From "Aphasia" To Awakening:The Female Identity And Consciousness In Alice Munro's Works

As the winner of Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013,Canadian female writer Alice Munro(1931--)never claims herself as a feminist writer;however,most characters in her stories are females,and the depictions,usually from female perspective,also focus on the sufferings and experiences of women.Hence,Munro's stories naturally reflect feminist thought to the extent,and it is certainly very necessary for us to explore it.Generally speaking,most women will experience the following growth process:being born as “a girl”,falling in love and getting married and then becoming a wife and mother.Accordingly,the female identity contains three major aspects: gender identity in social culture,lover identity in the love relationship,and motherhood in family life.In this modern society of factually patriarchal influence,“discursive power” is mostly dominated by males while the female identity is passively constructed by cultural discourse.The word “female” in reality simply suggests an image of “the weak”,meaning that women are in kind of subordinate and inferior status.Thus,the three aspects of the female identity are all subject to oppression from the “male authority”,which leads to female “aphasia”,in other words,female passiveness and self-repression.However,the female characters in Munro's stories don't succumb to the “male authority” willingly.Most of them are experiencing or will experience the awakening of their female consciousness.In order to survive and keep sane and normal,they muster up courage to challenge “male authority”,to attack“patriarchal discourse” and overcome the social constraints on females.Therefore,selecting five of Munro's relevant short stories,“Boys and Girls”,“The Beggar Maid”,“My Mother's Dream”,“The Office”,“Runaway”,and her only novel,Lives of Girls and Women,this thesis attempts to explore the “aphasia” of the three aspects of female identity,their predicament and the causes of their “aphasia”.At the same time,it also analyzes how females break the spell of “aphasia” and achieve the awakeningof female consciousness with the hope to develop a comprehensive and thorough understanding to females' sufferings.