内容提要

本文致力于研究身份对加拿大著名女作家艾丽丝·门罗（Alice Munro,
1931-）短篇小说创作带来的影响，将门罗的女性身份与加拿大国籍身份和她所
采用的叙述形式联系起来，把叙事技巧不仅看成是意识形态的产物，而且还是意
识形态本身，通过研究具体的文本形式来探讨社会身份与文本形式之间的交叉作
用，把叙述声音的一些问题作为意识形态关键的表达形式来加以解读，尝试从三
方面解释身份问题影响短篇小说创作：身份问题对女性主题的影响、身份问题对
叙事方式的影响、社会身份对文学创作的影响。
本文的第一部分简要分析了身份问题对门罗创作主题方面的影响。她的作
品，综合了对现代女性诸多问题的审视，其中包括爱情、婚姻、家庭、亲子关系
问题等等。门罗没有美化现实，也没有对读者进行说教，而是以女性的视角和超
脱的态度暴露主人公自己的问题，向读者展现不同人物的内心世界。
本文的第二部分探讨了身份问题对叙事方式的影响。社会身份影响思维方式
和语言。女性叙事方式反映了女性的思维特征，也反映了女性的社会身份。该部
分既讨论了门罗语言的特征，又论述了门罗的叙事方式的多样性，这些叙事手段
的调整是由于门罗的女性身份让她敏感的意识到了现实的不确定性，并且多样的
女性叙述技巧服务于主题，为故事构建了合理的框架。
第三部分重点分析了女性身份与加拿大国籍的相互作用对门罗短篇小说创
作的影响。加拿大是一个移民国家，有着独特的多元文化背景，从加拿大文学诞
生之日起，加拿大的作家们就对身份问题进行不断地探讨和追问。该部分从门罗
的小说文本入手，尝试解释社会身份影响文学创作。
本文认为，门罗作品的形式和主题既不像纯粹意义上的现实主义文学作品那
样自然纯朴，也不像后现代文学作品那样反叛不驯，门罗用女性的视角观察世界，
描写女性的生活，书写自己的人生感悟。在写作技巧上，门罗不拘泥于传统，不
断的尝试创新，借鉴并采用了后现代作家的写作方式，把短篇小说的创作提到了
一个新的高度。

关键词：
艾丽丝·门罗；身份问题；叙事方式
 Synopsis

This thesis devoted to research how identity affects Alice Munro in her short
story making. I try to combine the female identity and her Canadian nationality with
the narration form. The narration technique is not only seen as the product of ideology,
but also treated as the ideology itself. I explore the concrete text form in order to
research the interaction between social identity and text. Take the voice of narration as
the fundamental expression. And try to interpret identity problem affects story making
in three different ways: identity affects female theme, identity affects the ways of
narration, and social identity affects literary creation.
The first part is a brief analysis about the influence which identity exerts on
Munro’s theme. In her works, there are much thinking about modern women’s
problem, including love, marriage, family, and parent-child relationship etc. Munro
neither romanticizes nor moralizes explicitly, but lets her protagonists reveal their
own problems, thus displaying different aspects of reality.
The second part discusses identity problem affects ways of narration. Female
identity makes Munro sensitively realizes the uncertainty of reality, thus she
consciously avoids intruding action as an omniscient author. The deceptively simple
style and varied narrative strategies serve the theme, which set up suitable framework
s for the story telling.
The third part analyses how the interaction between female identity and
Canadian nationality influences Munro in her story telling. Canada is a nation of
immigrants and it has its unique multi-cultural background. From the beginning of
Canadian Literature, the Canadian writers explore their identities consistently. This
part takes Munro’s text as the approach and tries to explain how social identity affects
short story creating.
In the form and the theme aspects, Munro’s work is neither as natural simplicity
as realism works in the traditional sense nor as rebel as the post-modern works. She
observes the world from female perspective and she describes female lives, and writes
her own perception of life. As for her writing technique, she does not adhere to the
tradition. She tries to innovate the ways of story telling, and takes some writing ways
of post-modern writers, thus enhances the story telling to a new height.

Key Words:
Alice Munro; Identity; The Way of Narration
 Contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................1

Chapter One Identity and Theme .................................................................5

1.1 Lives of Women ..............................................................................5

1.2 Girls’ Relationships to Their Parents ..............................................8

Chapter Two Female Narration and Literature Form ................................18

2.1 Attention to Language: “The Albanian Virgin” ............................18

2.2 Treatment of Form: “Rooted in Progress” ....................................24

Chapter Three Interaction of Female Identity and Canadian Nationality.30

3.1 Alice Munro’s View on Gender ....................................................30

3.2 The Struggle for Identity as A Canadian Woman ......................33

Conclusion......................................................................................................40

Works Cited....................................................................................................43

Acknowledgements........................................................................................47

导师及作者简介

I
 Introduction

Alice Munro (1931~), the contemporaneous Canadian short-story writer, and

widely considered as one of the finest living English-language short story writers. She
won the Governor General's Award for her first collection of short stories, Dance of
the Happy Shades in 1968 and again in 1978 for Who Do You Think You Are?, which
was also runner-up for the Booker Prize. Her many other national and international
accolades include Canadian Booksellers Association Awards (1971 and 2005), the
first Canada-Australia Literary Prize (1977), the inaugural Marian Engel Award
(1986), two Giller Prizes (1998, 2004), the Rea Award (2001) for lifetime
achievement in short stories, and a 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her stories
have been published for decades in such renowned magazines as The New Yorker,
Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review. Fellow acclaimed short-story writer Cynthia
Ozick said of Munro that she is "our Chekhov".
The fiction of Alice Munro, one obviously shared by generations of girls, women
and men; since 1950s’s, readers have discovered in her work connections with their
own lives, and with the lives of those around them. For so many of her readers,
Munro’s appeal is rooted in her open-ended exploration of ways of seeing and
understanding reality. Perhaps the most striking feature uniting the author’s numerous
collections is to be found in her persistent avoidance of a solitary and unified vision.
Instead, she offers a multitude of ways of seeing the world, briefly illuminating
various characters’ perspectives, and thereby drawing attention to human process of
subjectively constructing meaning to combat what is mysterious, troubling, and
inexplicable in the lives presented by her fiction.
Munro attracts many attentions in recent years. Some critics believe that Alice
Munro is a realistic writer, because realistic writers always concern common people’s
ordinary life. Realism has been chiefly concerned with the commonplaces of everyday
life among the middle and lower classes, where character is a product of social factors
and environment is the integral element in the dramatic complications. Meghan

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Grieve in his thesis “Writing Women’s Lives: The Fictional Aesthetic of Alice Munro”
said that Alice Munro’s work rooted in real life, having distinctive local color. The
stories she wrote about mainly from her own life experiences or the things she saw
and heard. She depicted the secular affairs, displayed various relationships, such as
the mother-daughter relationship, relationship between husband and wife, relationship
between sisters and relationship between friends. She vividly showed the different
stages of women’s lives, taking realistic style to portray women’s lives. Sister Claire L.
Duteau in “The Dramatis Personae of Alice Munro” mentioned the persona prototype.
She also thought Munro was a realistic writer, people could find themselves in
Munro’s work.
But some critics held different opinions, they think Alice Munro is not a realistic
writer in traditional sense. Because in her works, the way of narration always
challenging the traditional realistic way. Mark Nunes in “Postmodern Piecing” said
Munro was a postmodern writer. Her stories applied many writing techniques
belonging to the postmodern trend. Such as the changing vision, the variety of story
levels, the embedded story structure etc. He thought Munro treated narration as a
process of context constructing. Each plot or chapter could be taking as a single story.
Behind each of the single one, there seemed to be the clue connecting them as a whole.
The whole story patched up by pieces of plot. Melanie Sexton in “The Woman’s Voice:
The Post-Realist Fiction of Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro.”
pointed out that Munro’s work contained many postmodern characters. The most
remarkable one was the incessancy innovation of narration way. But we can not place
Munro to the postmodern group just because of that. Sexon thought it was Munro’s
way that using women’s voice and way of narration to express her understanding of
life. She is not a realistic writer in complete sense, and a radical writer belongs to
postmodern either. Munro stands in between the two, absorbing their traits and
applying them to her own writing. The incessant changing way of narration indicated
women are in searching for power to speak. So Sexton put Munro to “post-realist
writer” group. Jill Varley in “Not Real but True: Evolution in Form and Theme in
Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, The Progress of Love, and Open Secrets.”
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analyses the effort Munro has made in adjusting narration to fit into the theme.
Rosalie Mary Weaver in her thesis “Innovation Within The Modern Short Story
Through The Interaction of Gender, Nationality, and Genre: Margaret Atwood’s
Wilderness Tips and Alice Munro’s Open Secrets” asserted the innovation that
Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro had made, and she thought their nationality and
female identity affected them a lot both in genre choosing and narration innovation.
Rosalie also applied Sandra Zagarell’s narration community theory to attest to her
opinion.
At home, there are not so many scholars devoted in Munro study. And the papers
published just introducing Munro and her works. Zhao Huizhen in her paper “The
Canadian Woman Writer Alice Munro and The Female Personae under Her Pen” gave
us a glimpse on Alice Munro and her works. And she took “Lives of Girls and
Women” as a typical example, indicating the underling meaning “the stronger is not
really strong, and the weaker is not really weak”. Liu Xinhui in her paper “The Two
Faces of Munro——Brief Comment on ‘Lives of Girls and Women’” analyses Munro’s
female subject, and Lives of Girls and Women indicated Munro’ s opinion on society,
live and death, religion, sex, female identity, and literature creation.” Chen Xiaowei in
“The Realization of Truth in A Novel” said the charm of Munro’s story lied in the
description of the real world and the “creating truth.” Through reading Munro’s novel,
readers can feel the beautiful and poetic meaning of lives under the surface of our
common, ordinary and routine lives. Ma Aihua in thesis “The Feminity and Manliness
in Lives of Girls and Women” said Alice Munro vividly tells Dell’s grow- up process
from a very little girl to an adult woman.
From the summarization above, we can easily see that both the critics abroad and
at home admit the attribution that Munro has made in short story field. But they
seldom connect female identity with Munro’s story creation. And this thesis will
connect the identity with the form of narration, for the first time to deplore the cross
effect between society identity and context constructing. In Munro’s fiction,
discrepancy between truth and falsehood engenders ambiguity and many possibilities
to interpret her works. Truth and reality always interweave fascinatingly with dreams,
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make-believe, and unreliable memory and narratives. The primary objective of this
thesis is to explore how identity affects Alice Munro in her story making with specific
references to the stories themselves, including the analysis of the form and her
thematic concerns. Modern literary theories such as Feminist theory, Post-structuralist
theory and Formalistic theory will be adopted as the theoretical bases.

4
 Chapter One Identity and Theme

As far as the social background of Alice Munro is concerned, the late 1960s saw
a second wave of feminist movement in Canada due to the influences from America
and Europe. As a result, gender issues in everyday life were increasingly
foregrounded and concerned with. Feminist writers began to examine various aspects
of personal relationship to establish basic feminist concepts and subvert remaining
Victorian values imposed on women once again after the Second World War.
Jane Flax argues that “the single most important advance in feminist theory is
that the existence of gender relations has been problematized. Gender can no longer
be treated as a simple, natural fact” (73).
Alice Munro, among various themes and concerns, primarily concerns herself
about women’s issues. In many of her issues, she not only explores women’s role in
many personal relationships but also dissects the natural vulnerability and defects of
women themselves. Like Jane Austen and many other women writers, many of
Munro’s stories centers on love and marriage. Nevertheless, as Munro’s lucid, lyrical
stories usually involve a variety of motifs and permit many possibilities of
interpretation, she does not seem to be radical although she can come up with
interrogating questions in some stories. Mild in tone but uncompromising in the
feminist stance, Munro’s works cover the experiences of women at all ages ranging
from adolescent girls to divorced or deserted women to the elderly and aged women
or grandma. The reader can always find the progress of self-search, self-improvement
of women.

