从门罗的《逃离》谈女性的自我追寻及其挫败

学 号：

HEBEI UNITED UNIVERSITY

毕业论文

GRADUATE THESIS

论文题目：从门罗的《逃离》谈女性的自我追寻及其挫败

学生姓名： 专业班级：

学 院：外国语学院 指导教师：

2014年05月31日

Female Self-pursuit and its Frustration from Alice

Munro‟s Runway

By

A graduate thesis

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Bachelor of Arts to the

College of Foreign Languages Hebei United University

May 31st, 2014

摘 要 摘要

艾丽丝·门罗是一位加拿大籍女性作者，她擅长于短篇小说，被誉为”当代契科夫”。她的小说朴实感人，着眼于普通人的日常生活，关注普通女性内心暗藏的波澜。在她的短篇小说《逃离》中，一个平凡女子对自我的渴望、追求和理想生活破碎后的无奈被她娓娓道来。本论文就选取了《逃离》作为研究文本。 毫无疑问，门罗的作品中有着很强的女性意识。她在写女性的同时，又不动声色地赞扬与批评女性。但是门罗从来不会给予读者任何有着鲜明立场的观点，她只是平静地描述一段事实，在人物的选择中，有着她对人生的感悟，但她不会逼迫她笔下的人物和读者作出选择，一切只是遵循着命运的轨迹，往往意料之外又情理之中。

本论文在第一章，对门罗和她的作品做了一个简要的介绍，阐述了国内外目前对其作品的研究成果。在第二章，论文对小说《逃离》和门罗的女性主义作出了简要的阐述。在第三章，论文以《逃离》为蓝本，分析了文中女主人公追寻自我之路。通过分析，读者将对女主人公被压抑的自我，受男性控制的精神世界有一个深入的理解。在第四章，论文深刻地分析了造成女主人公自我追寻之路挫败的原因，提出了两个切实可靠的解决方案。最后在第五章中，总结和升华了论文的主题思想和研究成果。

关键词 艾丽丝·门罗；女性主义；自我追寻；挫败；策略；

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ABSTRACT ABSTRACT

Alice Munro is one of the famous Canadian writers and noted female writers in the contemporary literature. Her theme has often been the dilemmas of the female coming to terms with family, friends in a small town. This paper attempts to make a brief introduction about the titled story Runaway, the first short story from the collection of stories Runaway, which is her masterpiece. The thesis explores the protagonist's way of the female self-pursuit and the frustration of escape that they cannot get rid of the ineluctable reality of life.

Unquestionably, a strong awareness is showed in Munro‟s works. When she depicts female, she praises and abuses female as well. Yet Munro doesn‟t tend to display any personal perspective. She just descries a story for audience and never forces the heroes and reader to make choice.

In chapter one, the thesis makes introduction to Alice Munro and her works and elaborates the current research on Munro‟s works from abroad and China. We find the associated study of Munro‟s works is superficiality and insufficient, typically in feminine perspective, so the research is of significance.

In chapter two, with meticulous description, the thesis makes a brief introduction of Runway and its unique feminism.

In chapter three, the thesis makes a further study on the way of female self-pursuit based on the short story, Runway. According to research, the audience of this thesis can obtain a comprehensive understanding of the spiritual world of protagonists in the story.

In chapter four, the thesis analyzes the reasons causing the frustration of escape and raises the strategies to find the outlet for the female plight.

In chapter five, the thesis makes a final conclusion based on the topic and achievements of the whole paper.

Keywords Alice Munro；female self-pursuit; frustration; strategies

II

CONTENTS CONTENTS

摘要................................................................................................................................................... I ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... II Chapter 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1

1.1 Literature Review ................................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Alice Munro and her Works ................................................................................................ 2 Chapter 2 Runaway and Feminism ................................................................................................... 4

2.1 A Brief Introduction of Runaway ........................................................................................ 4 2.2 Munro’s Feminism ........................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 3 The Way of Carla‟s Female Self-pursuit ........................................................................... 7

3.1 The First Period of Carla‟s Female Self-pursuit .................................................................. 7 3.2 The Second Period of Carla‟s Female Self-pursuit ............................................................. 9 Chapter 4 The Frustration of Carla‟s Female self-pursuit ............................................................... 12

4.1 The Main Reasons behind Carla‟s Frustration .................................................................. 12

4.1.1 The Impossibility of Female Quest ........................................................................ 12 4.1.2 The Impossibility of Self-awareness ...................................................................... 14 4.2 The Strategies to Female Plight ......................................................................................... 15

4.2.1 Female Initiative against Male Repression ............................................................ 15 4.2.2 Philosophy of Freedom against Male Repression .................................................. 16

Chapter 5 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 18 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................... 20 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ 22

III

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 1 Introduction

Alice Munro is one of the famous Canadian writers and noted female writers in the contemporary literature. Her theme has often been the dilemmas of the female coming to terms with family, friends in a small town. This paper attempts to make a brief introduction about the titled story Runaway, the first short story from the collection of stories Runaway, which is her masterpiece. The thesis explores the protagonist's way of the female self-pursuit and then the frustration of escape is that they cannot get rid of the ineluctable reality of life. Escape is only a temporary action which cannot save them from endless triviality of life. What they should do is not to escape from life, but to adapt to the reality of life.

