Between Mentality And Physicality:a Psychoanalytic Approach To Character Development In Alice Munro’s Short Stories

Alice Munro,who was honored as "master of the contemporary short story" and awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2013,is regarded as one of Canada’s leading literary figures.Her style is often likened to the works of magic painters,for its vivid images and concentrated depictions of surface textures,exposing the meanings that lie beneath the surface of commonplace occurrences.This thesis focuses on Munro’s presentation of her characters,women and children in particular,to explore how different facets of their world are exemplified through a series of incidents of the common life of the ordinary,covering are murder,insanity,death,divorce,and various cheats.The thesis takes four short stories from Too Much Happiness,one of Munro’s early collections,to expound the mentality and physicality of characters in the light of Freud’s psychoanalysis and Lacan’s mirror stage theory.It contains five parts:the introduction,three chapters and the conclusion.The Introduction gives an overview of Alice Munro’s life and career,a brief account of her criticisms,theoretical basis and the framework of this thesis.Chapter One is an elaboration of Munro’s children characters,how they confront their world of growth in face of desire,identity,and even death.Chapter Two offers a study of women characters’ world where they struggle with daily trifles,household violence marriage and betrayal while they are battling their quests for stability and independence.Chapter Three is a discussion of several character development models by the author of this thesis attempts to figure out,by means of which the characters in Munro’s stories are endeavoring to find their way out of their problems.The Conclusion summarizes the progress and discoveries of the thesis author’s interpretation and analysis in her study of Munro’s stories.They are often caught in the mental world filled with psychological problems,and,if they fail to cope with them,their mental world may collapse and be trapped into a disordered condition.Therefore,Munro tries to design,successfully or not,certain development models for different characters of hers,which may function as self-therapy and self-cure for them to get out of their chaotic situations.However,it is also discovered that there are some problems,either mental or physical,that have not been actually solved,and this may reflect some dilemma-like essence in humanity as well as in human life.