Signifying Autobiographical Intimacies of Woman, Mother, and Daughter in Alice Munro’s Short Stories

Abstract

Alice Munro’s reception of the Nobel Prize in 2013 jointly positioned the short story genre and female narrative at the forefront of literature, suggesting or perhaps confirming a deep connection between women’s experience and vision, and short fiction. Her work can be broadly contextualised within postcolonial and postmodern literature and, more specifically, included in the Canadian cultural movement which, coinciding with second-wave feminism, gave rise to a writing community of prominent female authors. In this regard, and although she has no feminist agenda, Munro has become a chronicler of women’s lives in the Western world at the turn of the millennium, asserting alternative epistemological stances that have helped create a collective female consciousness, promote the understanding of women’s realities, and challenge traditional stereotyped perspectives. A compendium of three published articles, this doctoral dissertation explores Alice Munro’s literature to interpret and signify themes and events revisited throughout her collections from different angles and perspectives rendered as kaleidoscopic portrayals of intimate revelations or subjective realities closely connected with the experience of womanhood of her female characters and her own personal biography and observation. In this sense, the short story genre provides the ideal instrument to describe these instances of existential apperception of truths, frequently belonging to the realm of the emotional, which inhabit outside the scope of linear time and space of long fiction and the external world, so often in line with the male discourse of patriarchal structures. After a close reading of Munro’s collections, my literary analysis is built on previous literature on the author, short story theory, and female autobiography studies, and ultimately aims to understand, support, and extend the often-claimed autobiographical dimension of Munro’s literature, while offering an insight into Munro’s intimacies of femalehood that transcend her writing and which, I argue, stem from the author’s biography and involve existential strokes of female experience: the mother-daughter dyad from the perspectives of daughter and mother, and the sexual pleasure and desire that hinge the two.