1.1 Literature Review

Munro‟s works captures many attentions for the past few years and studies of Munro are thriving both at Munro's home and abroad in recent years, gradually attracted the attention of western critics and be the hot spot among literature lovers and researchers. Not only in English-speaking countries but also in other parts of the world, associated study of the novel, academic papers and review articles were increasingly springing up, especially in the latest years. Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts(1983) whose author was Louis McKendrick and The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable(1984),edited by Judith Miller, outlined the issues of concern which Munro‟s first four collections of short stories focused on, leaded the main direction of research on Munro‟s criticism research, opened the door to research towards Munro‟s works.

Some admirable analysis and studies on Munro such as Ajay Heble's The Tumble of Reason,Magdalene Redekop's Mothers and Other Clowns, Beverly Rasporich's Dance of the Sexes, James Carscallen's The Other Country, and Jo Ann McCaig's Reading In Alice Munro s Archives, etc.

In China, there are not so many scholars and professors devoted in Munro study. Some published papers just introduce Munro and her works. The most famous scholar in China in studying Alice Munro is Zhao Huizhen, who published the book

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College of Foreign Language, Hebei United University titled Studies on Canadian Women Writers in English, giving a brief introduction of Munro‟s writing career and works. In addition, there are also some papers, such as Chen Xiaowei‟s The Realization of Truth in a Novel,; Liu Xinhui‟s The Two Faces of Munro—Brief Comment on Lives of Girls and Women; Liu Yiqing‟s article, comparing Munro‟s heroin in Lives of Girls and Women with Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

1.2 Alice Munro and her Works

Alive Munro is a Canadian author writing in English, awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature for her work as “master of the contemporary short story”. Alice Munro is the most critically acclaimed author of contemporary Canadian Literature. She has won virtually every prize available to a Canadian short story writer. She has altogether published fourteen short story collections, and is lauded for her concentration on regional histories, for the unique “feminism” depicted in her writing. Female always take up the heroine in her works. Munro depicts the feminine love, marriage, family life, parent child relations and social issue in the modern society and reveals the deep and complex emotion in the life of normal people via detailed feminine perspective.

Her work is well-known to a wide audience in both United States and Canada. Her first book of stories, the novel Dance of the Happy Shades earned her Canada‟s highest literary prize--the Governor General‟s Award in 1968. The novel Lives of Girls and Women which is her second book has been quarrelling was published in 1971 and achieved the Canadian Booksellers Association International Book Year Award. The books of series were met with unequivocal praise when subsequently published in the Britain and United States. Four years later, Something I've been Meaning to Tell You, which is her second collection of short stories, was published by NAL. Then in the 1978, the novel Who Do You Think You Are? was entered the list of the Booker Prize. Through the 1980s and 1990s, she published a collection of short-story about once every four years. In an interview to promote her collection The View from Castle Rock which was published in 2006, Munro suggested that she might not publish any further collections. Hence she has recanted and published further work. In August 2009, her collection, Too Much Happiness, was published.

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Chapter 1 Introduction

In her writing career for nearly 50 years, Munro achieved disproportional artistic achievements.

Moreover, her unique life experience gives rise to her different writing style and technique. She was born in Wing ham, Ontario, Canada, living in peaceful and desolate place for a long time, which dedicates to forming her unique style. Many of Munro's work exemplify the literary genre known as Southern Ontario Gothic. The life of a small town and normal women are the forever depicted theme of her works. In Munro‟s work, what behind the heroine is the shadow of her own experience: a poor girl who is born in upper class starts from a smaller provincial town and makes this a new starting point to a blurry and misty destination and future with dream and ambition. She marches forward courageously but in the end she find she don‟t know what does she really need or want. All of t her persistence and braveness evolve into cautiousness and depression.

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College of Foreign Language, Hebei United University Chapter 2 Runaway and Feminism

This chapter will make a brief introduction of the titled story Runaway and then depicts Munro‟s feminism hiding in the short story.

