Mobility And Intimate Relationship In Alice Munro’s Works

Alice Munro depicts the everyday lives of ordinary people and is adept at expressing the psychological shifts of ordinary women.In her writings,she not only shows her particular feminine traits,but also builds a very different fictional world in accordance with her unique feminist perspective.This paper explores the micro mobility of women in Munro’s works with the use of mobility theory in order to investigate the significance of mobility in intimate relationship.The courtship in Munro’s works is always about walk and the train,which are representations of outdoor mobility and clearly reveal the forming mechanisms of love.Walk,as an active mobility,is always an important way of maintaining and enhancing intimacy because of the direct,unconscious and rhythmic perceptual memory it generates between the lovers.Railway mobility,through the interaction of bodies,objects and technologies,contributes to the formation of diverse emotional experiences at the station.The concepts of “body-ballet,” “place-ballet” and“body-memory” not only fit perfectly with Munro’s focus on family,but also clearly illustrate the role of mobility within domestic spaces in the maintenance of long-term relationships.The habits that are created in domestic space later develop into“responsibilities” in marital relationships,“memories” in intergenerational relationships and “contact” in kinship.Scholars have recently approached “immobility”and regarded it as forced,passive,and marginal,lacking dialectical reflection.Clarifying the dialectical relationship between the two and using Munro’s “soft feminism” to reason women’s “immobility”,not only enrich the connotation of“immobility,” but also reveal Munro’s unique feminism.The interplay between mobility and intimate relationship in Munro’s works provides readers with a wide range for literary imagination,and also stimulates reflection on the meaning of mobility in literature.