A Study On The Male Images In Alice Munro’s Short Stories

Alice Munro, a distinguished master of contemporary short stories, is lauded as the "Chekhov of Canada." She is the 13th female winner of Nobel Prize in Literature. Her works, filled with rich regional features, present in front of the readers a wonderful literary world through her realistic and exquisite depiction. Most of her works concentrate on females. They focus on the life experience of ordinary towns in Canada and explore the complicated psychologies and emotional world of females. By contrast, the males in her works are not that eye-catching, and few studies are conducted about these males. The thesis attempts to reveal the female consciousness and the feminist theme of Munro by classifying the males in Munro’s short stories into three different kinds:fathers, husbands and male friends, making a careful analysis of their psychologies and behaviors and summarizing the roles they have played in the different life stages of the females.The thesis consists of three parts with five chapters. Chapter One is taken as the first part, which serves as a brief introduction to Alice Munro and the twelve short stories selected from her works, summarizes the studies on Munro and her works at home and abroad and discusses the significance as well as the layout of the thesis. The second part is made up of Chapter Two, Chapter Three and Chapter Four. These three chapters explore three typical types of male images in several of Munro’s short stories. Chapter Two concentrates on the father images. Fathers are the initiator of female’s role as the Other, while some open-minded fathers serve as the beacon for the awakening of the daughters’female consciousness. Chapter Three analyzes the husband images. On the one hand, husbands hinder wives from pursuing financial and spiritual independence; on the other hand, it is also this hindrance that impels wives to conduct self-exploration. Chapter Four focuses on the male friend images. The male friends serve as the external forces that provide females with access to freedom and inspire them to fulfill self-realization. The third part is Chapter Five, which summarizes the previous discussions and concludes the standpoints of the whole thesis. This part also points out the academic and practical significance as well as the shortcomings of the thesis.The males that Munro depicts, be they fathers, husbands or male friends, are always reduced to marginal situations. They cannot enter the center of the city, nor can they be the center of the narration. Nevertheless, without these males, the various living states of the females cannot be vividly presented in front of the reader. Through the analysis of the typical male images in Munro’s writings, the reader can get a glimpse of her sober understanding and powerful criticism of the social reality and the essence of the gender relationship.