2.1 A Brief Introduction of Runaway

Runaway is Munro‟s magnum opus, which earned the prize of book of the year that appraised by New York and the best foreign novel selected by Read, the famous French magazine. Apart from above reputation, Canada awarded Runaway Giller Prize, their highest literary prize, for its outstanding performance in literature. Alice Munro also won the Third Booker International Prize with this work. For its high appreciation, this thesis chooses the Runaway, the first short story of this collection, as research object.

Runaway, the title of Alice Munro‟s 2004 collection of short stories, directs the reader to Munro‟s recurring and interweaving themes of entrapment and escape more explicitly than any of her other titles. In each of the collected stories, flight or abandonment is either undertaken, with varying success, or anticipated. Papp Carrington notes that: “Clearly recognizable patterns unify almost all of Munro‟s fiction” (1992) and with its repeated description of the figure of the escaper who undertakes or contemplates a necessary journey, Runaway points to its location within the quest romance pattern. Nevertheless, the title story, Runaway, opens not with a departure but with a return.

Runaway tells a story about a woman whose name is Carla. It is a simple story, even without any fierce and intense conflict of plot. A sensitive and diffidence county girl who lived in a small town in childhood spends her tough and unpopular time. When she grew up as a teenage, she fell in love with her equestrian coach who is not a good-tempered guy. There is no doubt that Carla‟s parents make a deep impact on her character and life choice. Carla elopes with her equestrian coach to another city. They get married. However, the crises hide in their peaceful matrimony and wait a proper moment to give attack to Carla. With the help of Sylvia, Carla ready to revolt her boring marriage.

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Chapter 2 Runaway and Feminism

2.2 Munro‟s Feminism

Feminism began when women sought to analyze the conditions that shape women‟s lives and advocate some change of women‟s subordinate existence in the patriarchal society. Since the world of feminism came into being, there are some definitions about it. In a word, the core of feminism is that male and female should be equal politically, economically and socially.

Feminism criticism, as a literary trend, grew up in Europe and American in the late 1960s and 1970s. It can not deny the association between feminism criticism and the movement by political feminists for legal, social, and cultural freedom and equality. And it also broadens the range of perspectives of looking at the world and changes the unique male perspective of viewing the world in the male-dominated society.

According to chapter one, we can safely conclude that no matter the critics at home or abroad admires the contributions that Alice Munro has made in short stories field. Such as some critics believe that one author is a realistic writer, because a realistic writer always pays attention to common people's ordinary life. It is also noticeable that the early scholarship on Munro mainly falls into two categories: 1) feminist themes and 2) narrative techniques. Given the fact that Munro is a woman writer and that she writes mainly from the female perspective, it is understandable that the feminist approach is most often applied to the study of Munro‟s fiction. Critics focus on issues like the female quest for identity, mother-daughter relationship, gender roles, as well as the power struggle between sexes. As Robert Thacker (1987) notes:

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.

Munro‟s fiction, however, frequently depicts women‟s adventures other than loss of virginity and considers satisfactions other than a secure nest. Often being about girls too young for marriage or about older women—single, divorced, or remarried—Munro‟s stories tend not to follow the conventional marriage plot. Some of Munro‟s stories conclude with a comment on the happiness of the characters, generally one that provokes reconsideration of conventional happily ever after

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College of Foreign Language, Hebei United University endings.

However, Alice Munro, likes other modern female authors, doesn‟t regard herself as a feminist writer and willing to be labeled as “feminist”. Once in an interview, in 1987, Munro said:

“When I wrote the The Lives of Girls and Women, I don‟t think it is of feminism. I am just interest with the living style of women such as the condition middle aged man and woman keep.”

Although Munro once said she was not a feminist writer, her works those wrote in female perspective and style actually reflected the personality as a feminist author. Her female characters, though, are more complex. Much of Munro's work exemplifies the literary genre known as gender relation such as the short story Runaway, one of the collections of stories Runaway, has been studied in this thesis. In the research in China, the feminism is seldom connected with the female growing novel—Runaway. And this thesis chooses this novel to explore how the female to develop their ego and grow a mature self for the first time. Alice Munro express the difficult progress that the female in pursuing in dependence, freedom, and happiness. To arrive at the destination of the long way, the possible way is to strive for a harmonious and peace environment with male, themselves and the society.

With this effort, the thesis' author aims to make a further study to Alice Munro‟s works in Chinese audience and, further more, offer wide readers a fresh angle to enhance and broaden the scope of research in Munro‟s works.

