An Interpretation Of Rose's Alienation In Who Do You Think You Are?From The Perspective Of Three Orders

As the first Canadian female writer of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature,Alice Munro(1931-)has broken the spell that short story writers have great difficulty in winning it.Her many works focus on the mundane life of ordinary Canadian people in the small town and show their confusions and frustrations,which reflects Munro's concern for the humanistic world.Who Do You Think You Are? as the fourth collection of short stories of Munro,was published firstly in 1978.Munro takes Rose's growing line as a thread running through the novel to show Rose's self-alienation in the contemporary consumer society.Who Do You Think You Are? as an earlier representative work by Munro,has attracted the attention of many scholars at home and abroad because of its complexity,polysemy and richness.However,most researchers have interpreted this work from the aspects of feminism,narratology,theme and so on.Among them,feminists believe that Rose's self-alienation is caused by the repression and confinement of patriarchal society,which reveals the social significance of the novel to some extent.But it neglects Rose's individual spiritual world.In other words,explaining Rose's psychological crisis should return to her mental condition and elucidate it from a micro perspective.And it is not enough to focus on her gender.Some unique interpretations in Lacanian Three Orders can provide theoretical support for this thesis.This thesis attempts to probe into the cause and essence of Rose's self-alienation from the perspective of Jacques Lacan's Three Orders in order to understand Rose's psychological dilemma in a more detailed and comprehensive way.The thesis is mainly divided into six parts which include introduction,four chapters and conclusion.The introduction simply presents Alice Munro and Who Do You Think You Are?,and summarizes domestic and foreign studies about Munro and this novel,and then points out the significance of this thesis.Chapter One is the theoretical foundation.It mainly illustrates the origin and development of Lacanian Three Orders and some key terms of this theory.Three Orders as one of the most important theories of Lacan,takes the Imaginary Order,the Symbolic Order and the Real Order as tools to construct the triple interface of the subject's survival,playing a synchronic role in the construction of subject.Chapter Two analyzes Rose's misrecognition of ego in the Imaginary Order.On the one hand,Rose regards the perfect and unified virtual image in the mirror as her true ego because of the influence of narcissistic complex.But this identification is a narcissistic misrecognition,which is doomed to failure.On the other hand,she is too obsessed with the stable ideal-ego to be able to fulfill the roles of wife and mother,so she has to face the alienated anxiety that caused by her ideal-ego.Chapter Three mainly interprets Rose's resistance to the Symbolic Order.The first section presents Rose's fear of entering the Symbolic Order and her fascination with complete ego in the Imaginary Order through her defiance of the “scholarship girl”.The second section shows Rose's opposition to the Other from the disintegration of the “beggar maid”.Rose finally abandons the enviable marriage and escapes from the control of the Other in order to get rid of the constraint of the “beggar maid”.The third section further demonstrates Rose's alienated anxiety in the Symbolic Order from the ideal-ego and ego-ideal.Chapter Four discusses Rose's epiphany after returning her hometown from the angle of the Real Order.Although Rose has freed herself from the bondage of these identities,she still can not find her true ego.When she returns to her hometown to look after her stepmother,she recalls a neurotic idiot and her friend in her hometown.And their experience makes her understand human beings will never be able to reach the Real Order.Based on the above analysis and discussion,the conclusion indicates that Rose's psychological crisis originates from the anxiety of self-alienation.And it is manifested in her infatuation of the Imaginary Order and rejection of the Symbolic Order.Through Rose's spiritual crisis,this thesis tries to prove that ordinary people can not really be separated from the pseudo reality which is composed of the Imaginary Order and the Symbolic Order,and human beings can not get rid of the anxiety of alienation and enter the Real Order really,because it is the interconnection and mutual conflict of three orders that can promote mankind move forward continuously.