1.1 Lives of Women

Alice Munro’s short story collection Open Secrets presents the hidden histories
of women and more importantly it demonstrates that, if, like Munro, we look beyond
conventional expectations, women’s experiences provided ready material for
disrupting and rearranging the “surface ordinariness” of life and fiction alike. The
5
collection as a whole echoes this view of reality, for it assembles eight stories
depicting the frequently dislocated and disguised lives of Canadian women.
Publishers Weekly notes: “The careful ordering of these works, the casual
reappearances of characters in various entries, the layering of time, and the unity of
place——all expand the depth of each entry, heightening the illusion that Munro’s
fiction is as infinitely startling as life itself” (72).
One such story is “A Real Life,” which is set in the fictional town of Carstairs in
rural Ontario, in the late thirties and early forties. The story focuses on two
middle-aged best friends, Millicent, a housewife, and Muriel, a single music teacher,
and their third friend, Dorrie Beck, to an eligible Australian bachelor, Mr. Wilkie
Speirs. The title derives from the conventional view of what constitutes reality for a
woman, a view expressed by Millicent when she tells Dorrie: “Marriage takes you out
of yourself and gives you a real life” (75).Munro’s strategies in this work is to conjoin
a realistic representation of these women’s experiences with a questioning of the
traditional assumption s about human needs that are embedded in certain narrative
patterns.
Munro’s wariness of attempts fully to accommodate the experience of Canadian
women is most noticeable in her sly critique of the patterns of womanhood offered by
conventional codes of the time, especially by etiquette books and women’s magazines.
For example, Muriel, the spinster music teacher, carefully patterns her appearance on
fashion articles, whose prose, in turn, is parodied by Munro’s description of Muriel’s
code of beauty:
Muriel was always dressed in some shade of blue. A woman should pick

a color that really suits her and wear it all the time, she said. Like your

perfume. It should be your signature. Blue was widely thought to be a

color for blondes, but that was incorrect…It suited best a warm-looking

skin, like Muriel’s——skin that took a good tan and never entirely lost it.

It suited brown hair and brown eyes, which were hers as well. She never

skimped on clothes, it was a mistake to. Her fingernails were always

painted——a rich and distracting color, apricot or blood-ruby or even

6
 gold. She was small and round, she did exercises to keep her tidy

waistline. (57-58)

Both Muriel’s slavish mimicry of the magazine beauty tips and Munro’s parody of
Muriel’s adopted code are forms of imitation. The kind that Muriel adopts however is
restrictive. Just as she is limited to appearing a certain way in order to attract a man so
she is limited to certain behavior once she has attracted one. The provincial morality
of Carstairs, for example, forbids a sex to a middle-aged single woman like Munriel.
Furthermore, when any hint of the possibility surface, “at the first whiff of trouble”
(59), Muriel is instantly reminded of her limits. The narrator explains: “A warming
from the school board. Miss Snow will have to mend her ways. Miss Snow, I am sorry
we are cancelling——or simply silence. In the face of Muriel’s protests over these
restrictions, even Millicent feels that she must defend the prevailing propriety: “Well,
you know, Muriel…a wife is a wife. It’s all well and good to have friends, but a
marriage is a marriage” (59).
Munro digs into women’s problems from their own perspective, and probes
women’s relationships to men.
Women’s vulnerability, which is the inner cause of women’s problems, is
investigated in many of Munro’s stories. According to Munro, owning to the
dependent or self-deceptive tendency of some women and the emptiness of their lives,
they tend to lose themselves in their illusions and depend on men to achieve their
happiness in life. However, more often than not, they are frustrated, disillusioned, and
deserted. Whether their counterparts are to be blamed or not, the inner vulnerability
and dependent tendency of women themselves at least in part bring about their own
frustrations and misfortunes.
In “Tell Me Yes or No,” for example, Munro dissects the flaws and natural
vulnerability of women by means of her mouthpiece the narrator:
I hear myself in witty and rueful pursuit of this theme——how women

build their castles on foundations hardly strong enough to support a

night’s shelter; how women deceive themselves and uselessly suffer,

being exploitable because of the emptiness of their lives and some

7
 deep——but indefinable, and not final——flaw in themselves.

(Something 95)

The narrator, having learned the death of her lover, secretly visited his city in great
sorrow, by ironically was given by his widow a package of love letters from another
mistress of his. The narrator can be considered as the representative of credulous and
self- deceptive women who commit their happiness and life only to men. As the
narrator reflected, the reason why such kinds of women suffer uselessly and are
exploitable lies in the emptiness of their lives and some deep flaw in themselves.
Lydia in “Dulse” is another woman sensitive and fragile by nature. She found
herself emotionally disturbed after parting with her lover. Her uneasy attitude toward
her own identity formed a contrast against that of the three workmen who were faced
with more or less similar problems and pressures but could cope with their lives with
more courage, firmness, and confidence. Lydia also envied Old Stanley, who enjoyed
his autonomy in his craze for Willa Cather, obviously of the other’s views:
What a lovely durable shelter he had made for himself. He could carry it

everywhere and nobody could interfere with it. The day may come when

Lydia will count herself lucky to so the same. In the meantime, she’ll be

up and down. ‘Up and down’ they used to say in her childhood, talking of

the health of people who weren’t going to recover. (59)

1.2 Girls’ Relationships to Their Parents

Female identity provides Munro endless material to write about. She concerns
more about women’s lives and her works are mainly female protagonists and female
themes. In her early works, the protagonists are always girls
The word girl had formally seemed to me innocent and unburdened, like

the word child, now it appeared that it was no such a thing. A girl was not,

as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become.

(Dance 119)

To understand the world of Alice Munro’s girls, and how they fit into it, one must

8
examine their ideas about parents and families.
Most of the mothers who appear in the short stories consider their children as
burdens. The one in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” is the worried type, keeping her two
children in the yard close to her, sorrowing for the passed time when she was proud of
her husband but now he has become a travelling salesman. She uses her children as an
audience for her reminiscences and makes so many emotional claims upon them that
they welcome the opportunity to leave home and accompany their father into the
country. But when the father suggests that his bringing the children along will be
restful for the mother, the girl who tells the story comments somewhat plaintively:
“What is there about us that people need to be given a rest from?”(Dance 6)
When the mother is sick as in “Images,” the child is made to feel in the way.
Domineering Mary McQuade will not allow a small girl to stay in the sickroom:
“You’ve been tiring your Momma out? What do you want to bother your Momma for
on this nice day?”(Dance 33) With adolescence come the more serious adventures for
which mothers must make amends. “An Ounce of Cure” tells the story of a girl who
feels so “mortally depressed” (Dance 79) that she drinks the Berryman’s whiskey
while babysitting for them, disgracing herself and her family. Her mother replaces the
liquor, and one can imagine that from April to July——the time it takes for the girl to
make enough money to pay for the bottle——her despair at having a problem
daughter must be frequently aired. In “The Time of Death” Leona Parry immediately
assumes the role of victim, blaming Patricia for Benny’s death, and insisting that the
child be not allowed into her presence. By dramatizing her sorrow, Leona is trying to
make people forget her neglect of house and children. She wants to be seen as a
woman with no life of her own. “Boys and Girls” has both a grandmother and a
mother wanting to make “a little lady” out of a girl who enjoys men’s work, slams
doors, and sits with her knees apart. The mother’s nagging is suggested in the girl’s
comment that “the word girl…was a definition, always touched with emphasis with
reproach and disappointment.” (Dance 119) The particular form of burden in this case
is that of the daughter who will not fit a pattern. For an adult version, there is Helen in
“Postcard”——the daughter who does not get married and set up and ordinary home.
9
Her clandestine affair has been no secret to her mother, but has not been spoken of,
and Helen is surprised to hear the tearful accusation: “I am an old woman but I know.
If a man loses respect for a girl he doesn’t marry her,” (Dance 142) the implication
being that Helen has caused her mother much secret sorrow. In “Red Dress——1946”
an awkward adolescent compares herself with a friend who is the confidently
successful girl and might so much more easily satisfy maternal expectations. The
mother gives her daughter a stylish appearance and waits up for her after school
dances, expecting the reports of her social success. But the ugly duckling feels she can
never be as “happy” as her mother wishes.
An unmarried mother with her own burden poses special problems——as does
Hazel in “A Trip to the Coast.” The old woman reads ads from the newspaper’s
Personal Columns to her daughter: “Man in prime of life desires friendship of healthy
woman without encumbrances, send photograph first letter.” (Dance 179) May’s
query “What’s encumbrances?” is all the more painful that the term is so obviously
meant for her. With the last story in Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro shows
another type of burden——the ordeal of having to endure childish performances not
only of one’s own progeny but of the children of others. The extent to which mothers
have to hide their true feeling during a musical recital is summed up in the narrator’s
observations that they “wore the dull, not unpleasant look of acquiescence, the touch
of absurd and slightly artificial nostalgia which would carry them through any lengthy
family ritual.” (Dance 215) In all these cases mothers suffer because of their children,
the resentment towards them growing more seriously as they become older. Only with
“The office” is the desire for emancipation from them related to creativity. The mother
who wishes also to be a writer cannot expect privacy in her home, where “the very
thought of shutting a door to her children is outrageous to them.” (Dance 60) A great
variety of frustrations thus come to mothers through their children.
On the other hand, mothers themselves appear as burdens, continuing to live with
their daughters and taking their lives. Nora, who lives inn a desolate farmhouse with
her blind mother, puts on a mask of cheerfulness for her visitors. One suspects,
however, that the child who tells the story sees into the true nature of her life when she
10
remarks that “In spite of the cleanness…there is a faint sour smell——maybe of the
dishrag or the tin dipper or the oilcloth, or the old lady…” (Dance 11) For Nora who
works hard to keep her mother and herself alive, life has little zest and dreams have
soured. The Momma of “Postcard” dominates in a more active and more despicable
manner. She examines the wastepaper basket, monopolizes Clare’s presence when he
calls once a week, jokes with him about Helen, and manages many details of her
daughter’s life. The fact that she is called Momma shows in itself how well she has
managed to keep Helen where she wants her. Lois in “Thanks for the Ride” is ashamed
of her grandmother’s undisguised lechery as well as of her mother’s vulgar manners.
The city boy who has picked her up for the evening describes her as she leaves her
home with him.
She began to laugh, and I had a glimpse of her mother in her, that

jaggedness and hysteria. “Oh, my God!” she whispered. I knew she

meant what had happened in the house, and I laughed too, not knowing

what else to do. So we went back to the car laughing as if we were

friends, but we were not. (Dance 52)

