The Construction Of Female Subjectivity In Alice Munro’s Runaway

As the first Canadian female writer who won the Noble Prize for Literature, Alice Munro enjoyed high reputations of "the greatest short story writer alive" and "the master of contemporary short stories". Munro is the writer who is good at observing ordinary women’s daily grind with her unique female perspective and revealing women’s inner desires and struggles. She expresses her concerns about women’s observations of themselves, their family and the society they are living in. With her keen observation and skillful writing technique, Munro shows six female characters who possess unique personalities in her representative short story collection Runaway. In this book, the contradiction, confusion and helplessness when women are facing with oppression and choices are described with subtlety, which reveals her profound understanding of contemporary women’s fate.The research approach adopted by this thesis is the combination of textual analysis with the theory of female subjectivity construction. The thesis fust retrospects the three waves of feminist development, and illustrates the gradual improvement course of female subjectivity. On the theoretical basis of female subjectivity construction, the thesis analyzes the female characters from the three aspects, namely, female experience subject, thinking subject and speaking subject to show how these common female characters construct their subjectivity by emotional release and struggle for the right of speech in ordinary life.The thesis comes to the conclusion that most female characters in Munro’s Runaway do not successfully construct their subjectivity. The female characters depicted by Munro suffer from the stress from their parents, mates and friends in their ordinary life, so they are dissatisfied and begin to query their lives. Those female characters try to construct their subjectivity and recognize their inner needs with the struggles of their thoughts, emotion and behaviors. They are eager to improve their current living situation and realize the ideal state of life they expect. However, in the process of their construction of female subjectivity, except Grace, most female characters in Runaway are absent in various degrees in the three necessary stages, namely, experience subject, thinking subject and speaking subject, which leads to their final failures to construct their subjectivity. Through analyzing female characters’efforts to construct their subjectivity in Runaway from the feminist perspective, this thesis deepens people’s cognition of the theoretical construction of female subjectivity, and enriches the feminist study on Alice Munro’s works.