The Analysis Of The Protagonists’ Growth Processes In The Love Of A Good Woman

The Love of a Good Woman written by female Canadian author Alice Munro is a short story collection published in 1998. The collection consists of eight short stories, namely “The Love of a Good Woman”, which was named the title of this collection, “Jakarta”, “Cortes Island”, “Save the Reaper”, “The Children Stay”, “Rich as Stink”, “Before the Change”, and “My Mother’s Dream”. As a master of the contemporary short story, Munro has published a great wealth of works in which she always describes the psychological changes, as the protagonists face various suffering in the daily life. The Love of a Good Woman Alice Munro wrote shows the different people’s psychological growth by telling eight independent stories.According to the basic structure of the initiation stories developed by Rui Yuping in A Study of American Initiation Stories, this thesis is devoted to the protagonists’ growth processes in The Love of a Good Woman, by analyzing the protagonists’ psychological experiences in the five stories, including “The Love of a Good Woman”, “Jakarta”, “Save the Reaper”, “Before the Change”, and “My Mother’s Dream”. The psychological experiences are studied from three stages, which are dilemmas, epiphanies and maturity. The initiation story is intended to describe the people ’s growth, especially the growth of psychology and the processes of people’s maturity. All of the five stories, which are referred to the initiation story, in The Love of a Good Woman, portray the protagonists’ psychological changes. All the protagonists experience the three growth stages—dilemmas, epiphanies and maturity.The thesis is divided into five parts. The first part is devoted to introducing Alice Munro’s life, works, and the main plots of the five stories, “The Love of a Good Woman”, “Jakarta”, “Save the Reaper”, “Before the Change”, and “My Mother’s Dream” in The Love of a Good Woman. Meanwhile, the literary review of the story collection, the introduction of initiation story, and the framework of the thesis are also expounded. In C hapter One, protagonists’ dilemmas in the five stories are explored, based on the stage: “being lost” in the structure of the initiation story. All the five protagonists are trapped in their dilemmas and can not find the right way to solve the problems. C hapter Two is concerned with the five protagonists’ processes of epiphany, an important stage in the structure of the initiation story. All of them are touched by the epiphanies and understand the truth of the life. C hapter Three is focused on the maturity which the protagonists experience, after the stages of the dilemmas and epiphanies, based on the “recognizing life and self”, the last stage of the initia tion story structure. Through the detailed analysis of the psychological changes of the protagonists in the five stories, their growing processes of dilemmas, epiphanies and maturity are revealed in this thesis.