A Freudian Interpretation Of Alice Munro's Works

The artistic value of short story has been generally ignored by the world for a long time, but this genre of literary works can better reveal a writer's command of the language and reflect the tension of text. Alice Munro, a Canadian woman writer, uses her unique narrative techniques and the profound comprehension of human nature to dig into the psychology of ordinary people, thus showing the artistic charm of short story to the extreme. In 2013, Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature, known as the “contemporary master of short stories”, and her achievement has attracted worldwide attention in the field of short story. Instead of focusing on the narrative, feminist perspective or other heatedly discussed topics on Munro's works, this thesis innovatively employs Freudian theory to explore characters' multiple anxieties together with the hidden causes, and further analyzes the ego-defense mechanism to alleviate the inner stress, as well as three releasing forms: dreams and fantasies, Parapraxia and insanity.The thesis consists of three parts. The first part introduces the background information of Alice Munro and her works, related theories of Freudian Psychoanalysis, literature review of Munro's study and the layout of the thesis. The second part of the thesis, the main body, is divided into three chapters. Chapter One, on the basis of Freud's theory of anxiety, discusses Munro's characters and her own inner world, and further probes into the hidden reasons both internal and external of their anxieties. Anxiety is a negative emotion mainly perceived by ego, which includes the realistic anxiety, the neurotic anxiety and the moral anxiety. Chapter two, combining the development of plot and the mentality of characters, explores the defense mechanism adopted by the characters in Munro's fiction in order to protect the ego through which the state of anxiety would be relieved. Measures of repression, projection and sublimation will be involved. The third chapter mainly considers the ways of abreaction to release the depression during the mental process meanwhile realizing the fulfillment of wishes through analyzing dreams and fantasies, Parapraxia and insanity in her short stories. The last part is a conclusion which reemphasizes the major argument of the thesis to reveal the general psychological embarrassment of Canadian characters, especially Canadian women, in their ordinary lives.