Even friendship seems inaccessible to a girl manacled to the ugly women who have
imposed their way of life upon her.
The most flagrant example of the burdensome mother is that presented in “The
Peace of Utrecht.” Two daughters remember their adolescence as “a dim world of
continuing disaster” (Dance 191) in which adult responsibilities were trust upon them
by their mother’s infirmity. Despite the girls’ efforts to keep her out of sight, she had
become a legend in the town, and the narrator confides that when people spoke about
her mother, she felt her “whole identity” that pretentious adolescent construction,
come crumbling down.” (Dance 194).The narrator herself has married, but for the
past ten years her sister Maddy has kept a “vigil” beside the creature both sisters
consider “a particularly tasteless sideshow.” (Dance 195) Even now that the mother is
dead she does not leave her daughters in peace, her death being only an unsettled
treaty that will leave two women profoundly troubled for the rest of their lives.
Motherhood as it appears in the short stories engenders far more sorrows than
11
joys. The mother-daughter tie is a mutually oppressive one marked by periodical
crises and long-term anxieties which are shared in only a few cases with husband and
father.
The male figure is absent or weak in the works of Alice Munro. Those of the
short stories are typically violent or irresponsible men. In “A Trip to the Coast”, the
amateur hypnotist who causes the grandmother’s death is reminiscent of May’s
father——a man who have been just a traveler passing through, not staying to accept
the consequences of his act. In “The Shining Houses,” there is another
runaway——Mr. Fullerton, who merely walked off one day with a strange visitor,
leaving no explanation to his wife. They share secrets with their children which must
not be divulged to the mothers. In suggesting to his daughter that her mother could not
cope with the bizarre story of old Joe Phippen, the father of “Images” is pointing out
her inferiority. Both this story and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” show father and
children leaving the mother behind with a real sense of relief. There is an ambiguous
situation in “Boys and Girls”, the young girl at first escaping housework by helping
with the foxes and then, as though touched by her mother’s squeamishness, feeling
such repugnance for her father’s work that she tries to prevent his killing an old
mare. At first it is the mother who is the enemy.
She was plotting …to get me to stay in the house more, although she

knew I hated it (because she knew I hated it) and keep me from working

for my father. It seemed to me she would do this out of perversity, and to

try her power. (Dance 118)

Then comes the rejection by the father, as if he were washing his hands of her. “He
spoke with resignation, even good humor, and the words which absolved and
dismissed me for good. She is only a girl, he said.” (Dance 127) The father of “An
Ounce of Cure” has apparently handed matters of discipline over to his wife, for he
takes no position in the question of his daughter’s misconduct. When a serious
occasion arises, such as Benny’s accident in “The Time of Death”, the uselessness of
men is especially felt.
When the men came in——the father, a cousin, a neighbor, bringing a

12
 load of wood or asking shamefacedly for something to eat——they were

at once aware of something that shut them out, which removed them. And

the father who was getting a little drunk, and belligerent, because he felt

that something was expected of him and he was not equal to it, it was not

fair, said, Yeah, that won’t do Benny any good, they can bawl their eyes

out.( Dance 92)

Turing to Lives of Girls and Women one finds a similar situation with Del Jordan’s
father. He rarely speaks, retiring into the background of his family’s life with no
resistance at all. He seems the very quiet unassuming man the domineering Mrs.
Jordan would choose to father her children. His absenteeism, however, is no issue for
Del. Besides, she has more of a father than any of her friends; both Naoml and Garnet
have old, handicapped fathers, and Jerry Storey’s has been dead for years. Alice
Munro’s father do not measure up to the one described by Simone de Beauvoir.
Little by little (the young girl) realizes that if the father’s authority is not

that which is most often felt in daily affairs, it is actually supreme; it

takes on more dignity from being degraded to daily use; and even if it is

in fact the mother who rules as mistress of the household, she is

commonly clever enough to see to it that the father’s wished come first;

in important matters the mother demands, rewards and punishes in his

name and through his authority. The life of the father has a mysterious

prestige: the hours he spends at home, the room where he works, the

objects he has around him, his pursuits, his hobbies, have a sacred

character….His work takes him outside, and so it is through him that the

family communicated with the rest of the world: he incarnates that

immense, difficult, and marvelous world of adventure; he personifies

transcendence, he is God.（98）

Hardly any of this applies to Del’s father, who unquestioningly allows his wife and
children to move into a house in town, thereafter appearing fleetingly, and being
quoted only a very few times, as Del recalls the events of her life. Mrs. Jordan never
refers to her own father. Her brother Bill’s childlessness, his apparent indifference to
13
an imminent death, the unconcern with which he has accepted to be a mere “meal
ticket” (Lives 90) for the almost lifeless Nile——all contribute to make him a weak
figure. Uncle Craig might to be an exception here, but it is obvious that he is
important only in the eyes of his sisters. To Del, who interprets her aunts’ regard for
his work as senseless conformity, he remains eccentric and ineffectual.
It would have made no difference if (he) had actually had abstract

intellectual pursuits’ (like those of Natasha’s husband in War and Peace)

or if he had spent the day sorting hen feathers; they were prepared to

believe in what he did...They respected men’s work beyond anything;

they also laughed at it. This was strange; they could believe absolutely in

its importance and at the same time convey their judgment that it was,

from one point of view, frivolous, nonessential. And they would never,

never meddle with it; between men’s work and women’s work was the

clearest line drawn. (Lives 32)

Del does not share her aunt’s awe for men’s work; neither does she find it important
enough to laugh at (as she does so noticeably at sex). If men impress her, it is mainly
in their oddities. Mr. Chamberlain, with his pathetic exhibitionism, is not the person to
make her change her mind. Jerry Storey, the intellectual man, and Garnet French, the
sensual one, are not objects of great mystery, Del managing with relative ease to
overcome the threats they pose to her integrity. For Del, men are not formidable
unless one makes them so. Watching her aunts degenerate, she observes that “this was
what became of them when they no longer had a man with them, to nourish and
admire.”(Lives 60) It does not sound like the kind of risk Del would be likely to take.
This girl, who has no substitute father and relates so little to the one she has, would
puzzle both Freud and Simone de Beauvoir. The latter points out that “what Freud
calls the Electra complex is not, as he supposes, a sexual desire; it is full abdication of
the subject, consenting to become object in submission and adoration.” Del feels no
need for her father’s approbation. What he thinks of her father in one way or the other
is of little importance. She notices that he treats her respectfully, that he does not joke
with her as he does with girls of her age who have less education. “He approved of me
14
and he was in some ways offended by me. Did he think my ambitiousness showed a
want of pride?” (Lives 203) Because Mr. Jordan does not express feelings; his
influence on his voluble daughter remains very small. The last mention she makes of
him concerns his three favorite books, and these may well suggest what he is to her: a
figure who was necessary in the past, a lone man involved in monotonous activities
assuring a meager survival, a creature dwarfed by his wife. The books are H.G. Well’s
Outline of History Robinson Crusoe, and some pieces by James Thurber. Del observes
curtly that her father reads these books “over and over again, putting himself to sleep.
He never talked about what he read,”(Lives 231) In every way this man seems closed
to new ideas and he has little in the type of person his daughter is making of herself.
For example, there is an ironic contrast between his conventional defense of her father
in fraternal squabble with the dull Owen (Lives 230) and her own lusty defense of
herself in a physical struggle with Garnet (Lives 239) when she sees a menace to her
real life.
Strangely enough, Del’s family life is not unhappy. Harmony between her
parents is something she takes for granted. Her desire that they express love for each
other is balanced by the embarrassment she feels on the rare occasions where they do.
(Lives 49)The security of her home contrasts to the violence which surrounds little
Diane in Uncle Benny’s house—— and it is with this account of a child battered by
her wild mother that Del begins the story of her own life. Diane is a pale, silent, and
suspicious creature. “Touched or cuddled, she submitted warily, her body giving off
little tremors of dismay, heart beating hard like the heart of a bird if you capture it in
your hand.” (Lives 18) In direct contrast to the haphazardness of Diane’s life——as
so well illustrated by her mother’s plunge into a grotesque marriage with Uncle Benny
and her disappearance shortly afterwards—— is the solidity of Del’s own family.
My mother sat in her canvas chair and my father in a wooden one; they

did not look at each other. But they were connected, and this connection

was plain as a fence, it was between us and Uncle Benny, us and the Flats

Road, it would stay between us and anything. (Lives 149)

Del feels the strength this gives her when her parents on winter evenings play cards
15
together and she is in bed.
Upstairs seemed miles above them, dark and full of the noise of the wind.

Up there you discovered what you never remembered down in the

kitchen——that we were in a house as small and shut-up as any boat is

on the sea, in the middle of a tide of howling weather. They seemed to be

talking , playing cards, a long way away in a tiny spot of light,

irrelevantly; yet this thought of them, prosaic as a hiccough, familiar as

breath, was what held me, what winked at me from the bottom of the well

as I feel asleep.( Lives 26)

The haven provided by her parents is not superfluous support. Just as surely as Diane
is battered by her mother, so Del will be torn by the pains of growing.
It is Mr. Jordan who plays the central role in Del’s development. This
well-meaning person is taken up with a variety of interests but the modernistic ideas
she spouts are based on such fragile ground that she frequently appears
ridiculous．Her absentmindedness allows Del a fair amount of liberty and her
disregard for convention, while it sometimes makes her daughter squirm, is no doubt
related to the boldness which characterizes much of Del’s approach to life. The two
rarely engage in intimate conversation and yet time and again Del quotes her mother,
usually disagreeing with her opinions and yet feeling much more at home in their
intensity than in the righteousness of her aunts’ attitudes. Del senses that behind the
energumen in her mother, there is a rather vulnerable woman. When the aunts point
out failing such as environed blouse, Del tries to explain her ambivalent feelings to
herself.
I felt the weight of my mother’s eccentricities, of something absurd and

embarrassing about her——the aunts would just show me a little at a

time——land on my own coward shoulders. I did want to repudiate her,

crawl into favor, orphaned, abandoned, in my wrinkled sleeves. At the

same time I wanted to shield her. She would never have understood how

she needed shielding from two old ladies with their mild bewildering

humor, their tender proprieties. (Lives 64)

16
Mrs. Jordan’s love of knowledge, undigested, though it is, will eventually appeal more
strongly to Del than the aunts’ perfect house where reigns over everything “the clean,
reproachful smell of wax and lemons.”
Independent herself, Mrs. Jordan knows better than to impose her views on Del,
who is thus free not only to associate with the objectionable Naomi and the equally
dangerous Garnet but to read books her mother does not approve of as well as to
explore what the various churches of Jubilee have to offer. The period of inordinate
respect for her mother is a short one in Del’s life. Fittingly, it is expressed in a garbled
image of antiquity.
When I was younger, at the end of the Flats Road, I would watch her

walk across the yard to empty the dishwater, carrying the dishpan high,

like a priestess, walking in an unhurried, stately way, and flinging the

dishwater with a grand gesture over the fence. Then, I had supposed her

powerful, a ruler, also content. She had power still, but not so much as

perhaps she thought .And she was in no way content. Nor a priestess.

(Lives 80)

Mrs. Jordan sets out upon strange crusades. How can she stimulate the intellectual life
of Jubilee when she herself has such a shallow education? How can she give
credibility to her ideas about male domination when her own husband is so mild and
affable? Yet, from her mother’s very zeal, Del learns discretion. There are ways of
being assertive, and noting the scorn her mother receives, Del comments: “I myself
was not so different from her, but concealed it, knowing what dangerous there
were.”(Lives 81) At least, Mrs. Jordan is not guilty of what would for Del be the
unpardonable sin: attempting to make her daughter a simpering feminine doll. Del has
decided that her mother’s “virginal brusqueness” (Lives 180) will not do for her. She
is not the girl to say it, but she might be grateful that her mother has not pushed her
into one of the alternatives: to become, as the song suggests, “As soft and as pink as a
nursery” (Lives 180).