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Chapter 3 The Way of Carla‟ of Female Self-pursuit

Chapter 3 The Way of Carla‟s Female Self-pursuit

For the development of the plot, we can safely divide the growing track of Carla into two period of progress of “pursuit—frustration”. Carla firstly leaves to pursuit because she wants to avoid the terrible and awful school life and resent the reality. And ending with looking forwarding to a decent living, getting married with her equestrian coach Clark and returning into traditional family life. Carla secondly leaves to pursuit because she is strongly discontented with her husband‟s man depression and their marriage has been marked by coldness and emotional withdrawal. She goes through a dilemma and finally returns to the life she resents at the beginning.

The thesis will study Carla‟s growing self-ego base on the two period of progress.

3.1 The First Period of Carla‟s Female Self-pursuit

Carla was born in an ordinary family. In high school, she was an average student and the one always be make fun of by classmates. But she was not quite care about that. She knew what she really want to do was to take care of animal and live in countryside since she was born. When she was 18 years old, during the gap year, she found a part time job in a riding school. Liked many other girls at that age, she had her first serious crush at the age of 18. She fell in love with the man who was the equestrian coach in the riding school and just an undergraduate, either. Carla‟s stepfather called the man a looser and one of those drifters. However, in spite of her mother and stepfather‟s opposition, Carla still decided to elope with Clark together. The reason why she made such choice was what her stepfather said: “I‟m not about to argue with you.” (ALICE M, 2004,Runway) 29

Perhaps because she is brave enough so that she could control her own density. Or she believes in the invisible romantic love and their common interest on raising horse. She does not to consider too much. Leaving a note for her parents, she chooses to flee home with her lover. As the note wrote: “ I have always felt the need of a more authentic kind of life. I know I cannot expect you to understand this.”

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College of Foreign Language, Hebei United University (ALICE M, 2004, Runway) 29

The inharmonious family relationship plays an important role in her leaving, too.

We can see Carla flees home because she yearns to get rid of the suppression, dominate her track of life and pursuit the happiness and dream because in a male-dominated society, marriage is always influenced by the ideology of patriarchy. What‟s more, she flees because she wants to build the whole family life with Clark.

As a result, she leaves her safe home to a misty future with the hope to new life, under the guidance of Clark. Although the she can not predict the future, but she knows what she gives up is that her parent‟s house, backyard, photo albums, vacation, toilets, even the cooking method.

Together with Clark, the first runaway is a satisfactory tour. She regards Clark as the designer of their future. She obeys Clark without a question like a captive animal. We can see that from the following quotation: “She saw him as the architect of the life ahead of them, herself as captive, her submission both proper and exquisite.” (ALICE M, 2004, Runway) 12

In the first “runaway”, Carla‟s female consciousness has been springing. She knows what she likes and plans her professional career that is to raise animal and give up on living in big city. Actually, she is courageous and resolute. The quality of her can be seen when she defended against her stepfather as Clark is to be exposed to the ridicule of him. She treats his power with indifference. The following quotation can be seen the first rebellion to patriarchal ideology:

Her stepfather, who was an engineer, did not even grant Clark that much power. “A loser,” he called him. “ One of those drifters. ” As if Clark was a bug he could just whisk off his clothes.

So Carla said, “Does a drifter save up enough money to buy a farm? Which, by the way, he has done?” and he only said, “I‟m not about to argue with you.” She was not his daughter anyway, he added, as if that was the clincher. (ALICE M, 2004, Runway) 28

Carla express the confidence they can set up a riding school and take the job they have passion for based on their technology to train horse. In the case, Carla sees herself as independent individual, herself as a person who is pursuing freedom and independence. Beverly J.Rasporich(1990) referred the point in DANCE OF THE SEXES: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro, a comment on Munro‟s

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Chapter 3 The Way of Carla‟ of Female Self-pursuit

fiction, as following: “For Munro, the feminist quest includes the search for freedom of imagination and expression through the medium of art.”(BEVERLY J R, Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro) 29

However, at this time, we can not see Carla a completely independent individual because she put her dream and future in the Clark‟s shoulder. That means upon fleeing from the suppression of father, she gives her individual freedom to another man who is her husband. From patriarchy to man depression, she reaches the different prison. Anyway, this is an original success of the long way of Carla‟s growing female consciousness.

To sum up, Carla has not been a totally independent woman at this step. As a female, she feels the injustice come from her family where her stepfather is the core. The prejudiced family relationship stimulates her female consciousness. As to her female identity, due to the limit of the level of the education, she is unclear to the self-ego as a female. She displays her female consciousness unconsciously as she even does not know what is the so-called the “feminism”. She just thinks she should be together with the man she loves as a growing-up lady who should own one she loves. This means that Carla realizes the sexual difference between male and her. But the understanding of difference is a superficial knowledge of the sexes. She does not expect that the traditional culture of male depression will has a huge impact on her marriage. Even, she does not realize that the construction of gender equality will exert an influence on social progress, let alone initiative pursuing for gender equality.

