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Alice Munro Alice Munro was born in a family of farmers in Canada. One of the brilliant short stories writers she was awarded with a number of literally prizes. The protagonists of her short stories are women of her age. She does not go far from her native place and finds her heroes just in the neighborhood she lives.
Being a master of the word she was acclaimed by short-story writer Cynthia Ozick as "our Chekhov." 1 Munro similar to Chekhov succeeds in finding her plots in the everyday life of rural Canada and her stories are remarkable due to their reality, depth of the human conflicts mirrored from the everyday life. In the collection of the stories The Progress of Love her characters live between the aspiration to gain freedom and the domesticity. They are torn by two feelings, two of their aspirations, the duty to belong and the natural desire to be free of their noose. Indeed, the characters in Ms. Munro's stories seem perpetually torn between freedom and domesticity, the need for independence and the need to belong. One man seems to trade in wives and girlfriends, regularly, as soon as their failure to live up to a designated role - of ''hippie, '' ''trollop, '' etc. - threatens him with real intimacy; another determines to leave town when his girlfriend hints she might be pregnant. 2 Irony is one of integral elements of her stories describing the lives of her folks.
She is using an irony as a tool to make her stories live and attractive. In ''Jesse and Meribeth'' a teen age girl imagines the love affair with a married man and retells it to her friend. The story of girl is the lie from the very beginning but the girl uses this lie to impress her friend. This lie is ironical it is so sincere that the girl firmly believes in it. Sometimes a sense of irony is exaggerated as it is in ''Monsieur les Deux Chateaux, with two possible attempts of murder.
The stories of Munro create the complete world for the reader but this world is characterized by some irregularity as the life itself which makes them true and complete. Love is the central theme of Munro's stories. But for Munro love and life are not only merely marriage and divorce as well as birth and death, but she is interested in the development of love and life. She explores the feeling which moves the world in its development, how the weight of intimacy can suffocate a marriage, as easily as loft it into new passion; how disappointments, an apprehension of loss, can be handed down generation to generation, mother to daughter, as easily as the capacity for caring; how history repeats itself, when the man who spurns one fiancee for another decides, years later, to leave the wife for another woman. 3 The genre of Munro's writing is difficult to define just as short stories; she constructs the novels of her short stories which in its term constitute the long narration of Munro's own life.
All phenomena described in the short stories are extremely realistic and true. The mission of any writer is to develop the best feelings of his reader through perception of his own ones of love and sorrow, joy and happiness etc. Munro finds all these not in imaginary personalities but in ordinary people who surround her. Sometimes they are not so eloquent but this makes their feelings more real and understandable by Munro's readers.
The women of Munro are happy when they find the romantic love which is actually does not have too much romance displayed and they are unhappy when they loose it. The romantic affairs according to Munro is not an intrigue with the beautiful prince riding a white horse but the firm relations with just an ordinary man. The mastery of Munro is that she succeeds to reveal romantic love of average people, her contemporaries and these feelings seem even stronger than those of the fairy tale princes on the white horses. The Munro's women do not need fairy tale love, they find the comfort of love they have in reality and they suffer when they loose it. For instance when Wilfred, in ''Visitors, '' proposed to Mildred, they were both middle-aged and his way of proposing was to say, ''Why not end up in Logan? I've got a house there.
It's not so big a house, but it will take two. '' Mildred asked him why he had never been married before. He said he had often been on the go, and besides, it wasn't often you met a good-hearted woman. 4 The proposal sounds very ordinary but a good hearted woman is an utmost expression of the Mildred feelings and his attitude towards the woman. The paradox of Munro is that her characters are extraordinary in their ordinariness. They live their ordinary life and their extra ordinariness is displayed in their feelings, deeds etc. The life of the characters of her stories is very monotonous when the visit to a doctor becomes a great event and the talk of weather is the main conversation of a day.
This monotony of the everyday life contrasts the feelings of people narrated by Munro. The characters of Munro are naive, they firmly believe in what they are told. People tend to look for something more in their feelings. It is like miracle which is to be reached.
In ''Hard Luck Stories, '' the narrator shows the conversation with Julie a woman who is married and believes that she had missed some large love in her life. She thinks that the love she found in marriage was not just the real love. The narrator explanation There's the intelligent sort of love that makes an intelligent choice. That's the kind you " re supposed to get married on. Then there's the kind that's anything but intelligent, that's like a possession.
