A Feminist Interpretation Of Runaway

Alice Munro(1931-),a renowned contemporary Canadian short story writer,has dedicated her life to the creation of fourteen short story collections.Published in 2004,her short-story collection Runaway won the Canadian Gilles Prize in the same year.As a tribute to her lifelong devotion to short story writing,Munro received the "2013 Nobel Prize in Literature" presented by the Swedish Academy which praised her as "master of the contemporary short story".Since the 1970s,international scholars have conducted comprehensive and thorough researches on the artistic values of Alice Munro and her works.Based on former studies,the present thesis attempts to discover the textual presentations of female consciousness in Runaway.The definition of female consciousness,though argumentative,is a basic concept in feminist literary criticisms.It has been adopted in the discussion of female writers by several critics.However,the present writer seeks to find its representation in the female characters created by female writers.Based on a feminist ideal for equality between men and women and for social harmony and individual freedom,and on shared feminist critical notions that the liberation of women rests with a change in the established social structure and hierarchical culture,the female consciousness defined in the present thesis adopts a female perspective for the numerous disadvantages women have suffered under the pervasive influence of patriarchal ideology.Primarily,it seeks freedom and independence against patriarchal domination.Later,it seeks to discover the "Self",as an independent human being in its full sense.Trapped by their family and marriage as a result of the domination of patriarchal ideology,some female characters in Runaway are trying to escape with their awakened female consciousness,while others end in failure.Based on the feminist opinions proposed by Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir and on other shared feminist notions,the present writer seeks to discover how the female characters develop their female consciousness in their various representations of escapes and how their denouements reveal Munro 's viewpoint about women in Runaway.The present thesis is mainly composed of the following parts.Firstly,the thesis discusses the representations of escapes which include escapes from family and from marriage.In the first category,Carla runs away from a life chosen by her parents while Juliet and Penelope both run away from maternal love.Robin tries to escape her sister Joanne's control by an annual visit to the theatre thirty miles away from home.In the second category,Carla and Juliet both run away from their husbands and Grace regards her marriage with her fiance as a betrayal to herself.Tessa,being endowed with a power of clairvoyance,is taken advantage of by her husband and can never free herself from him.Secondly,the thesis offers an analysis on the reasons for their escapes in the perspectives of female consciousness.For quite a long time,women's lives have been greatly influenced by the pervasive patriarchal ideology.In the case of Runaway,some female characters such as Carla,Juliet and Robin are fighting against male dominance,against familial constraints and against social confinements with an awakened female consciousness,while others such as Tessa and Penelope are lost in the patriarchal domination with their repressed female consciousness.After exploring the reasons for escapes,the present writer continues to discover what happens after the escapes of these female characters.Penelope and Grace both go on for self-exploration after their attempts to run away from familial and social constraints.Juliet and Robin,both being brave and resilient,strive for their own exploration and go on for self-realization.As strange as it is,Carla and Tessa,both being confined by their husbands,make opposite choices after their flights.However,both of them end in self-destruction with their repressed female consciousness.Based on the above discussion,the thesis comes to its conclusion.As representatives in Runaway,the different endings for these female characters not only reflect their physical and spiritual plight caught in the choices of their own life,but also shed light on Munro's viewpoint on women in general.Grounded in the twentieth century Canada,women depicted in her fiction are still struggling under the pervasive influence of patriarchal ideology.By presenting their plights,Munro shows great sympathy toward them.And by depicting their fight against patriarchy,she also expresses her mild but lasting hope in the exploration and continuation of a female tradition.