A Lacanian Psychoanalysis Of Women In Runaway

As the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013,the Canadian writer Alice Munro is known as “the most outstanding novelist in North America today”.Her short stories have always been highly praised and have won prestigious awards.The collection of short stories Runaway describes the plight of women in different periods of life and their psychological turmoil in a plain tone.Similar to her other works,the theme of Runaway is related to women's self-development and gender awareness.Based on Lacan's theory of Three Orders,this paper makes an in-depth study of the female protagonists in different short stories,and then analyzes the psychological motivation behind their runaway,and finds out their escape mode.This paper consists of six chapters.The first chapter mainly introduces Alice Munro and her work Runaway and combs through the domestic and foreign literature research on Munro's works.The second chapter expounds Lacan's psychoanalysis and his theory of Three Orders.The third chapter concerns how the female protagonists' original self-consciousness comes into being in the Imaginary Order and how it affects their escaping behaviors.The fourth chapter discusses the suppression and confusion of female protagonists in the Symbolic Order and the relationship between language expression and subconscious.The fifth chapter analyzes the reasons for the failure of women's pursuit of self-consciousness in Runaway and the concept of the Real Order reflected in Munro's creative thoughts.The conclusion summarizes the similarities of female protagonists' modes of runaway,and provides some reference and suggestions for the researchers who will use psychoanalysis to analyze Alice Munro's works in the future.A Lacanian reading of the short stories in Runaway reveals that even though the heroines in Munro's short stories are different in terms of age,social status and life stages,their psychological states behind their runaway behaviors follow a unified pattern: as early as the pre-language stage,their self-consciousness begins to develop and is influenced by their mothers.Their misunderstanding in the Imaginary Order constitutes their first cognition of themselves.In the Symbolic Order,their self-consciousness is reconstructed under the influence of language and the Other,and is mostly affected and suppressed by the Other,such as family,society and religion.They struggle to escape from the conflict and trauma,but fail in the end.After they go back to their normal life,they find that the Real Order is an unreachable state,in which the existence of trauma and emptiness lurks in life and has an impact on them,which means the total failure of their runaway.