And that's the one, that's the one everybody really values. That's the one nobody wants to have missed out on. '' 5 made Julie think that she had not used her chance of having true love thus revealing her past for the reader. This attempt of Julie to evaluate her past is one of the flashbacks expressed in the title. Hard luck is luck in love which had been missed by Julie. The stories of Julie are stories of missed love. Julie's first story was about a young man she started to get to know when she was first married, and had thought that she might fall in love with, but before that could happen she discovered that he was only seventeen and was a patient in a mental hospital.
Her second story was about a leader of an encounter group who had pursued her, writing her several letters a day, claiming to be obsessively in love with her. And although she resisted his overtures, she did let them become a part of her life that she depended on to some extent, until he came out that this psychologist was in fact sleeping with one woman in each of the several groups he led. At last Julie found some kind of love with Douglas, but life made her suspicious of the truthfulness of her feeling and she catches every chance to reconsider it. Julie displaying her naivety tries to realize what her current position is, happy love or unhappy memoirs of lost chances. People find their high ideals in their everyday life. In "How I Met My Husband teenaged girl had been waiting for her hero and married a postman who used to come and sit beside her without bringing the letter she was waiting for.
At last she married this postman. What was that, association of the postman with the hero or upraising the postman to the brave hero? In the last sentence there is an explanation of her husbands stories, He always tells the children the story of how I went after him by sitting by the mailbox every day, and naturally I laugh and let him, because I like for people to think what pleases them and makes them happy. " She keeps quiet because the dream of the brave pilot she was waiting for belongs to her only, it is her innermost dream. At the same time she displays her spiritual wealth by not discredit her husbands stories. This is the best manifestation of the Munro's aesthetics, a postman may be a pilot, love prepared for the brave hero is granted to a postman who might become a hero. This is maybe the greatest achievement of Alice Munro, to create a hero in imagination of provincial woman and then grant the heros features to the provincial man; or it is better to say, to find these features in provincial men.
Thus Munro confirms the exclusivity of each human being. Ordinariness is the main theme of the Munro's stories. She uses the simple plots and stories to reveal the best qualities of her heroes. Some of the characters are only vaguely aware or just beginning to understand those impossible things they " ve set their hearts on. Et, another character from "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, " is plagued with ambivalence and a kind of passive aggression (she still wants to sabotage any potential relationship her sister might have with Blaikie). In "The Ottawa Valley, " the narrator tries to write a story that is a portrait of her mother, and her mother's family and generation but finds that she cannot: "The problem, the only problem, is my mother.
And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid, of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow.
Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same. " 6 No doubt Alice Munro is one of the most specific writers of the English language literature. Her originality is in the ordinariness of her heroes. She has been no doubt included into Literary Canon as a writer who succeeded to find her own way of creating the hero of provincial people, heroes who are understandable to the ordinary people for whom she wrote her great works. Her greatness is confirmed by the fact that she became the recognized modern classic of the Canadian literature.
The New York Times even compared Munro with such giants of the American literature as Tillie Olsen and John Updike. Alice Munro's subject matter is ordinariness -- disappointment, the passage of time -- but she doesn't bring to her stories what, say, John Updike or Tillie Olsen do: extraordinary language, a mind in love with the everyday but able to exalt it so that we feel the magic in what is usual. Most of the stories here concern the past, hidden from others but told to us: a woman, happily married, reflects on her first husband, who was a writer, without disclosing the reflection to her present husband; a woman, happily married, reflects on how she met her present husband while in love with someone else; a woman, long in love with a man who has left her, takes poison as she had planned to do years before, after he returns and once again leaves. This isn't all that Alice Munro writes about, but it is mostly what concerns her, and the stories do seem formulaic. 7 Citation The Canadian Encyclopedia Michiko Kakutani Ibid Lee Lady The Moons of Jupiter W. Smith The NY Times Bibliography Munro, Alice, The Canadian Encyclopedia, available at web retrieved 17. 03. 2006 Michiko Kakutani, Books of The Times, NY Times, September 3, 1986, available at web retrieved 17. 03. 2006 Lee Lady, review of The Moons of Jupiter, available at web retrieved 17. 03. 2006 Munro, Alice, The Moons of Jupiter, New York: Vantage Books, 1991.
Wendy Smith. Alice Munro: Selected Stories 1996, available at web retrieved 17. 03. 2006 The New York Times, Review: 'Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You', October 27, 1974, available at web retrieved 17. 03. 2006
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