A Feminist Interpretation Of Dear Life

Alice Munro, winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature for2013, is one of the mostoutstanding female writers in Canada’s contemporary literary world. Her stories are about thedaily life and love of the civilians in small town environments, which involve serious topicssuch as birth, death, illness and old age. Her simple writing exquisitely portrays the realmeaning of life, and brings deep and sincere emotions. The American Jewish writer CynthiaOzick even regards her as “the Contemporary Chekhov”, and many European and AmericanMedias give her the title of “master of the contemporary story”. Dear Life, published in2012,is the latest book of short stories before she said she would stop writing. This new collectionconsists of fourteen short stories, and the theme of the first ten is betrayal; while the final fourpieces----“The Eye”,“Night”,“Voices” and “Dear life”----are said to be the autobiography ofthe author. The different experiences of the women characters in the novel embody theawakening of female self-consciousness, consumerism, hedonism, and the things alike, whichexists in real life.In the past30years, although Munro had caused the attention of the Chinese domesticscholars, the academic research on her was limited to some translations and a small number ofacademic papers. From the point of view of research, the domestic critics study her novelsfrom the aspects of theme, narrative techniques, writing style, language characteristic andfeminism. And similar to foreign research, relevant achievements mainly focus on hernarrative technique. Thus, the research on Munro and her works are still insufficient in ourcountry. Since women writers play an important role in the literary world, exploring femaleconsciousness embodied in the works which has become a unique research perspective. Thispaper will analyze the female characters in Dear Life in detail by classification and induction,and discuss women’s living conditions and their way out for freedom, in order to enrich andexpand research on Dear Life.This thesis consists of five parts. The introduction provides the basic information aboutAlice Munro and the collection Dear Life, and introduces Simone de Beauvoir’sexistentialist feminism. Besides, this part also reviews the literature criticism both at home and abroad on Munro and her works. Chapter one expounds the definition of "the other", andanalyzes the females’ status as "the other" reflected in the novel. Chapter two elaborates theplights and imprisonment of the women characters in Dear Life from the perspective offeminism. Adult women are bound in the subordinate position and cannot extricatethemselves because of their husbands’ ignorance and disdain, lover’s betrayal, discontent inmarriage and the desire for passion. For girls, although they do not have the similarconfusions, they also get into the endless pain for unreasonable sense of guilt. Chapter threediscusses the different solutions of women in the collections. Although they have differentways to pursue the wholeness of life----such as pursuing relief in nature, running away fromhome, and things alike----they have made unremitting efforts to make the future full of hope.In the conclusion part, this thesis elucidates that through Dear Life Munro has an insight intothe inner world and life condition of the women. She seems to suggest as long as women lovelife, life will be full of hope.