The Male Images In Alice Munrosshort Stories

Alice Ann Munro,known as “Canadian Chekhov”,is the most famous short story master in contemporary Canada.She is the first person in the history of literature to win the Nobel Prize for short stories.Up till now,the domestic and overseas studies on Munro's works tend to focus on feminism,narrative techniques and regionalism.In contrast,studies on her male images are limited.In the previous studies,the male images are examined horizontally according to their social roles.Based on the theories of feminism and Carl Jung's theory of the unconscious,this thesis focuses on the male images in different periods of Munro's writing career from the vertical perspective.Apart from the introduction and conclusion,this thesis is made up of three chapters.The first chapter combines the background of the first wave of feminism and Munro's childhood experience and analyzes the authoritative father in Boys and Girls and the privileged men in Flats Road.The second chapter combines the background of the second wave of feminism and Munro's love and marriage experience and analyzes the self-centered lover image in How I Met My Husband and the fantastic husband image in Beggar Maid.The third chapter combines the background of the third wave of feminism and Munro's experience in her later period and uses Jung's archetype theory to analyze the masked male image in Before Change and the isolated male image in Face and Forest,and the self-redeemed male image in The Bear Came Over the Mountain.This thesis discovers that the male images in Munro's short stories are largely based on the males in her life;the change of the male images is based on the change of the female identities and narrative perspective and reflects Munro's sex consciousness has gradually risen from concerning about social issues such as female gender,language,and rights to exploring and pursuing the overall cultural identity of human beings.