17
 Chapter Two Female Narration and Literature Form

“Language is a mirror of the mind in a deep and significant sense. It is a product

of human intelligence, created anew in each individual by operations that lie far
beyond the reach of will or consciousness.” (Hu Zhuanglin 191)
This means that language reflects thinking ways to some extent. Language can
not live without society. One does not need to be very observant to find that certain
linguistic phenomena cannot be accounted for unless they are placed in the general
context of society. In other words, social factors cannot be excluded from our
description of language and language use.
Spender expands on this concept to suggest that: “How we live our lives as
conscious thinking subjects, and how we give meaning to the material social relations
under which we live and which structure our everyday lives, depends on the range and
social power of existing discourses, our access to them, and the political strength of
the interests they represent” (Spender 26).
“Women are defined in language. A public language constructed by and for
masculinity purposes in which the male is the norm and women's experience is
“unintelligible, unreal, and unfathomable” (Spender 2).
So the word is the world. Munro is aware that language as it has traditionally
been used as a powerful tool to control reality. Yet she also perceives that the act of
using a language can liberate women from constricting patriarchal structures and
create a new female-centered reality.

2.1 Attention to Language: “The Albanian Virgin”

The first obstacle to writing fictions that are true to women’s experience is the
matter of the women writer’s alienation from the official, “male discourse” of
literature. Citing Irigaray’s description of the way women writers must first rethink
the male system of discourse in order to create fiction that fits women’s lives, Jacobus
maintains that “the aim would be to show that ‘the maxims that pass for the truth of

18
human experience, and the encoding of that experience in literature, are organizations,
when they are not fantasies, of the dominant culture’” (39). In Open Secrets, Munro
not only questions the adequacy of language to represent women’s experience, but she
also reveals language as power system that represses truth about women’s lives by
excluding women from its acquisition. Showalter points out that the power system of
gender, where the masculine becomes the norm, relegating the feminine to “other”
than the norm. “It is primarily constructed through the acquisition of language, rather
than through social ascription or cultural practice”. The result shows that “to
deconstruct language is to deconstruct gender” (3).
This is what Munro attempts in her story. “The Albanian Virgin,” where a young
Canadian woman, lost in a strange and primitive land, is unable to speak the language
and, because of her foreignness, is excluded from full participation in the gender roles
of either the men or the women. Initially, her solution is to adopt the status of “virgin”
who, according to the ancient precepts of the Albanian tribal Ghegs “was a woman
who had become like a man. She did not want to marry, and she took an oath in front
of witnesses that she never would, and then she put on men’s clothes and had her own
gun, and her horse if she could afford one, and she lived as she liked…nobody
troubled her, and she could eat at the sofra with the men”(90).
“The Albanian Virgin” begins with the abduction by Albanian outlaws of a young
Canadian heiress traveling in Europe in the 1920s.At the outset; the story has all the
markings of romance. Captured by a fierce tribe of “Ghegs,” the heroine is threatened
with being sold into marriage to a member of an enemy Muslim tribe. Gothic
conventions at this point dictate that the Muslim bridegroom must be handsomely and
brutally attractive, and that the heroine must be powerless to resist his compelling
charms and must marry him and live happily ever. Munro, however, resist this
conventional plot and replaces it with a very different story involving the young
woman’s isolated life as an exile in Albania and her eventual escape to Victoria,
Canada, where come forty years later—as an old woman, whose name we learn is
Charlotte—she tells her story to a younger Canadian woman, Claire. In “The Albanian
Virgin,” Munro places Charlotte’s story of her exile and adventure among the
19
primitive tribe of Ghegs in northern Albania next to Claire’s story of her flight from
London, Ontario and the confines of a dull marriage and an unfinished thesis. The two
women meet in Claire’s bookstore in Victoria during the 1960s. The effect of Munro’s
juxtaposition of the two women’s stories is at first unsettling and eventually revealing.
Most of the stories in Open Secrets are set in rural Ontario, and even the exotic
setting of “The Albanian Virgin” has its roots in Munro’s backyard. As Turbide
explains, the story grew out of an incident Munro had heard about a woman from her
hometown of Clinton:
The tale…is based on a real-life episode of a Clinton librarian, Miss

Rudd, who got separated from her traveling party in Albania. Munro

heard the story from her husband, and she was later able to verify some

details in the local newspaper accounts written at the time. “I could not

put these two elements together: Clinton librarian, Albania,” Munro

recalls. “So I started reading everything I could about Albania”….Of

course, Munro acknowledge, the story (The Albanian Virgin”) is not

really about a “high romance in Albania. (67)

In “The Albanian Virgin,” Munro focus on women’s cultural powerlessness and, by

revealing the possibilities of transformation open to omen in this position, she
explodes the limits placed on men and women by conventional gender roles. By
renouncing sex, both Charlotte and Clair find themselves isolated from society. From
that exile, however, comes not a sense of inferiority, but a sense of transformation.
Instead of powerlessness, the “true privation” of their isolation brings about a sense of
“risky authenticity” (120) that compel both women to refuse victimhood and the
limited roles open to them.
Women who must write in the language and literary conventions of the dominant
culture face similar artistic isolation and privation. Rachel Blau Duplessis describes
the peculiar cultural situation of the woman writer: “woman is neither wholly
‘subcultural’ nor …wholly main-cultural, but negotiates difference and sameness,
marginality and inclusion, in a constant dialogue, which takes shape variously… but

20
with one end——a rewriting of gender in dominant fiction”(43). Consequently, this
dialogue gives way to a critique of the language and the conventions within which it
must negotiate, and since such a critique can lead to a “rescripting” of the old story, “it
is no surprise that in the process romance is singled out as a “trope for the sex-gender
system as a whole”: the “Gothic” is “a major organizing grid for female consciousness.
It is a form of sexual feudalism: the masochistic powerlessness of the generic female
confronted with the no-frills, cruel-buttender male” (Duplessis 44).
Indeed, “The Albanian Virgin” begins as a romantic narrative complete with
Gothic conventions of female powerlessness:
In the mountains, in Maltsia e madhe, she must have tried to tell them her

name, and “Lottar” was what they made of it. She had a wound in her leg,

from a fall on sharp rocks when her guide was shot. She had a fever. How

long it took them to carry her through the mountains, bound up in a rug

and strapped to a horse’s back, she had no idea. They gave her water to

drink now and then, and sometimes raki, which was a kind of brandy,

very strong. (81)

As the narratives continues, the heroine submits, in Gothic fashion , to her situation:
“When she was being carried through the pine forest, she awoke and found herself
suspended, lulled——in spite of the pain and perhaps because of the raki——into a
disbelieving surrender”(85)
Yet Munro does not allow us to be lulled and suspended in the powerless of
gender scripted into this genre. Instead, she positions herself between what Jacobus
has termed “the alien critic and inheritor…at once within culture and outside it,” able
to challenge the conventions and work within them (43). Munro’s authorial positioning
parallels Jacobus’s notion of women’s “consigned inferiority,” as determined by
socially described gender roles. According to Jacobus, “we need the term ‘women’s
writing’ if only to remind us of the social conditions under which women wrote and
still wrote and still write——to remind us that the conditions of heir (re)production are
the economic and educational disadvantages, the sexual and material organizations of
society, which, rather than biology, from the cultural determinant”(39). Lottar’s
21
experience within the women’s culture in the kula also parallels the woman writer’s
alien position, at once within and outside the power system of language. At first, the
only one she can communicate with is the Franciscan priest, who ministers to the clan,
and who speaks Italian, a language she had recently picked up in her travels: “He
understood so much more than anyone else around her that she expected him, at first,
to understands everything” (82). His complete understanding is not possible; however,
just as in the flow of time, instead of maintaining her outsider stance, Lottar is
incorporated into the repetitious takes of the women’s culture:
Women’s hands must never be idle…they pounded the bread

Dough…had to sweep out the kula…Little girls stirred the yogurt…Older

might butcher a kid…Or they would go together, girls and women, all

ages, to wash the men’s white head scarves in the cold little river…They

tended the tobacco crop…hoed the com and cucumbers, milked the

ewes…Women were with women and men were with men, expect at

times in the night. (87-88)

Caught up in this continual labor, Lottar also comes to a better awareness of those
from whom she initially felt remote:
When she thought of how she had been during those first weeks—giving

orders, speaking English without embarrassment, sure that her special

case merited attention—she was ashamed at how little she had

understood. And the longer she stayed at the kula, the better she spoke the

language and became accustomed to the work; the stranger was the

thought of leaving. (90)

At the same time, the reality of her social position as a foreigner and a woman
make it impossible for Lottar to play out the role of inheritor. Her marriage to a
clansman is out of the question, so the clanswomen plan to marry her off to a Muslim
infidel for three napoleons, because, as they explain, “she has to marry somebody.” (92)
The Franciscan priest, however, will not tolerate such a situation, and offers Lottar a
way out of repeated female powerlessness: “If you become a Virgin, it will be
alrigh…But you must swear you will never go with a man. You must swear in front of
22
witnesses…By the stone and the Cross” (93). Lottar’s oath of virginity in front of
twelve witness serves not only as an acceptance of the official power of language, it
also serves as a way to avoid consigned inferiority in the form of accepted gender role
of marriage. As well, it proves her a time and place, away from conventional gender
roles, to experience the sense of risky authenticity that is often denied to women. In
this way, Munro challenges both gender stereotypes and language in her representation
of the Albanian Virgin, whose oath allows her to live alone, free from the unending
work of women, with the same privileges of men. Such a figure is very different from
the female powerlessness ascribed to virginity by Gothic conventions.
According to Joseph Gold, “Language is both an instrument in Munro’s creation
of women and a defining part of that creation, a part of her subject.”(2) In “The
Albanian Virgin,” she addresses this position through her constant dialogue with
prevailing narrative conventions and gender roles. Adopting a different tack, Ajay
Heble explains how Munro’s fascination with the details of the surface or appearance
of reality is paradoxically coupled with her awareness of the limits of language to
represent reality:
The world of facts, details and objects, which, at first, serve to ground the

reader in a safe and recognizable reality, is suddenly called into question

as Munro makes us aware that we are reading only attempt to represent

these things in fiction, that language is being used to re-present reality.

Our hold on reality thus becomes, at best, precarious and tentative, as

referents become signs, things become words and signified become

signifiers. (7)

In “The Albanian Virgin,” Munro brings these two dimensions together: her
deconstruction of the power of language to reflect reality also subverts the power
system of gender.
Munro’s use of multiple versions of the two stories (Lottar-Charlotte’s and
Claire’s) of women’s cultural isolation is one of her primary means for exposing the
unreliability of language to represent reality. In “The Albanian Virgin,” Lottar’s story
of exile and escape is represented by Munro’s third person narrator after first being
23
told by Charlotte and then retold by Claire. In turn, Munro intertwines the story of
Lottar’s exile in Albania with the first-person narration of Claire’s exile to Victoria and
her friendship with Carlotte. The gap between the realistic depiction of surface reality
and the uncertainty at its core is manifested by Claire’s reaction to Charlotte’s story of
the Albanian virgin:
One night, when Lottar served one man his food…she noticed what small

hands he had, and hairless wrists. Yet he was not young, he was not a

boy…his voice...seemed hoarse but womanish. But he smoked, he ate

with the men, he carried a gun. “Is that a man?” Lottar said…But the

young girls (laughed)… “Oh, Lottar, you are so stupid! Don’t you know

when you see a Virgin?” (89)

Munro interrupts Charlotte’s third-person Gothic tale of Lottar’s abduction by

introducing the story of the Virgin and then by producing Claire’s skeptical
first-person account of her reactions to the story: “I heard this story in the old
St.Joseph’s Hospital in Victoria from Charlotte, who was the sort of friend I had in my
early days there. My friendships then seemed both intimate and uncertain. I never
knew why people told me things or what they meant me to believe” (95). Claire is
suspicious of Charlotte’s story about the Virgin, her motives in telling it as well we its
meaning. In addition to presenting Claire’s distrust of Charlotte’s story, Munro disrupts
the illusion of reality about Charlotte’s past history with a multilayered representation
of the story of the young Canadian woman’s exile in Albania.

