in relevant domestic and international studies.Chapter One presents a brief survey of Canadian regional cultures.Then it considers the various roles that multiple cultures and regional cultures have played in Munro's writing.Tracing the growth and development of Munro's female awareness,it discusses her mature and mild view on gender.Growing up in a beautiful and isolated small Canadian town,Munro develops "marginal mentality",which makes her life different from traditional housewives,and her writing different from feminist writing,one dominant trend in Canadian literature in the 1970s.Chapter Two illustrates the subtle and complex relations between common feminist writing and Munro's female writing,exploring the speciality and complexity of her writing.Munro's literary career almost synchronizes with women's trend in the 1960s,but a detailed reading of Munro's fictions leads to a discovery of Munro's distinctive quality differing from the widely acknowledged and well established way of feminist writing.Combining Munro's personal experience and a lot of interviews,it analyzes Munro's unique female awareness and discusses her distinctive view of gender.During her long writing career,Munro gradually developed a mild view of gender and broke through the sort of distortion and misrepresentation about female images and heterosexual relationship in traditional writing.Chapter Three analyzes the female images in Munro's stories in particular.A close reading of Munro's short stories shows that regional characteristics and feminism are just the apparent labels for the protagonists.In her fictions,all the women characters of different ages and from various works of life have a clear sense of the shadow of patriarchy in the male-dominated society,where they either confront difficulty and predicament,suffer from misunderstanding and mistreatment,or experience bewilderment and disappointment,but finally they reconcile with themselves and others.With their inner psychological changes and emotional growth,they have transcended viewpoints of the binary opposition.Chapter Four summarizes the important themes in Munro 's writing.Despite the differences in their life and story,every woman in her fictions shares common experiences in the process of falling in love,getting married,becoming a mother,aging and dying.Different choices will lead to different lives.To summarize,themes like growing up,marriage,relationship between mother and daughter,and departure are pivotal themes conveyed in Munro 's writing.This chapter intends to explore how women win independent space in patriarchal society,thus we can ponder on how to harmoniously live in the world instead of destroying it.Chapter Five discusses the most impressive trait of Munro's writing---artistically integrating feminist themes with narrative techniques.narrative strategies,narrative perspectives,epistolary form and open endings in Munro's stories are analyzed to evaluate their function and significance in female writing.Conclusion examines the significance of Munro's female writing by means of summarizing and expounding "marginal" cultures.Wiping off such binary oppositions as male vs.female,male-dominated vs.female-dominated,civilized vs.barbarous,central vs.peripheral and urban vs.rural,Munro's female writing takes up a stance of an amalgamation.Following Munro's path,one can mediate on civilization and men and women can converge on human nature.It is dynamic communication rather than static opposition that makes it possible for the two genders to examine and rethink each other.In this way,"marginal" is not "necessary supplementary",but rather "significant" in cultural fields,capable of providing rich cultural sources,wide observant perspectives,flexible living stances and gentle attitudes towards the world.Thus,Munro's literature world will be opened and its real value can be discovered.