3.2 The Second Period of Carla‟s Female Self-pursuit

At the second time Carla leaved everything behind for fleeing her husband. When they got together at the beginning, although they lived in poverty, but they always attempt to add color to their ordinary life. In the early days their world included several towns in the surrounding countryside and they had sometimes behaved like tourists, sampling the specialties in grimy hotel bars. They would sing all the way home like crazy hillbillies. Pig‟s feet, potato pancakes, beer, and sauerkraut are good memory too. However, such romantic outings came to be seen as a waste of time and money. Romance went by, pity came. Carla did the heavy

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College of Foreign Language, Hebei United University manual labor, make efforts to living better with Clark. However, the hardship and poverty of life, the exhaustion of marriage and male chauvinism threw their marriage into confusion. Clark has been changing his attitude towards Carla. In spare time, he used to killing his time on computer. Upon facing problem, he always got angry with Carla as if he hated Carla so much. Whatever she did and said were totally wrong. Their life was gradually being boring and indifference. Carla could express his sorrow to sheep and horses only. As if the sheep and horses could understand her than Clark. In addition, Clark was going to accuse Mr. Jamieson, their departed neighbor, for a fake sexual harassment which has made up by Carla to call back the concern and attention from her husband. But the last failed result disappointed her badly. Clark saw this case as an opportunity to acquire ill-gotten wealth and would like to take this opportunity to threaten Ms. Jamieson for a large amount of money. Carla felt both sad and angry. Negative emotion was filled of her broken heart and she needed an outlet to release those bad feelings.

Female individual consciousness is a progress of changing and enriching condition. In their married life, we find Carla‟s original female consciousness in depression and silence.

That was what she did. It was obvious by now that the five o‟clock person wasn‟t coming. She got out the potatoes and began to peel them, but her tears would not stop and she could not see what she was doing. She wiped her face with a paper towel and tore off a fresh one to take with her and went out into the rain. She didn‟t go into the barn because it was too miserable in there without Flora. She walked along the lane back to the woods. The horses were in the other field. They came over to the fence to watch her.

From the quotation, we can safely conclude that Carla‟s marriage life is not happy as she images before. When Carla leave home to marriage with Clark, her female individual consciousness does not grow up but lag behind. The reason is that there is a contradiction between the female consciousness she has and the tough reality when she forms family group. Under the direction of female consciousness, she attempts to repair the relation between Clark and her. But her struggles between ration and male depression are insignificant and negligible. From the following quotation, we can find it clearly:

“Just don‟t be mad at me,” she said.

“I‟m not mad. I hate when you‟re like this, that‟s all.”

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Chapter 3 The Way of Carla‟ of Female Self-pursuit

“I‟m like this because you‟re mad.”

“Don‟t tell me what I am. You‟re chocking me. Start supper.” (ALICE M, 2004, Runway) 10

There are the difference attitudes to love between female and male that is reflected in Carla and Clark. The female faith in romantic love as total commitment is an absolute fiction and Munro underlines the point with the narrator‟s final admission of having invented the man and the entire situation. While Munro‟s fictional construction is devious, her protest is explicit, leveled squarely at that “re-mother love, to romantic love, the religious love, to amorphous, undifferentiating caring.”(Brown miller, Femininity. 215) While the male of the species as romantic lover moves successfully from woman to woman or maintains multiple relationships.

When Clark got angry with Carla, what she could do is just to bear. From the above conclusion, we can analysis the cause of aphasia in the state of Carla is female faith in romantic that unlike male. Carla does have the right to make a decision but to obey orders. At this time, Carla realizes that the only way to find her confidence as a female is to leave everything behind again. However, this time the financial support is seemingly not ample and the braveness of her is not stronger than the first time any more.

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College of Foreign Language, Hebei United University Chapter 4 The Frustration of Carla‟s Female self-pursuit

In the chapter 3, the thesis analyses the two different period of Carla‟s growing female consciousness. There are success and failure in the departure which Carla passes by. In the next, the thesis will give a further analysis on the frustration of Carla‟s female self-pursuit. Moreover, the thesis will probe into the main reasons behind Carla‟s frustration and the strategies to female plight.

In this chapter, the thesis will study the reasons of frustration of female self-pursuit and then put forward two effective strategies to resolve the difficulties while women facing. The life experience of Carla and Sylvia both reflects the Alice Munro‟s feminism in which she advocates living in harmony between female and male, ideal and reality that is to obtain the female initiative and philosophy of freedom.