2.2 Treatment of Form: “Rooted in Progress”

Munro’s innovation treatment of the short story, which features the alteration of
existing narrative patterns of the genre in order to fit the unpredictable form of
women’s identity development, makes clear the close relationship between notions of
subjectivity and story form. This relationship calls to mind Zagarell’s explanation of
the recent “discovery” of the narrative of community as a genre. She links genre theory,
identity theory, and feminist theory in her discussion of the recent challenges to the

24
construction of the literary canon and to the construction of subjectivity:
The questioning of the monolithic self… has thrown into relief other

assumptions that formerly discouraged serious study of extended

non-novelistic works of narrative prose…privileging the individual

informs the novel’s early appearance, purposes, and structures…feminist

scholarship has been …instrumental in reconceptualizing literary history

in ways that make an enterprise like the identification of narrative of

community possible.(255-256)

Such supraindividual concerns, according to Zagarell, are central to female identity

formation and to the narrative of community.
These concerns appear prominently in Munro’s story. “The Jack Randa Hotel”
where, in lieu of linear development, the story opts for a more episodic presentation
that emphasizes subjectivity as an ongoing progress. The story opens with its main
character, Gail, sitting in a plane “on the runway, in Honoluu” (161) wavering between
Canada and Australia. The middle-aged protagonist has left her home in Walley to
follow her former lover, Will, who has abandoned her for Sandy, a younger, Australian
woman. After selling her small dress-shop, Gail has left without telling anyone where
she is going. To dramatize her flight, she has cut and dyed her hair, and put on a “dress
of a kind she would never usually wear” (169), and, later, we discover she has adopted
a new identity, that of a dead woman, In Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Still in Canada, Gail senses the impermanence of her life, especially when she
visiting the home of Will’s mother, Cleata, who is also Gail’s close friend:
This bare-fronted pre-Victrian house in Walley, and the veranda, and the

drinks, and the catalpa tree that she was always looking at…All the trees

and streets in Walley, all the liberating views of the lake and the comfort

of the shop. Useless cutouts, fakes and props. The real scene was hidden

from her, in Austrilia. (168)

Gail’s perception of life’s makeshift quality is underscored by the fact that when they
were together, Will taught high-school drama and Gail was a costumer, or made
“handcrafted” clothes as she liked to call them.
25
 In this story, too, a talking back and forth goes on. Munro’s third –person narrator
questions the main character’s identity. “What sort of a woman did she think she was
making herself into?” and then responds, “That doesn’t matter. It is a disguise” (169).
The pointed question indicates Munro;s conscious recognition of her own and her
character’s awareness of the necessity of pretense, the necessity to five life and fiction
dramatic narrative shape.Gail continues to lose herself in her search for Will in
Australia: “Would anybody know Gail? With her dark glasses and her unlikely hair,
she feels so altered as to be invisible. It’s also the fact of being in a strange county that
has transformed her” (170). Like Kat, Gail’s transformation and the fact that she “did
not tell anyone where she was going”(169) offer temporary respite from the old habits
of her life with Will, which she feels are tinged with pretense.
Will’s romantic view of her as “brave and generous and resourceful and gifted” is
seen by Gail as showing “a touching innocence”(170).She, on the other hand,
perceives herself as “anxious and desperate” (166), and the burden of deceiving Will
to fit the dramatic role in which he has cast her, causes Gail to carry on imagined
conversations with him, “trying to think up clever and lighthearted thing to say.” (162)
As Gail journey to Australia becomes more and mo re motivated by her need for
escape than by her wish to pursue Will, Munro’s story strays farther from the
conventional narrative path. Increasingly, Gail becomes intensely and ironically
conscious of the contradictory interconnections in her life. Her new flat on Hawtre
Street in Brisbane and her new identity as Ms.Catherine Thornaby, whose recent
demise leaves the flat available to Gail, provide her refuge from her old life with Will,
even though she has traveled thousands of miles to be near him, and Will has recently
written a letter to Ms. Thornaby, which has been intercepted by Gail. Visiting a nearby
lending liberary, Gail “calls to mind” the woman whose runs it when she decides to
respond to Will as Catherine Thornaby. Of the librarian, Gail thinks, “There is
Catherine Thornaby, dead and moved into a new existence a few blocks away” (175).
Munro’s surrealistic weaving together the treads of human alienation and
connection calls to mind her earlier “Who Do You Think You Are?” and the
protagonist, Rose’s perception of the missed connection between herself and an old
26
classmate, Ralph Gillespie. Although they lost touch after high school, Rose still feels
that they are connected as co-prenders: “She felt his life, close, closer than the lives of
men she’d loved, one slot over from her own” (206). “The Jack Randa Hotel”, with its
references to misunderstood names, false pretenses, and missed connections, revisits
the notion of interchanble lives and identities one slot over from each other. Will’s
correspondence with the dead Ms. Thornaby, Gail’s false identity as the dead woman,
and Gail’s connection of Ms.Thornaby with the lending librarian, are all indicators of
the transitory and transitional nature of identity at the same time that they emphasize
its interwoven aspects.
In “The Jack Randa Hotel” the narrator further reveals to us that Gail is not the
protagonist’s real name. Her real name is Russian, “Galya,” a name she discarded
when she left her distant life with her family, a life, the narrator tells us, “she could
still salvage…if she wanted to”(175). The idea of salvaging, of rescuing and reusing
material, permeates this story. Gail’s continued correspondence with Will under false
pretense, and the fluent and “fine nasty style” of her letter writing, strikes her as
having been gotten “ out of some book” and shocks her into thinking that “ she has
certainly gone too far” (178). Her discomfort with her artful dissernblance is
underscored when, during her morning walks, she encounters birds, flying over the
river, “smaller than gulls…their bright white wings and breasts…touched with pink.”
They are Galah birds, she is told, a name that sounds “something like her childhood
name” (179).These birds, with their unsetting familiar names, are one of several
incidents in the story involving name confusions. Gail mistakes the name of the exotic
blooming trees, jacaranda, for Jack Randa, and soon after that her landlord startles her
by “calling her false name” (182). Munro’s artful juxtaposition of these distant lives,
temporary names, false identities, and impersonations reveals their interconnections.
Identities, after all, are interchangeable; they can be salvaged, rescued and recycled to
provide refuge from any tendency toward self-completion.
After writing several letters that reveal his growing dissatisfaction with his
present wife, and his near-discovery of Gail’s identity, Will realizes that he is
corresponding not with Ms. Thornby, but with Gail. “Gail. I know it’s you” he writes.
27
This discovery of Gail’s former identity triggers, unexpectedly, not Gail’s happiness at
the possible recovery of her life with Will, but her flight, involving a new disguise:
“Her clothes can stay behind, her humble pale-printed dresses, her floppy
hat.”Stripped of her camouflage, and her false identity, Gail must run for her life.
“Otherwise,” the narrator asks, “What will happen?” and answering her own question,
she responds evasively, “What has surely wanted. What she is suddenly, as surely,
driven to escape” (188). The narrator talks back to herself in an attempt to understand
why Gail actions do not follow the prescribed narrative pattern for living happily ever
after through self completion. Gail should run to her prince rather than flee from him.
She should accept the unforeseen intervention that will bring them together.
In her story, Munro pairs the death of Cleata from a distance, with the close-up
death of a stranger, the man who lives in the flat downstairs from Gail. It is his hand
that she holds, while “impersonating” a person to whom he might be connected: “his
companion, the red-haired young man, or some other young man, or a woman, or even
his mother” (186). She holds on to the dying man “with great force…enough force to
hold her back, when she would have sprung towards Will” (187). Like Rose and Ralph
Gillespie, Gail feels that this stranger’s life is “closer than the lives of men she’s loved,
one slot over from her own.” In its suggestion of a temporary refuge for transients,
“The Jack Randa Hotel” is thus an appropriate title for a story about the confounding
combination of human dislocation and connection.
Munro’s vision of the transitional and transitory nature of identity parallels her
treatment of narrative patterns as salvageable and recyclable. They can be altered to fit
the processual nature of female identity formation. Munro as author is also aware of
her pretender status where the pretense lies in creating art through some kind of
narrative order. At the end of the story, Gail finds herself in the airport on her way
back to Canada buying a present to send to Will, a small round box made by Australian
aborigines. The decoration on the box triggers Gail’s memory of a day when she and
Will witnessed “hundreds, maybe thousands, of…butterflies hanging in the trees”.
Looking like “flakes of gold tossed up and caught in the branches,” and there ensures
for Gail a kind of salvaging: “On that way, Cleata had already begun to die and Will
28
had already met Sandy. This dream had already begun Gail’s journey and her deceits”
(189). The butterfly as symbol of metamorphosis is used by Munro as metaphor of
Gail’s existence. The collection of memories of her past, however, does not form any
final sense of self-completion for Gail. Instead, they appear and disappear in a
disjunctive and dream-like jumble, and Gail feels no compulsion to find order and
meaning in them other than to weave them into her future life. In “The Jack Randa
Hotel” the pretense of any kind of narrative order or control is exposed and alongside
it is revealed the duplicity and dislocation women feel in maneuvering within such
order and control. This perpetual negotiation, says Zagarell, makes women “highly
adept at balancing divergent, often contradictory systems of value and discourse and
gives them special skill in the kinds of mediation that…are fundamental to narrative of
community” (260).
At the end of “The Jack Randa Hotel” the narrator talks back to herself one more
time, when she questions the purpose of Gail’s gift. This self interrogation carries
echoes of the author questioning her role as artist or “god like arranger of patterns and
destinies”: “What could you put in a box like that before you wrapped it up and sent it
far away? A bead, feather, a potent pill? Or a note, folded up tight, to about the size of
a spitball. Now it’s up to you to follow me” (189). I would argue that the direction
contained in this metafictional statement is less to follow than to take the initiative.
Thus, similar to her narrative strategy in “Carried Away”, Munro leaves it up to the
reader to decide whether or not to follow this new narrative path. This option also
reminds us that “It is through our words…and through our conversations with each
other, that we have the power to re-create our worlds” (Spender 9). In “ The Jack
Randa Hotel,” author, narrator, characters, and readers talk back and forth and perform
interdependently “ the small-scal negotiations and daily procedures through which
communities sustain themselves,” and, in this case, the story itself. Furthermore, the
relational process through which this nurturance takes place can be seen as a kind of
“salvaging” of the short-story genre from the end of the century’s “wreckage” of
cultural loss and despair.

