本文是一篇英语论文，笔者认为门罗的众多短篇小说体现了对共同体的反思和形塑，她独到的叙事技巧体现了文学文本之间分享与沟通的共同体观念，对小镇生活的描写和女性主义视角的阐释揭示了人类共同体建构的需要。
Chapter One Munro’s Exploration of Spoiled Community Life in Transitional Times
1.1 Encroachment on Pastoral Life by the Economic Crisis
Some writers may find the view of the countryside unpromising and depressing, while Munro looks at her small town with fondness. She obviously enjoys its geographical and cultural meaning, recording them in her literary works as a distinctively rural picture with strong Canadian background. In her depiction, the landscape has a stark and unworldly beauty. In 1931, Alice Munro was born in Wigham, a small town in the southwest of Ontario Province, Canada. Her father was a local farmer who raised foxes for a living, and her mother, a typical Ontario person, was a primary school teacher at that time. Munro was very familiar with this remote place where she spent her childhood and girlhood. When she became an adult, Munro went to study in Western Ontario, a regional university, where she met her first husband and began her new life in Vancouver. However, in 1973, she chose to return to her hometown after divorce at the age of 42, leaving her husband and her home in Victoria. At that time, Munro had already emerged in the Canadian literary world, and in her works, she usually took her familiar growing environment as her writing background. The changes of her small town are reflected in her literary works, which not only epitomize the Canadian society, but also show their own pace and way of life in rural towns with strong regional characteristics and far away from urban centers. The local customs have become the bond that unites the strength of community in that small town. The town is the rich and real writing material of Munro’s short stories. As she said in one interview, “If you live in a small town, you will hear more about matters and know all kinds of people” (Munro, 2014: 193). Therefore, each family in the town has become the subject of her writing, the living conditions of people in small town also become Munro’s priority. In her process of writing, she takes care for minute changes of living environment in her short stories, takes “home” as a reference object to symbolize community, and talks about the fact whether those people adhere to the value orientation of “home” under the impact of industrial society and the crisis of modern civilization.
1.2 Anxiety in Face of Modernization
The narrator’s mother in Walker Brothers Cowboy has always been indulged in those happy memories of many years in the past and stuck in the old way of thinking, so that she tries in vain to escape from reality and delude herself. Munro’s description of the mother expresses the anxiety that people in the small-town experience when they cannot adapt to new changes in life during the transitional times. Maintaining the original way of dressing is a manifestation of the mother’s refusal to accept the unbearable reality and the resulting anxiety. “She wears a good dress, navy blue with little flowers, sheer, worn over a navy-blue slip. Also a summer hat of white straw, pushed down on the side of the head, and white shoes I have just whitened on a newspaper on the back steps” (Munro, 2000: 12). This written language vividly depicts the image of a middle-class woman who lays stress on her appearance. Living in a poor and remote town, she must dress meticulously and elegantly even if she only goes to the grocery store, but this kind of dress is incompatible with the local housewives. It can be seen that the narrator’s mother has been affected by the economic crisis. After the family moved from a big city to a rural town, they live with housewives all day long, such gap in life and psychology gradually makes her feel anxious and uneasy about her identity, so that she still keeps her previous dressing habits and styles to cover up her confusion and anxiety. From the mother who escape from reality and faces the unbearable situation, it could be seen that the anxiety of the identity of the townspeople in the face of modernization after the economic crisis is also the evidence of the lack of community bond in the town.
Chapter Two Munro’s Reconstruction of the Organic Community
2.1 Mother-Child Relationship: The Core of Community by Blood
Robert Thacker once said in an interview, “Munro has called her relation with her Mother her default material. And now, as she continues to write on into her eighties, Munro seems to have returned to the time and place in Huron County Ontario that made and shaped her most explicitly” (Zhou, 2013: 7). Mother-Child relationship is one of the themes Munro deeply cares about, and most of her works focus on family theme. With her meticulous observation of the complex interpersonal relationships in the family, she points out that family members play a greatly significant role in the whole family. Admittedly, as the most natural and close form of community, individual connections in the family embody the universal bond of community mode. Likewise, Tönnies regards the Community by Blood as the basic form of community and the constituent unit of the larger community, thinking that “Study of the household is the study of community, just as study of the organic cell is the study of biological life” (Tönnies, 2001: 39). He deems that the Community by Blood is the most powerful community relationship “that between a mother and her child” (Tönnies, 2001: 22).
