A Feminist Narratological Interpretation Of Hateship,Friendship,Courtship,Loveship,Marriage

Alice Munro(1931-)is one of the most renowned Canadian female writers in contemporary literary circle worldwide.An adept writer of short stories,she often bases her work on women's lives,reflecting women's marriage,relationship and inner growth through depictions of trivialities in everyday life.Munro's novels excel in simple and unadorned writing style,ingenious conception,precise portrayal,concise language and unique narrative,with which a distinctive “Munro Style” is formed by breaking through the set pattern of traditional novel creation.Hateship,Friendship,Courtship,Loveship,Marriage is a crowning opus in the later period of Munro's creation and extracts almost all the emotional themes running through one's life.This thesis takes the text of Hateship,Friendship,Courtship,Loveship,Marriage-Alice Munro's collection of short stories,as a research object.On the basis of feminist narratology theory,it interprets and explores the charm of the novel in three aspects: narrative voice,narrative perspective and intersectional feminist narratology.The thesis is divided into three parts: introduction,main body and conclusion.The main content goes as follows.Introduction mainly introduces Alice Munro's major works and writing style,a Literature Review of Munro's works as well as Susan Lanser's feminist narratology.The main bodyhas three chapters.The first chapter explores how to incisively portray characters' images(especially that of women),psychological activities and personality traits in creation by leveraging omniscient,internal and external narrative perspectives in a flexible and complementary way and how to show the emergence and rise of feminism from a multi-narrative perspective.Starting from the perspective of narrative voice,the second chapter analyzes the construction of female authority in Hateship,Friendship,Courtship,Loveship,Marriage through narrative voice.It mainly takes the lens of Lanser's feminist narratology to dissect how the work can speak of women and show the pursuit of female authority construction through authorial voice and personal voice in the narrative voice.Based on the intersecting feminist narratology,the third chapter unpacks the narrative techniques employed in Munro's opus,analyzes the impact of the intersectionality of Munro'sauthorship on the narrative techniques,the narrative techniques across time-space transition,and the impact of “intersectionality” of feminism and narratology in combination with“negative plotting” on narrative.It aims to probe the positive role of fictional narrative techniques in constructing feminism in the text and discuss where the novel's charm lies.The last part is conclusion which summarizes the main argument of this paper.