29
 Chapter Three Interaction of Female Identity and Canadian

Nationality

Society in the forms of gender and nationality has played a part in shaping writer’s
vision. Howells describes the effects of being Canadian and women on the literature such
writers produce:
It might …be argued that women’s stories could provide models for the

story of Canada’s identity. The feminine insistence on a need for revision

and a resistance to open or revolution might be said to characterize

Canada’s national image at home and abroad, while women’s stories

about procedures for self-discovery, which are as yet(as always)

incomplete may be seen to parallel the contemporary Canadian situation.

Gender and nationality have an impact on the writer’s challenge to the conventional
unwavering unity of effect and inexorable movement toward closure. National image and
gender operate in Canadian women writer’s imaginations as forces that produce a sense of
narrative incompleteness and discontinuity, which subverts the conventional narrative
movement toward closure in a unique way.

3.1 Alice Munro’s View on Gender

Munro, from rural southern Ontario, with only two years of college education at
the University of Western Ontario and twenty years of a conventional marriage and
three children, began her early literary career in relative isolation. Catherine Sheldrick
Ross explains: “With small encouragement from the world, Alice just kept writing
whenever she could. She sent stories off to the few available markets, and coped with
rejections by focusing on what she was writing next…she worked alone, not knowing
other writers or feeling part of any community.” (5)
Munro grew up as Alice Laidlaw on the edge of the small town of Wingham in
southern Ontario，she lives a common life as other girls. When her mother contracted
Parkinson’s disease, marriage presented itself to her. Her scholarship ran out at the
30
same time. Munro admits, “There was no money then to do anything but get
married…I could either stay in Wingham or get married.” (Ross49). Although she is
quick to add that her husband was accepting of her role as a writer, nevertheless, for
the next twenty years, her writing was accomplished in between her main duties as
wife and mother. She often wrote in her laundry room, and when she applied for a
Canada Council grant, she explains, “Perhaps unwisely I said it was to get a cleaning
woman and babysitters. I did not get it, and I heard via the grapevine that… a demand
like this just was not taken seriously. I imagine that men who said they had to go to
Morocco or Japan would get grants.” (Ross 58).
This domestic situation may account for her preference for the short story-story
genre. As she explained in a 1973 interview with Graeme Gibson: “In twenty years
I’ve never had a day when I didn’t have to think about somebody else’s needs. And
this means the writing has to be fitted in around it…I think it’s a miracle that I’ve
produced anything.” (55) In addition, Munro’s creative imagination seems
well-suited to the short-story genre, what is important to her is “a view of reality—a
kind of reality that I can go into for a while….It’s getting into it that’s important, not
caring what happens.”(Gibson 257).
For Munro, the ordinary existence of Canadian women serves as a point of
departure into the remarkable and mysterious. Through her stories, Munro views
everyday details and life experiences as potential departure points into the
extraordinary. Although seeing the mysterious in the lives of her characters, the
Canadian women, may be a way of escaping from one’s everyday reality, it may also
be Munro’s way of acting the creative non-victim. Seeing beneath the surface into the
mystery and truth of women’s lives challenges a previous literature which defined
women according to male- directed conventions. This pursuit, however, is conducted
on the artistic and intuitive level: “Her method is not that of the didactic social critic,
but that of the literary artist who filters and refracts society through the prism of her
own imagination and experience.”(Rasporich 21)
At the same time, the converse is also true: society in the forms of gender and
nationality has played a part in shaping her present vision. As Munro herself explains
31
becoming artist was a struggle, in which the roles expected of women was a major
component: “I grew up having to feel so…protective about… writing… I always
operated in disguises, feeling if I do to a certain point what the world expects of me,
then they’ll leave me alone, and I can do my work.”(Gibson 249-251). Being left
alone, however, is not something that is easy when one is a wife and mother: “The
detachment of the writer, the withdrawal is not traditionally expected of a woman,
particularly in the man-woman relationship…And then when children come…the
problems are …getting enough time” (Gibson 250). Munro goes on to explain that
this necessary “selfishness” is something which “complicates a woman’s life much
more than a man’s, because men are expected to be selfish in a way about their work,
to have faith in themselves.” (Gibson 254).
In 1973, her marriage of twenty years dissolved, and she lived on her own raising
her younger daughters, struggling to write and teach. Looking back on this period in a
1987 interview, Munro draws attention to her prior lack of feminist consciousness:
“When I wrote Lives of Girls and Women, it didn’t cross my mind that I was writing a
feminist book…it just occurred to me once that I wanted to write the kind of thing
about a young girl’s sexual experience that had often been written about boys’…But I
didn’t think, then, that I was writing about women and their ways of survival…Now, I
am consciously interested in the way women live. The way things are different for
men and women at middle age, and so on.” (Hancock 223) By the 1990’s she had also
been made aware of the effects of gender roles on women’s sense of power:
I do feel a power now that I haven’t felt science I was very young,

probably science I was about twelve, and I do think there is this power at

both ends of sexual life…that pleasure you have as a child which doesn’t

come from rejection by other people or social role or achievement or

anything at all but the moment…I remember that very strongly from

about nine to twelve. That’s the girl’s period of power, reality, and then

the whole female thing has to be dealt with. And I guess you go on

dealing with it for about forty years in one way or another. (Rasporich

18)

32
The development of Munro’s consciousness of her own experience of gender has
become subject matter for her art.
Dealing with the conflict between conforming to gender-role expectations and
following one’s ambitions to be an artist has been an ongoing process for Munro. She
compares writing to “a trip you take all alone…something we are accustomed to
thinking of the male artist as doing.” But not the woman, who, instead, we see as
“looking after the material wants but also providing a kind of unquestioning
cushion…which is the very opposites of what the female artist has to do” (Rasporich
21-22).This is the dilemma of the female artist, which, according to Munro, is made
difficult by the perception that “you are betraying to men that this still center that they
had thought was there, this kind of unquestioning cushion, is not there at all,” and
because at the same time “you know that you are not a freak. You are just the artist
woman as the man is the artist man” (Rasporich 22).

3.2 The Struggle for Identity as a Canadian Woman

The struggle for identity as an “artist woman” was compounded for Munro by
her nationality. The title of her 1978 story collection Who Do You Think You Are
indicates the Canadian preoccupation with identity that can be traced to Canada’s
political and economic colonization by Britain and the United States. When Munro
was arranging the collection in the U.S., her publisher felt that the original title was
too tentative and changed it to The Beggar Maid.
In an interview, Munro explained how the title change reveals differing concepts
of national identities: “They said to me nobody in America ever said to anybody,
‘Who Do You Think You Are’ Because Americans were too self-assured” (Hancock
203).
Such a sense of self-assurance continues to be alien to Munro. Although she
experienced as well as contributed to the Canadian cultural renaissance of the early
1970s, a sense of self-deprecation tends to remain. Thus, when asked about the
practice of journal-keeping, Munro confesses, “No. No. I don’t do any of that…I’m

33
always attracted by the idea of writing a journal. But I’m too self-conscious when I
start to do it. I don’t think it’s natural for me to write a journal. And I wonder if this
has something to do with being a Canadian” (Hancock 220). The pervasive sense of
the impossibility of being Canadian and an artist is also one that Munro has explicitly
addressed: “People say, how did you think you could be a Canadian and a writer
(Who Do You Think You Are), But since I thought that I could be a girl from Wingham
and a writer (laughter) that was the first step” (Harwood 127).
The other force Munro has had to deal with is the sense of lack a Canadian
literary tradition. She, like Atwood, points to the British tradition, especially the
women novelists, as having a significant impact on her artistic ambitions: “Wuthering
Heights was the big influence from the time I was 12 to 14. I still parts of that book
by heart” (Harwood 124) although she has dismissed the influence of Canadian
writers. “You know, I wasn’t aware of them” (Harwood 124), she does admit to the
important effect on her of L.M.Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon because it “is
about a girl wants to be a writer” (Miller 124). Munro also remembers the
significance of her later discovery of Ethel Wilson’s stories:
I discovered Ethel Wilson…when I had just moved to Vancouver, and she

was actually living in Vancouver, and I read “Lilly’s Story” and “Tuesday

and Wednesday”….It’d be about ‘52. And “Tuesday and Wednesday” is a

story that I don’t think is around much and more. It’s like a short novel. I

was enormously excited by her work….It was important to me that a

Canadian writer was using so elegant a style. You know I don’t mean

style in the superficial sense, but that a point of view so complex and

ironic was possible in Canadian literature. (Structures 18)

Certainly, complexity and irony are the words that can be used to describe Munro’s
own writing, and both qualities evolve naturally out of the unique vision inherently in
being a woman and Canadian. “The woman and the Canadian find that they have
much in common,” observes Linda Hutcheon, “in both cases there is a necessary
self-defining challenging of the dominant traditions (male; British/American)”
(Canadian Postmodern 5).
34
 This affinity between the woman an the Canadian has been noted by W.J.Keith
who points out that much of Modern Canadian fiction has been produced by
“accomplished women writers” (157), just as David Stouck has noted that the great
amount of attention “focused on Canada’s women writers” is due to “a conjunction of
feminist literary interest and the intriguing fact that a disproportionately large number
of Canada’s best writers have form the outset been women (257). This situation,
according to Mickey Perlman, leads also to explorations of “the issue of identity… the
linchpin of Canadian writing by women” (4).and is certainly at the center of Munro’s
writing. Moreover, Perlman suggests that “identity…evolves from place to site, from
birth and perception…in reaction to someone else’s perception of you” (50), which, of
course, includes gender, race and national identity. Coral Ann Howells suggests that
Canadian women writers’ search for identity reveals that “instead of the self being
solid and unified it becomes a more shifting concept without fixed boundaries” and
that “this feminine awareness finds interesting parallels in the problematic concept of
Canadian national identity which has notoriously escaped definition” (25) Speaking of
her own experience in teaching Munro’s stories, Lorna Irvine observes that the
varying responses to Munro’s fiction by her students reveal “the peculiarly ambiguous
quality of Munro’s fiction.” Her students commented on the way that Munro’s
“shifting literary paradigms emphasize idiosyncratic angles of vision,” and they listed
the complex characteristics of Canadian writing that are addressed by Munro:
“women’s contemporary Canadian writing is fundamentally ambivalent;
contemporary women’s writing tends towards indeterminacy; Munro uses fiction to
demonstrate and investigate the topic of ambivalence” (252)
A complex and ironic point of view is indeed a sort of stylistic signature in
Munro’s stories. She, herself, best describes her own distinctive writing style in
“Simon’s luck” a story in her collection, Who Do You Think You Are, whose main
character provides an idiosyncratic view of life’s unfolding as, “those shifts of
emphasis that throw the story line open to question, the disarrangements which
demand new judgments and solutions, and throw the windows open on inappropriate
unforgettable scenery” (173). According to Lawrence Mathew, Munro’s “art of
35
disarrangement” also functions as a way to “remind…us that any significant truth
delivers is a partial and provisional one” (192). Further more, Mathews believes that
this strategy is one that Munro will continue to employ an that will continue a
constitute a major appeal of her work：
The value of the art of disarrangement…lies in its continue commentary

on its own tentativeness, in the face of life’s complexity and mystery. It is

not that the artist should abandon her attempt to render experience fully

and accurately… rather; one should proceed warily, in humility, even, in

a sense, quixotically. Munro’s engagement in this endeavor in full

awareness of its difficulties, points to what will prove to be of enduring

interest in her work. (193)