2.2 Neighborhood: Embodied Community of Place
Although Community by Blood plays an important role in Munro’s short stories, she does not confine the boundary of community to family and marriage, instead further explores human relations outside family. As the extension and expansion of Community by Blood, Community of Place shows a higher common will than family, namely, common customs and community beliefs. Tönnies believes that neighborhood relationship is a common feature of Community of Place, because of neighbors’ constant contact and cooperation. In addition, villagers here rely on the agricultural background to survive, meet self-sufficiency, or form an unbreakable unity through the assistance of neighbors and community helpers, and eventually they constitute an organic and harmonious community lifestyle by mutual promotion.
In Runaway, Carla’s second suffering escape comes from male fetters. After she married her husband, Clark, both were not well with their marriage. Their marriage begins getting a little frayed around the edges, and it has placed an almost unendurable strain on Carla. “He was mad at her all the time. He acted as if he hated her. There was nothing she could do right, there was nothing she could say. Living with him was driving her crazy. Sometimes she thought she was already crazy. Sometimes she thought he was” (Munro, 2005: 23). Carla becomes the victim of Clark’s release of bad temper and his male authority.
Chapter Three Munro’s Contribution to Literary Community through her Authorial Voice .............................. 31
3.1 Speaking for Marginalized Female by Non-linear Narration .......... 31
3.2 Rewriting the Literary Tradition by Intertextuality ......................... 34
3.3 Striking Resonance by Open Ending ................................ 36
Conclusion ..................................... 39
Chapter Three Munro’s Contribution to Literary Community through her Authorial Voice
3.1 Speaking for Marginalized Female by Non-linear Narration
Post-modernist nonlinear narrative deconstructs the linear narrative mode of traditional novels, completely abandons the reconstruction of time and the significance of the existence of people represented by time, and instead focuses on presenting chaos (Zhou, 2014: 91-92). Non-narrative mode that deconstructs traditional linear narrative with the clearly continuous time sequence and closed plot structure allows the author not only to go back to the past, but also to examine the unpredictable life of the women in the story before the future, so as to present the diachronism and synchronism of the text, perform the new-type harmonious organic relationship between author, text and characters, recombining and integrating the seemingly unrelated fragmented plots and finally achieving a consecutive narrative. Meanwhile, with the text-centered paradigm deconstructing, Munro enriches the images of heroines in those short stories, implying the different faces and complex intertwined fates of women in different periods, and triggering those women in the story to recognize their own voices and realize self-growth and rebirth, which eventually achieves Munro’s expression on the female voice.
Conclusion
As one of the most famous female writers in Canada, Alice Munro has been committed to depicting the close and alienated complex relationship between individuals and community in the context of small towns through the subtle observation of daily life. This thesis studies the community writing in Munro’s works from the text content and narrative form through her three collections of short stories from three aspects: Munro’s exploration of spoiled community life in transitional times, her reconstruction of community and her construction on literary community through authorial voice.
Chapter one firstly takes “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and “The Shining Houses” as examples to show her depiction of the pastoral life of Canadian small towns, explores how Munro portrait residents’ images and their life changes in the process of economic crisis and modernization, and manifests those townspeople’s anxiety and lace of sense of belonging by industrialization. With Munro’s pen, community is changing. The life style of Canadian small towns in the agricultural era is simple and innocent, which makes people yearn for the self-sufficient community before the social transformation. However, in the process of modernization, the economic situation and lifestyle of small towns in Canada have completely undergone changes, and the town has gradually embarked on the road of modernization and transformation. In such course, society advocates materialism, but people suffer from cultural impoverishment and spiritual loss. The value system of urbanization affects the trend of people’s values, thus forming a conflict between adhering to the traditional small town or enjoying modern life, which creates a contrast between an organic community and a materialistic one. Therefore, Munro in her works seeks a way to deal with this dilemma at the time of social transformation, calls on people to attach importance to the spiritual world and cultural life, and imagines how to build a community under the background of industrialization, thus anticipates an ideal community where people and the environment can live in harmony. Munro’s literary writing is rooted in the changes of small towns in Canada.
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