| This thesis is an examination of the ways in which Alice Munro uses reality or the appearance of reality, specifically her use of place as not just a physical setting with its houses, streets and trees, but also a setting that evokes a body of imagery with its values, patterns, and stories. It focuses on three stories from Munro's 1994 collection Open Secrets--"A Real Life," "A Wilderness Station," and "Carried Away,"--and it explores the different ways each story uses place. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Munro depicts women in wilderness in the context of traditional images of the frontier, the wilderness, and the frontier community--how her characters live within or without their traditional gender roles and the images and effects of marriage. |