That Munro remains committed to writing fiction despite her awareness of art’s
tentativeness can perhaps be traced to her desire to encourage her readers to remain
committed to a sense of the goodness of life in the face of their awareness of life’s
complexity and mystery. Similarly, she may be encouraging her readers to deploy the
strategy of disarrangement as a way to “demand new judgments and solutions” to
their specific life situations.
According to E.D.Blodgett, indeed, Munro’s particular fictional
disparagements are what her attraction “to-women—some of whom find feminist
concerns in her works,” while he also notes “a growing appeal to those attracted by
her subtly self-aware manner of narration. It is this appeal that has made her one of
the more profound contemporary writers of the short story in Canada” (Preface). I
would emphasize that this self-awareness especially constitutes an appeal for women
a feminists who are sensitive to the power politics of gender relationships.
The complexity of social relationships depends on the nature of the balance
of power in a relationship, and Munro claims this is a major concern in much of her
writing. Being a Canadian and a woman has sensitized her feelings of powerlessness,
and she explains that her ambition to write comes out of “isolation, feelings of power
that don’t get out in a normal way” (Twigg18). She agrees with Gibson that most
fiction is about love and power, and she maintains that she often writes “from the side
36
of the person who loses power, but not always” (26).
As much as Munro writes about powerlessness, however, she does so in a
way that indicates her survivor status and makes her a creative nonvictim albeit in a
complexity and ironic way. This complexity, according to W. R. Martin lies in the
way that her insights are “at once penetrating and sympathetic, are typically conveyed
in paradoxes and parallels that are informed by the texture of her vision, which
appears also in the shape of her prose as well as in the structure of her stories. Her art
is …a complex counterpointing of opposed truths in a memorable model of life and
reality” (1). As Martin sees it, Munro’s nationality contributes to this artistic strategy.
Her realistic descriptions of the country towns of southwestern Ontario, where she
grew up and now lives, set a familiar scene that facilitates the injection of the
“strange…the mysterious, or alien” (205). This conjunction of the familiar and
strange can in turn register a sense of an ironic, doubleness of vision toward this
region and its people that, Martin feels, allows the exploration of the
characteristically Canadian struggle with identity evidenced in Munro’s aphoristic
query, “Who Do You Think You Are?” as well as in Northrop Frye’s speculation
about Canadian identity, “Where is here?”
Whereas Martin points to Munro’s Canadian experience as the inspiration for
her fictional parallels, Helen Hoy focuses on the way that Munro translates her
gendered position into a fictional model that is able to “include” rather than “discard”,
and which is able to “make room for ‘all that is contradictory and persistent and
unaccommodating about life.’” Hoy suggests that it is Munro’s experience of being a
female that helps to explain her inclusion of “what is muted, unmarked, or silenced in
society” (5). As Hoy sees it, it is Munro’s womanly experience of listening beyond
the usual sounds and seeing beyond the usual sights that enables her to challenge a
narrow view of reality and the dominant fictional patterns relates to it. To Hoy,
Munro’s stories demonstrate that reality “consistently proves more various than the
human constructs created to contain it” (5).
Munro’s vision of Canadian women’s experiences allows her to see beneath the
surface to the mystery in the lives of her characters, some of whom, in turn, are
37
accorded this unique vision. Howells suggests that just as Munro struggled early on to
disguise her writerly ambitions in normal feminine pursuits, so many of her fictional
characters feel that they must camouflage their determination. Author and characters,
says Howells, “are struck by the discontinuities between the surface ordinariness of
their town and of their own lives and the secret worlds that lie beneath appearances of
normality” (“Worlds”124).
Whereas Atwood seems to have resisted pressure to conceal her artistic
ambitions, and has made clear her views on nationality and gender in the form of very
public and polemical statements, Munro seems to deal with her concerns about
gender and nationality mainly on the artistic and intuitive level. She is much more
likely to approach art as separate from politics. She is also very aware of this similar
reticence in many women writers. In an interview with Rasporich, she explains her
ambivalence about overt political statements:
“Women are trained to be reticent, to be nice, and to be genteel… I think

it’s very hard for women to manage the kind of exposure that they may

feel has to be done in their own fiction. I think all this has changed, of

course. But I think that this is a problem” (21).

When asked, however, how conscious she is as an artist of envisioning her world in
female terms, Munro concedes her political awareness:
I’m not at all conscious of doing it, but it has certainly become apparent

to me that this is what I do…it could have something to do with the kind

of environment I grew up in… You know, it’s the women in the kitchen

who talk about everything that’s happening to everybody and so the

community’s personal life would seem to be much more strongly seen

and felt by women than men” (20).

Munro transforms the personal into the political in her art, not through overt
commentary by her characters or narrators, but through the subtle dynamics of
complexity and irony which inform her fiction. The arresting description that
concludes her early story collection, The Lives of Girls and Women, is imbued with
personal, domestic images of women’s consciousness, which can, in turn, be shared by
38
the entire community: “People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple,
amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with linoleum” (253). In her most
recent story collection, Munro continues to look beyond the surface ordinariness of
people’s lives and reveals the open secrets beneath.

39
 Conclusion

Alice Munro was still a new name to me when I borrowed some books of hers
from my teacher Pan Shouwen two years ago. Someone gives Munro judo kudos: “If
black belts were awarded for writing short stories, Canada’s Alice Munro would have
one with bells on,” and he lauds her “stunning victory over one of the toughest of
literary forms….where each story is richer and more satisfying than most novels”.
From reading her books, I was rewarded with great pleasure and amazement.
With the interests for Munro. I have attempted to look into Alice Munro’s works from
identity this perspective. How identity affects Munro in her short story creating and
whether be a Canadian woman writer means something more.
In this thesis, I try to give reasonable analysis to support my idea. By reading
references abroad and at home, through researching the internet resources, I found I
get closer to Munro. As a talented Canadian woman writer, Munro has already
attracted a lot of attentions from critics as well as readers. Most of Munro’s works
take the form of short fiction, and the choice of short fiction form allows her to
convey various themes in a succinct yet insightful fashion. Within Munro’s
deceptively simple narrative style we can find a rich combination of techniques as the
form evolves to encompass an increasingly complex artistic vision. While this
consistently reflecting her interest in female identity and the nature of reality.
In description of the shape of Munro’s stories, Rasporich refers to Munro’s
departure from the old notions of narrative:
Clearly, the form of Munro’s art is equal to notion-skinned layers of

multiple meanings and levels of reality. Clearly, too, to interpret her art as

simple extensions of reality or mirror reproductions of life-as-it-is-lived,

to argue…for a singular mimetic relationship between art and life, is

highly suspect, particular in the new age of postmodern writing and

thinking(164)

Munro’s art, according to Rasporich, “consists of an expansion inward, rather than

40
outward, the discrimination of the tone and language that makes a small event within
a provincial society an important human matter. It perhaps an essentially feminine art”
(166) Moreover, even when Munro provides temporary consolation by deliberately
using the conventional patterns to reassure the reader, at the same time she uses them
as points of departure to new realms of possibility.
Being a Canadian and a woman has sensitized her to feeling of powerlessness,
and she explains that her ambition to write comes out of “isolation, feelings of power
that don’t get out in a normal way” (Twigg18) And Munro’s Canadian experience as
the inspiration for her fictional paradoxes and parallels.
As much as Munro has felt the pull or the “spell” of story making, she has also
felt a distrust of the traditional conventions of story making. Her own experience as a
woman and a Canadian make her wary of controlled structures; thus while she draws
detailed representations of the textual surface of reality, she also questions her own or
anyone’s narrative authority by resisting the convention of the neat ending, or the
reliability of the narrator. This disarrangement questions any conventional “order” of
reality. As Helen Hoy points out , “For Munro and her characters, reality is often the
antagonist of the stories, confronted, defined, pinned down, only to reappear in a
different and more plausible guise elsewhere, more elusive, more disconcerting, more
intractable than previously suspected”(5).
Over the decades of Munro’s career, her representation of identity becomes more
complex, implying a significant element of self-creation, as characters reshape their
past into legends, often seeking to come to terms with the inevitable impact of family
and identity is particularly focused on the lives of women who are consistently in the
foreground of Munro’s work.
Identity and reality are not fixed concepts in Munro’s fiction. In fact, she presents
a myriad of reality as the ‘lives of girls and women’ are explored through the
perspectives of other characters, and through various, and often contradictory
self-images. These identities may be maintained simultaneously, or discard and
transformed with the passage of time and the gaining of life experience. The reader is
not provided with one objective reality, and emphasis is placed instead on inner,
41
personal versions of the truth. Reality is reconstructed from unreliable memory,
creating a new individual truth or legend that may be of greater value. Stories within
stories abound, as characters offer up their versions of reality: editing, revising,
reshaping, retelling themselves and their lives to project or protect what they currently
hold to be “true”

42
 Works Cited

Baldick, C., Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. Shanghai: Shanghai

Foreign Language Education Press, 2000
Belyea, Andy. “Redefining The Real: Gothic Realism in Alice Munro’s Friend of My
Youth” Diss. Queen’s University. 1998
Blodgett, E.D. Alice Munro: Twayne’s World Boston: Twayne. 1988
Campbell, Leslie, Marion. “Scottish Influence and The Construction of Canadian
Identity in Works by Sara Jennette Duncan, Alice Munro, and Margaret
Laurence”. Diss. Dalhousie University, 2000
Caskey, Sarah A. “Open Secrets: Ambiguity and Irresolution in The Australian, New
Zealand, and Canadian Short Story”. Diss. The University of Western Ontario.
2000
Daziron, Heliane Catherine. “Angles of Vision on Alice Munro’s Short Fiction.” Diss.
York University. 1985
Duplessis, Richel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985
Duteau, Sister Claire L. “The Dramatis Personae of Alice Munro.” Diss. The
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 Acknowledgements

I am indebted to all those who have helped me with the writing of this thesis. In
particular, I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisor Pan Shouwhen for the
valuable and on going help he is giving on literature. Deciding to write this thesis
came from Mr. Pan’s encouragement. He not only gave me the background
knowledge my thesis concerns but also helped me contrust the framework of my
thesis. And I an very much grateful for his great patience in revising my drafts and his
helpful comments on my thesis.
I wish to thank all the professors in the foreign language department who have
devoted their energy and time in guiding my studies in the literary field. I wish
especially to thank Professor Wu Jinghui, Professor Zhao Na and Professor Wang
Ping, whose inspiring lectures provoke my thoughts.
Lastly I an thankful to my beloved friends and family for their constant concern
and support. It is their love and kindness that have sustained me in the process of my
writing.