4.1 The Main Reasons behind Carla‟s Frustration

“Where is the feminist quest leading?” is one of the underlying problematic questions of Runaway. The battle of the sexes is blatantly here, but it cannot be won by Munro‟s narrators; in facet, it seems destined to a futile repletion of a longstanding feminine mode of behavior: to posturing and deceit. The young girls are learning to lie to escape their sense of helplessness and humiliation are the psychological precursors of the modern fashionable Carla of “Runaway” and others protagonists in Munro‟s other fictions. In the next, the thesis will make detailed elaboration to reasons behind of Carla‟s frustration.

4.1.1 The Impossibility of Female Quest

Coral Ann Howells points out that Munro‟s “stories significantly alter female plots so that they become stories of entrapment and escape”, and these two states are frequently inextricable in Munro‟s writing.

In Runaway, in spite of the recurring theme of departure, there are very few

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Chapter 4 The Frustration of Carla‟s Female Self-pursuit

accounts of successful escape. Nevertheless, the title story, “Runaway,” opens, not with a departure, but with a return:” Carla heard the car coming before it topped the little rise in the road that around here they called a hill. It‟s her, she thought. Mrs. Jamieson – Sylvia – home from her holiday in Greece.” (ALICE M, 2004, Runway) 2

Although the quest may be a recurrent and recognizable pattern in work of Alice Munro, it is also a controversial pattern, typically closed to female characters. Adventure and achievement can seem improbable or impossible for Munro‟s protagonists of fictions, such as another heroine Rose in Who Do You Think You Are?, who fantasizes about departure and escape: “To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named skin”.

We can find the similar choice compare to Runaway: “The days passed and Carla didn‟t go near that place. She held out against the temptation.” (ALICE M, 2004, Runway) 49

Discussing the title of that same short story collection (published in Britain and America as The Beggar Maid), Howells suggests that Munro‟s preferred, Canadian title better “highlights the narrative theme of a female quest and the general response of social disapproval which is provoked by a woman‟s resistance to traditional expectations”.

In her influential study, Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction, Annis Pratt points to a tradition of archetypal analysis, typified by Jung, Campbell, and Frye, that lays claim to universality, but is in reality predicated on male subjectivity. Consequently, argues Pratt, the archetypes present in women‟s fiction differ markedly from those previously identified in men‟s writing. In the quest motif in particular, the “universal” mythic archetype works to exclude female experience. Discussing The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Pratt (1999) notes: “Campbell depicts women as auxiliaries to men, elements to be absorbed in masculine maturation” . This also accords with Frye‟s assertion that the female “achieves no quest herself, but she is clearly the kind of being who makes a quest possible”. In each of these accounts, the role of the wanderer and hero is exclusively male.

Life is full of mystery. An unexpected impulsion gives Carla a wonderful adventure which she has never experienced. She chooses escape as a method to detach herself from the old sense of value and routine life, and as a way of self-quest. Alice Munro (2005) believes that even the ordinary life cannot be explained

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College of Foreign Language, Hebei United University precisely and clearly, but it is just these trivial things make life wonderful and infinite.

4.1.2 The Impossibility of Self-awareness

In the title story \"Runaway\increasingly hostile and disturbed husband. She previously ran away from him, from “their photo albums, their vacations, their Cuisinart, their powder room, their walk-in closets, and their underground lawn-sprinkling system” and attempted to leave her family for a life with the comforts of authenticity. Halfway to her destination of Toronto, however, “the strange and terrible thing coming clear to her is that she cannot imagine life without her husband. As she flees, he persistently “keeps his place in her life; what would she put in his place?” (ALICE M, 2004, Runway) 10She is drawn helplessly back, compromised by grief and uncertainty, willing to pay whatever violent price is required to keep her marriage.

Munro depicts the impossibility through a great amount of literary portray to protagonist in the title story, Runaway. From the above quotation, we can find that the female psychology can seem influenced and effective on the escape. Even for the Victorian ladies, order and comfort shelf can not be too enough. For the most women, the old role is comfortable, or has been, because it does not allow the risk of coming to know oneself as a female. It forms life and provides life order so as to be steady. Without order and limits, as a result, women embark on hazardous and misty route.

The closed self-awareness of female protagonist in this fiction leads to the impossibility to real escape and frustration of self-pursuit. In Munro's world wives, like Carla, witness the cold evil of their men, however, at the some time must pretend to ignore this glimpse. It is always too late in their lives for them to do transformation. Only the very young have the emotional luxury of successfully fleeing. As to Carla, she is absorbed and muffled by the rituals of everyday life and attempts to escape in order to resist her moody and abusive husband, however, she abstains herself from this chance and goes back to the original life panicky.

