Women’s Self-redemption

Alice Munro is the first Canadian Noble Prize winner in Literature. She is best known for her short stories and is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant Canadian writers in the literary field today.Runaway is her masterpiece for which Munro gained many other awards. The collection Runaway consists of eight short stories which are all about one theme, namely, runaway, or escape. In Runaway, Munro depicts ordinary women’s everyday life vividly and authentically, demonstrating their psychological conflicts and collisions. The female protagonists in Runaway successfully reveal to us women’s oppression in the patriarchal society, their awakening female consciousness and the subsequent escape and revolt.This thesis, by uniting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with feminism, offers a relatively fresh perspective for studies on Munro and her Runaway. By American psychologist Maslow, human being’s needs are roughly in a hierarchy. Both the gratification and the deficiency of these needs have noticeable influence on a person’s life. Under the patriarchy, women are long-time oppressed. Therefore, their various needs, such as the needs for love and for esteem, are inevitably suppressed and ignored. By taking Runaway as the example, it analyzes conflicts undergone by women, as well as by men, in a patriarchal society. Meanwhile, this thesis also discloses women’s awakening female consciousness to resist the patriarchy. It pushes them to struggle for their basic needs and shake off the patriarchal oppression. Such consciousness was initially demonstrated by women’s inclination to take escape as a means of rescuing themselves. Gender equality would not be attained before women’s basic needs, especially the needs for self-esteem and self-actualization are gratified. Nevertheless, gender equality entails more than women’s struggle; to shake off the shackles imposed on women by the patriarchy, efforts from all parties must be united. Therefore, there is still a long way to women’s equality.