Trauma And Healing:Mother-daughter Relationship In Alice Monroe’s Novels

Alice Munro is Canadians,one of the most important female short-story novelists in the world,who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.During Alice Munro’s writing career,there is a problem hidden in the center of Munro herself and her novel characters.This problem has repeatedly appeared in a dozen short stories.This is the relationship between Munro and her novel characters with her mother.The issue of mother-daughter relationship in a monograph on Monroe’s works is considered as," the writing daughter’s conscious failure to understand and represent the mother remains at the heart of Munro’s aesthetic " Constantly narrating the story of her mother makes this the topic became a kind of reconciliation and healing in Munro to ease the trauma of the mother-daughter relationship when she was young.However,this kind of trauma is hidden behind the narrative of the novel and it is difficult to find it.With the perspective of the sociologist Nancy Chodorow’s "The Reproduction of Mothering" as a background,it is possible to fine-tune the traumatic experiences of Munro in the relationship between the characters and the reality.However,because there is no study on chodorow in Chinese mainland,a brief introduction of chodorow’s viewpoint was added before the main part.In the main part,this article selects Munro’s three short stories "The peace of Utrecht","Boy and Girl" and "Dear Life" as the analysis objects.In Munro’s short story "The peace of Utrecht",we can find that the novel is divided into two parts.The two parts correspond to the relationship between the two relationship: the unresolved relationship between mothers and sisters.These two issues are linked together because of the motherhood,the former come into being because of the inability to perform the motherhood,and the latter formed because of the former.Through a detailed analysis of the novel’s creation background,the relationship between the character of the novel and the logic of the novel,we can see the process in which the two sets of relationships are intertwined.By analyzing the relationship between mother and daughter in "boys and girls",we can find the starting point of the rebellion of mother-daughter relationship.Daughters can only obtain self-development by leaving the family.The problem of the deterioration of mother-daughter relationship begins with the fixed connection between gender and function.Initially,the issue of mother-daughter relationship in "boys and girls" became a problem of solidifying sex.In Dear Life,we can discover that Munro’s novels blurred the boundaries betweenautobiography and fiction in the ongoing narrative of her mother.Her feelings about her mother affected Munro’s memory of her hometown.The mother’s remembrance lies in confession and constant digression,but the mother is the only one who wants to talk.Taking the mother-daughter relationship as the main reading context,these three short stories correspond to the attitude of Munro and the novel narrators to the mother during the middle and late years.The wounds of abandoning their mother in early years do not disappear even her new family formed.The story of the mother will not end until the dispute of the primary family relationship is straightened out.In the joint reading of these three short stories,we can find an obvious similarity: return.When the fiction narrative returns to Huron County or returns to childhood memory,Munro reshapes her memory in order to break through the discourse system of social stereotypes,and stabilize and repair the structure shaped by childhood memories,which Freud called "plot" and expresses her love for her mother.At the end of the article,I use the other Alice from Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor,pointing out that for Alice Munro,literature exists like a rabbit hole.Literature speaks out what Munro most wants to say.This type of discourse acts like a spell on reality and becomes a means of healing the relationship between mother and daughter in real life.Literature here becomes an individual self-statement of the problem to rebuild a stable way of thinking.It is Munro’s greatest power to describe and rebuild her love for her mother and herself by altering her unavoidable deaths,by recounting her mother’s and her own stories.