Anyway, yet freedom is no simple matter, especially the freedom of the heart and soul of a female. If her self-awareness falls in sleep, the independent spirit of resolution can never awake up. There is a contemporary complication, for Munro

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Chapter 4 The Frustration of Carla‟s Female Self-pursuit

can see that in some ways the promise of freedom has devolved into the same static designs of the past. She dramatizes female characters rituals and disguises, who, apparently liberated, have really only adopted a new set of unnatural rituals and disguises.

4.2 The Strategies to Female Plight

Carla‟s first quest failed because of her lack of autonomy and individuation. With her second attempt, she comes much closer to success and finds herself “riding on this bus in the hope of recovering herself” (AILCE M, 2004, Runaway) 34. But for Carla, once again, the binding connection with a significant other undermines the quest. Carla suffers a failure of imagination, unable to envision herself in the role of solitary adventurer: She could not picture herself riding on the subway or streetcar, caring for new horses, talking to new people, living among hordes of people every day who were not Clark. A life, a place, chosen for that specific reason – that it would not contain Clark.

How can a female, like Carla in Runaway, find the unambiguous destination in female quest and effective way in self-awareness? The thesis will make a series of exposition as following.

4.2.1 Female Initiative against Male Repression

Repression is the process by which an unwanted or unacceptable idea or desire withdrawn from the consciousness and pushed into the unconscious part of the mind. It develops from:

An impulse－a mental process that endeavors to turn itself into action. We know that it can be repelled by what we term a rejection or condemnation. (If that impulse is repressed) it would retain its energy and no memory of it would remain behind: “moreover the process of repression would be accomplished unnoticed by the ego.” (Freud, 1958:294)

A powerless and helpless girl, what strategy could she employ to survive the crisis? In order to survive, she avoids direct conflicts with patriarchal pressure. Having been tortured from teenage hood, the Carla becomes cunning and evasive.

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College of Foreign Language, Hebei United University While when she grows up, she has grown strong from the ill family environment and becomes polished and evasive. Since she is considered bad-tempered, she withdraws battleground to ease the tense gender relation. Since Clark loses the attention and interest on her, she makes up sexual fantasy to increase color to sexual life. Erotic Talk - Whether in the boudoir, over the phone, via text or online, lovers can catapult each other to a carnal cosmos with some lascivious lingo. Certainly, this invisible rumor is, to some extend, immoral and slanderous.

However, the unilateral concession of the gender brings about not only the harmony but also the other sense of depression. Carla loses the total discourse power. So the balance between concession and attack is the primary course of female initiative against male depression. If a female can not master the degree when they adopt the initiative strategy, they will drop into a more dangerous plight.

4.2.2 Philosophy of Freedom against Male Repression

Munro‟s freedom, in some sense, is a psychological of freedom. In Munro‟s view, to be free does not mean to obtain what one has wished, but rather by oneself to determine oneself to wish. In other word, success is not important to freedom. Munro argues that a female individual is free to be as she wants to be. This means that a female free is to choose who she is and to lay out the ground plan of our way of life, within a range of given determinants and situational constraints. Thus, this means that an individual woman can, to some extend, determines herself” from the inside” without being fully influence by alien forces (external or internal).

According to Munro, to be individual is to embrace female independence by choosing multiple possibilities of human identity. In the short story “Runaway” two different women in different educational background and age make different choice. They choose the multiple possibilities of a whole female life which lead to similar results.

Sylvia, as a highly educated female, provides spiritual and financial supports to Carla‟s plan to flee. It can be said Sylvia is the animator of Carla‟s plan. The narrative of her is of common middle aged woman‟s trifling matters, but under which it is the author‟s sensitive reflection on female density: what kind of freedom is the real freedom?

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Chapter 4 The Frustration of Carla‟s Female Self-pursuit

Sylvia is so-called successful people, on the face of it, but she can understand a woman like Carla, who is so different with her and in poverty and little education. What is behind of the action to help Carla‟s plan? It is the similar life experience between Sylvia and Carla. In the young age of Sylvia, she may experience the same torment of marriage. Who helps her to avoid the pain and bear the indifference? Munro gives us the answer that is the psychological of freedom.

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College of Foreign Language, Hebei United University Chapter 5 Conclusion

Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian author writing in English. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories embed more than announce, reveal more than parade.

