生态女性主义视域下的《逃离》(2)

菜单

Alice Munro’s rapturously acclaimed Runaway, published in 2004, consists of eight short stories. It is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. In Runaway, the female protagonists are all trapped in troublesome and confusing relation with nature, society, men or self. Like her usual writing style, Munro tries reveal the complexities of this kind of relation covered by the seemingly ordinary and simple life. All the protagonists in the story have deep and complicated inner world, just like the literary images in Munro’s other works. In this thesis, each protagonist from all the eight stories is picked out and analyzed in detail from the eco-feminist perspective. (Reuther, 1975: 34)

The prime reason to choose the collection from Munro’s piles of works is that the collection is relatively her earlier works, so the study into the female characters from the book can be more persuasive and comprehensive to prove the eco-feminist thought of Munro. Besides, it can be chosen as the representative works of Munro. Munro was not even known to the literary field until the publication of the collection, which won the Griller Prize and was recommended as one of the best books around the world by the French Lire magazine.

2. Literature Review

Research on Munro's work has been undertaken since the early 1970s, with the first PhD thesis published in 1972. The first book-length volume collecting the papers presented at the University of Waterloo first conference on her oeuvre was published in 1984, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable. Numerous critical studies have acknowledged Munro's mastery of the cultural and vocal tones of a region. Written within the conventions of literary realism, her fiction reflects the preoccupations of figures who must remain satisfied with momentary illumination rather than life-changing revelations. Her numerous and award-winning collections of short stories, set mostly in southern Ontario. Munro is often classified into Southern Ontario Gothic, which analyzes and critiques social conditions such as race, gender, religion and politics, but in a Southern Ontario context. Southern Ontario Gothic is generally characterized by a stern realism set against the dour small-town Protestant morality stereotypical of the region, and often has underlying themes of moral hypocrisy. Actions and people that act against humanity, logic, and morality all are portrayed unfavorable. In Munro's stories, plot is secondary and "little happens." Munro's work deals with love and work, and the failings of both. She shares Chekhov's obsession with time and our much-lamented inability to delay or prevent its relentless movement forward. In Runaway she has focused on the travails of middle age, of women alone, and of the elderly, "a mark of her style for characters to experience a revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to, an event" ( Alice Munro). Munro's prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time," "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry," "special, useless knowledge," "tones of shrill and happy outrage," "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it" (Thomas, 1995: 107-210). Her style places the fantastic next to the ordinary, with each undercutting the other in ways that simply and effortlessly evoke life. As Robert Thacker has it: "Munro's writing creates an empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude – not of mimesis, so-called and 'realism' – but rather the feeling of being itself of just being a human being" (Clark, 1996: 49-61). It is often noted that her amplitude of style and approach give her short stories the moral density of lengthier novels. However, these critics do not pay as much attention to Munro’s specific stories as to her overall writing style.