Gender And Feminist Narrative In Alice Munro’s Lives Of The Girls And Women

This thesis mainly studies Munro’s fiction Lives of Girls and Women and investigates women’s gender construction and Munro’s feminist narrative strategies in her text, which are the subversion of male discourse hegemony. This thesis discusses women’s gender roles which are not natural but constructed by patriarchal social system and male authority through analyzing women’s existential plight under patriarchic social order. The feminist narrative strategies employed by Munro share many affinities with Cixous’ s écriture féminine. In Lives of Girls and Women, Munro subverts the conventional representation of women experience which is oppressed by male authority by means of revealing the protagonist Del Jordan’s moments of epiphany and probing into the flow and real psychological experience of women. Munro also associates several of her female characters with energetic pagan and mythic features in order to challenge the exclusions of the patriarchal systems of representation. These unique feminist narrative strategies are subversive ways to represent women’s experience and reiterate the consciousness of female subject against the gender politics of patriarchy, and also express Munro’s reflection on gender issue.In chapter one, I discuss the construction of women’s oppressive gender roles under patriarchy by analyzing the images of ladylike girls and domestic women, and then explores the women’s oppressive gender roles which are not natural but constructed by patriarchic social order and discursive power. The main idea of chapter two is the discussion of the gender construction of Del Jordan who passes through several stages in which she learns to cope and get rid of conventional female gender roles and obtain independence and self-knowledgement through struggling towards the sexual liberation and spiritual freedom. In chapter three, I probe into Munro’s feminist narrative subverting the social patriarchy from the perspective of gender politics. Participating in the écriture féminine, advanced by Hélène Cixous,Munro uses epiphany and parody of the myth in her narrative which is to be freed from the patriarchal stranglehold of the narrative traditions and therefore challenges the male discourse hegemony in her writing.