In the thesis, after the literature review of Munro and her works, the author briefly introduces Munro‟s life experience and her major works. Then, the author provides a summery of Runway, the story author take for research object for this thesis. Next, Munro‟s feminism which supports the whole thesis is declared. The self-pursuit of the heroine is divided into two periods in the thesis. The heroine quests happiness, freedom and attempts to figure out what her ego is. This is what we call growing female awareness. Females are getting to focus on their own inner world and outer world instead of being sucked into male‟s spiritual world. However, the quest may not be easy due to the vital frustration confronted. The impossibility of questing outer world as well as of being aware of inner world seems like obstacles female may face and have to resolve in the way to pursuit soul‟s freedom. In the end, the author puts forward two strategies for female self-pursuit: female initiative against male repression and philosophy freedom against male repression.

Some of modern females may have a question: why some females are successful but others are live in unhappiness. In fact, the so-called successful women are not alike. They are not more beautiful or smarter than any others; they come from distinct characters; they choose different living styles and careers.

Sometimes, those modern females happen to make an ingenious decision. When they make choices, they may not understand what is behind their choices at all. Even, they do not think they are making a decision but to give subconscious response to living environment.

What distinguishes them from each other is their attitude toward lifes, not their identity.

The female lived before 20th century, their life are arranged by parents or husband. Up to modern society, female can arrange their own life. With a mountain of maybes, females are excited at the same time of being confused. Everything seems possible, but, what should be done?

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Chapter 5 Conclusion

In the Runaway, our heroine, Carla is the woman who makes her choice affecting her living.

In the society where is still under the shadow of the male repression, however the modern female reject and rebel, the obstacles faced by female come from not only outer world like society more importantly family environment. The latter is more vital than the other factors. In Runaway, when Carla is in her childhood, she is under her father‟s repression; when Carla steps into adult‟s life, she is under her husband‟s control. Although we do not to willing to admit, the male has, is and will take over the superiority in the gender relation. The truth is that male is the leader and boss when he communicates with female. It depends on human being‟s natural instincts. Upon damaging male‟s nature, which means female becomes the leader in the gender relation, male tends to do harm to female so as to release his natural instincts. But what the thesis advised in the chapter four is also definitely right. Because the thesis do not discuss how to be a boss in gender relation as a female, but to take full use of female‟s natural advantages to tame male. One of the strategies discussed in chapter four is the performance of behaviors and another is of philosophy. Every roads lead to Rome.

Munro‟s works frequently depicts women‟s adventures of female self-pursuit such as Runaway, the short story we have made a detailed and further study. As an outstanding and famous author as a female, Munro‟s short stories wins the appreciation in home and aboard. Though we have studied her work based on feminism, we should not limit the multiple possibilities on the comprehension to Munro‟s work.

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BIBLIOGRAPAPHY BIBLIOGRAPHY

BEVERLY J R. 1990. Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice

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FIONA T. 2010. To Leave and to Return: Frustrated Departures and Female Quest in

Alice Munro‟s Runaway [J]. Contemporary Women's Writing, 4 (3): 161-178. HOY H. 1980. Dull,Simple,Amazing and Unfathomable:Paradox and Double Vision

in Alice Munro's Fiction [J]. Studies in Canadian Literature :University of New Brunswick, 5(1):122-10.

JUDITH B. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [M].

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The process of finishing this dissertation was a process of reanalyzing the novel Runaway, during which I seemed to have witnessed a female‟s growth from a weak girl to an independent woman. Finally, I came to realize how hardly the female to realize, challenge, accept herself. It is of great significance for us modern women to inspect the own spiritual world in the male world, which is still similar to the world in several decades before.

Meanwhile, I would like to extend my thanks to many people who have helped me in the accomplishment of this thesis.

First and foremost, my sincere gratitude goes to my supervisor professor Liu Yingli whose valuable guidance, constant encouragement extended through these months. I wish to express my most sincere thanks for her advice and great patience in the preparation of the dissertation. Without Mrs Liu‟s help and guidance, this dissertation would not have come out so smoothly.

Second, I would also like to express my immense gratitude to my teacher Mr. Yu Yuehui , who gave us great literature classes and gave me great help. In her guidance, a door to focus on female‟s inner world opened for me. I never pay such attention to spiritual world of my own until I meet her. Without Mr. Yu, I may not choose feminism as my graduated paper. It is her who have led me into the portals of literature and assured me the nutrition and nourishment I have absorbed from the literary world.

Third, I would like to think all my roommates, who always talk with me about my dissertation and help me to chooses and deicide this topic.

My sincere thanks also go to all the teachers whose enlightening lectures I have attended during my four years‟ study at HUU , who have contributed great patience to teaching English. It is a great honor for me to have their instruction in these three years.

Finally, my thanks would go to my beloved family for their loving considerations and great confidence in me all through these years. I also owe my sincere gratitude to my boyfriend who still does not appear even in my 22 years life. With his help, I enable to dedicate me to academic study for 4 years and the greatest career—TAOBAO.

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