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 中文摘要
身份问题对艾丽丝·门罗文学创作的影响

20 世纪六十年代末到七十年代初,加拿大文坛上出现了两种引人关注的现象:
一是短篇小说大放异彩,二是女作家群星灿烂。艾丽丝·门罗(Alice Munro, 1931-)
便是代表这两种现象的杰出人物。她在短篇小说处于低谷时出版了她的第一部短
篇小说集《快乐影子之舞》，并立即受到评论界和读者的好评,当年就获得加拿大
总督文学奖。加拿大短篇小说的异彩始于艾丽丝·门罗,门罗也因短篇小说的成
就而享誉文坛。她只写短篇小说,不像当今不少作家那样全面开花。迄今,她已发
表短篇小说百余篇,大部分收在九部小说集中。有三部小说集获得加拿大总督奖,
其他作品也曾获加拿大图书奖、文学新秀奖、加澳文学奖等各类奖项近十次,不
少作品上了畅销书排行榜,有些还被改编成电影、电视剧、广播剧等。多数作品
已译成十几种文字,行销许多国家和地区。如今艾丽丝·门罗已是一位享有世界
声誉的优秀女作家。
艾丽丝·门罗出生于安大略西南部文瀚姆附近的一个乡村小镇,离休伦湖不
远,父亲有一个饲养场,生计艰难,她的童年时代就是在这个贫困的饲养场度过
的。母亲患珀金森氏病时,门罗才过十岁。病痛对人的折磨、人的徒劳挣扎、人
之无奈和脆弱,给她留下了深刻印象,使她从小便有了强烈的宿命观和危机感。中
学毕业后,获得西安大略大学的奖学金,于 1949 年至 1951 年间在西安大略大学攻
读英文。在校期间与詹姆斯·门罗相识并结婚, 1952 年迁居不列颠哥伦比亚省。
起初住在温哥华,丈夫供职于伊顿公司,她在温哥华公共图书馆工作。1963 年,门
罗夫妇迁居维多利亚,办起了一个小书店。在她的成名作《快乐幽灵之舞》于 1968
年出版前的十几年中,四个女儿陆续出生。门罗又要工作,又要操持家务,还要养
育三个女儿,然而她百忙之中挤出时间勤奋创作,从未间断。《加拿大论坛》、《落
叶松评论》、《女主人》等刊物不时登载她的短篇小说,但没有引起广泛关注,到
1968 年《快乐幽灵之舞》出版时,她还是文学界不知名的小人物。不过第二部短
篇小说集《姑娘们和女人们的生活》于 1971 年出版时,她的文学生涯有了转机。
当时她已有二十多年的创作史,而文坛却在欢呼一位重要的文学新人女才子诞生
了。该书出版的当年就获加拿大图书奖,第二年又获不列颠哥伦比亚文学会颁发

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的杰出小说家奖。此一发不可收,1974 年又一部短篇小说集《欲对你说》问世,1978
年出版另一部短篇小说集《你以为你是谁?》,同年此书获总督文学奖,后又于 1979
年在美国、1980 年在英国以《乞丐女郎》之名出版。1982 年又一部短篇小说集
《木星的卫星》出版, 1986 年又出版短篇小说集《爱的进程》,并再次获总督文
学奖。进入九十年代后, 艾丽丝·门罗仍笔耕不辍,先后出版了《青年时代的朋
友》、《公开的秘密》、《故事选集》
、《一个好女人的爱》等四部短篇小说集,成为
多产作家。1976 年爱丽丝·门罗与第一位丈夫离婚后,返回安大略省西南部,之
后除几度出访，几次出任几所大学的驻校作家外,一直在家乡搞创作。后与杰拉
尔德·弗雷姆林结婚,在安大略一个名叫克林顿的小镇定居至今。
艾丽丝·门罗的作品之所以有力度,原因之一是的她的创作深深植根于现实
生活,具有鲜明的地方色彩和浓郁的生活气息。她笔下的故事大都来源于自己的
所见所闻和亲身经历,描写常人俗事,表现各种人际关系,如母女关系、夫妻关系、
姐妹关系、朋友关系以及人生的各个阶段。她特别精于描写少男少女的迷惘、困
惑、矛盾和好奇心理,作品常以聪颖、敏感、精神生活中充满烦恼的女性为主角,
以女作家特有的洞察力、女性独特的感受和视角描写生活中的冲突。门罗的作品
根据故事背景可分为两类,一类以安大略为背景,另一类以不列颠哥伦比亚为背
景。一般来讲,以安大略为背景的故事更为精彩,因为安大略是作家度过少女时
代、对人生充满好奇和幻想的地方。童年的记忆和个人的成长经历屡屡反射在她
的作品中,许多篇章都带有明显的自传痕迹。迄今为止的所有小说集可以说各有
千秋,难分高下,但最具代表性的要数《姑娘们和女人们的生活》与《你以为你是
谁?》两部,有的评论家甚至认为《姑娘们和女人们的生活》是加拿大小说领域内
的最佳作品。
本文所要讨论的核心问题是“身份问题为加拿大著名女作家爱丽丝·门罗短
篇小说创作带来的影响”，主要目的是借助女性主义理论，叙事理论以及社会语
言学的一些基本理论，从小说文本入手，简要分析身份问题对门罗创作主题方面
的影响，身份问题对叙事方式的影响，女性身份与加拿大国籍的相互作用对门罗
短篇小说创作的影响。
从语言上看，门罗的作品措辞简单，句式简短，语法也极为规范。即使在记
叙人物思维的时候，门罗使用的也会用平时直白的话语，而没有像意识流小说那

2
样使用片段式，跳跃的语言。初读门罗，读者可以最直观的感受到作品语言通俗
易懂，对话贴近生活，人物真实生动，心理刻画准确到位，情节发展自然，叙事
角度有所限制。在人物刻画方面，门罗借助的是传统的现实主义手段。她用直接
界定和间接再现的方式将人物的外貌、性格、生活背景等等信息在一开始就交代
清楚，而且这些信息直接影响后来故事的发展。跟后现代主义那种作者直接插入
故事、对人物的真实性横加怀疑的手段相比，这样的写实手法大大降低了读者的
理解难度。门罗作品叙事角度比较有限，指的是她把故事限制在女性视角内，对
女性的故事和情感进行了大量的探索。
门罗也有写作叙事结构相对复杂一些的。《阿尔巴尼亚处女》为例，它有两
重故事构成。叙述者“我”为了逃避婚外恋带来的烦恼而远走，在另一个城市里
听到了夏洛蒂讲述劳塔的故事。“我”的故事与劳塔的故事交织在一起，是一种
嵌套叙事结构。虽然这个故事里面嵌套着另一个故事，但理解起来并不艰涩，因
为门罗用空行清楚地隔开了两个故事。
性别因素给门罗的创作也带来了很大的影响。她给与女性世界大量的关注，
而把男性在故事中的作用降至最低。男主人公可能在最后才出现，如《一盎司的
治疗》、《我是如何遇见我丈夫的》
、也有可能只出现一次《一盎司的治疗》、《诡
计》。他们的故事很少，但是他们的存在必不可少。门罗的小说世界是非常纯粹
的女性世界，她通过非常纯粹的女性视角来观察世界，描述世界。所以女性是这
个世界里的主角，而男性往往是女人世界里的配角，他们的存在只是为了展现女
性的婚姻状况，思维方式和精神状态。
总的来说，身份问题影响门罗的小说创作。她用现实主义的写作手法创造出
一个个鲜活的人物形象，一桩桩生动的故事和一幅幅熟悉的画面。门罗就像摄影
师那样，用短篇小说这样一台摄影机拍下了生活得一个个精彩片段，并把它呈现
在读者面前，让他们从生活片段中领略到整个生活的真谛。

关键词：
艾丽丝·门罗；身份问题；叙事方式

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 Abstract

The Effect of Identity on Alice Munro ’s Literary Creation

There are two kinds of phenomenons appear in Canadian literature from 1960s
to the beginning of 1970s. One is short story in bloosm .The other is that female
writers take their time. Alice Munro(1931~) is the outstanding person in this
movement. She published her first short story collection Dance of the Happy
Shades ,and won good comments from the critics and readers. She won Governor
General's Award at the same time. The bloosm of Canadian literature started with
Alice Munro. Munro become famous for her short story writing. She writes short
story only, this is different from other writers.Up to now, she has already published
short stories about for more than one hundred. Most of them are collected in her nine
short story collections. Three of them win Governor General's Award, Dance of the
Happy Shades in 1968 and again in 1978 for Who Do You Think You Are?, which was
also runner-up for the Booker Prize. Some of the works have adapted into movie, TV
drama program, radio play. Some of the works have already translated into different
languages and sell in many countries. Alice Munro now is a world-wide famous
writer.
Alice Munro was born in a small town near Ontario. Not far from Lake Huron,
there was her father’s farm. Her childhood was in this poor farm. When her mother
was ill to death, Munro just 10 years old. Man suffer painfully, people struggle in vain,
and the weakness of life leave her great impression. Thus she gained a sense of crisis.
After she graduated from high school, she won the scholarship of University of West
Ontario and she studied English there. She met her first husband James Munro in her
campus life, and moved to Columbia in 1952. She lived in Vancouver, and her
husband worked in Eton company. In 1963, They moved to Victoria, and hold a small
bookstore. After the publish of Dance of the Happy Shades, her four daughters are
borned one after another. Munro should go to work, did housework, as well as brought
her daughters up. She spared her time in her short story ctrating. The famous literature
4
magzine published her short story now and then. The second short story collection
Lives of Girls and Women published in 1971, at that time,she became famous as a
short story writer.
Many of Munro’s stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Her strong regional
focus is one of the features of her fiction. Another is the all-knowing narrator who
serves to make sense of the world. Many compare Munro's small-town settings to
writers of the U.S. rural South. As in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery
O’Connor, her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions. However,
the reaction of Munro’s characters is less intense than their Southern counterparts’.
Thus, particularly with respect to her male characters, she may be said to capture the
essence of everyman. Her female characters, though, are more complex. Much of
Munro’s work exemplifies the literary genre known as Southern Ontario Gothic.
Her theme has often been the dilemmas of the adolescent girl coming to terms
with family and small town. Her more recent work, such as Hateship, Friendship,
Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004), has addressed the
problems of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly. Characteristic of her style
is the search for some revelatory gesture by which an event is illuminated and given
personal significance.
Many of Munro's stories have been adapted for radio and film. The 1983 film
version of one of her most anthologized stories, "Boys and Girls," won an Oscar for
short film in 1986. A television movie of Lives of Girls and Women was produced in
1994. “How I Met My Husband” was dramatized as an Historica Radio Minute in 2005.
This thesis mainly discussed “ what identity affects Alice Munro in her short story
creation”. And take feminism theory, narration theory and social linguistic theory to
analysis and interpret identity problem affects story making in three different ways:
identity affects female theme, identity affects the ways of narration, and social identity
affects literary creation.
Munro’s language is simple.When she depicts people’s mind, she also uses the
plain language. So when you first read Munro’s work, the readers can understand the
story easily.And find the story vivily depicts people’s daily life. Munro uses the
5
traditional way to write her people. She gives the reader all the information of the
characters, and all these information affects the development of the plot.
Gender problem affects Munro a lot. She shows great concern to Women’s life,
and decreases man’ function. For example, “An Ounce of Cure”, “How I Met My
Husband”. The man’s story is limited, but they are necessary. The world under
Munro’s pen is purely woman’s world. She views the world from woman’s
perspective.So women are the leading role, and men are the supporting role. The
existence of them are to show women’s marriage, the way of thinking and mind
status.
All in all, identity affects Alice Munro in one way or another. She uses the
realistic way to depict many lively portraits, and many familiar pictures of life.Like a
photographer, she takes the wonderful moments of life. And the one who read them
will gain life meaning.

Key Words:
Alice Munro; Identity; The Way of Narration

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 导师及作者简介

导师简介：
潘守文，吉林大学外国语学院英语系教授，文学博士。近年来曾参加学术研
讨会并在学术期刊上发表论文数篇，主要研究领域为西方文学理论及美国文学，
加拿大文学。
联系方式：panshouwen@126.com
长春市前卫路 2699 号吉林大学外国语学院 130012

作者简介：
宫萍，女，1982 年 12 月出生于吉林省长春市。2007 年攻读吉林大学外国语
学院英语语言文学专业英美文学方向硕士研究生。
联系方式：吉林大学外国语学院 130012