alice munro neo-gótikus írásművészete

273 Pages·2010·1.49 MB·English

Doktori (PhD) értekezés

ALICE MUNRO NEO-GÓTIKUS ÍRÁSMŰVÉSZETE:
AZ 1990-ES ÉVEK ELBESZÉLÉSEI

Szabó Andrea

DEBRECENI EGYETEM

BTK

Debrecen, 2010.
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ALICE MUNRO’S NEO-GOTHIC: SHORT FICTION FROM THE 1990s

Értekezés a doktori (Ph.D.) fokozat megszerzése érdekében
az irodalomtudomány tudományágban

Írta: Szabó Andrea okleveles angol nyelv és irodalom - német nyelv és irodalom szakos
középiskolai tanár, társadalmi nemek szakértője

Készült a Debreceni Egyetem Irodalomtudományi doktori iskolája
(Észak-amerikai irodalomtudományi programja) keretében

Témavezető: Dr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(olvasható aláírás)

A doktori szigorlati bizottság:
elnök: Dr. …………………………
tagok: Dr. …………………………
Dr. …………………………

A doktori szigorlat időpontja: 201… . ……………… … .

Az értekezés bírálói:
Dr. ...........................................
Dr. ……………………………
Dr. ...........................................

A bírálóbizottság:
elnök: Dr. ...........................................
tagok: Dr. …………………………..
Dr. …………………………..
Dr. …………………………..
Dr. …………………………..

A nyilvános vita időpontja: 201… . ……………… … .
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Én Szabó Andrea teljes felelősségem tudatában kijelentem, hogy a benyújtott értekezés a
szerzői jog nemzetközi normáinak tiszteletben tartásával készült. Jelen értekezést korábban
más intézményben nem nyújtottam be és azt nem utasították el.

2010. december 15.

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Contents

1. INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………….…… 5
1. 1. Area and Objective of Research ……………………………..… 5
1. 2. Position and Significance within Scholarship …………….…… 7
1. 3. Thesis Outline ………………………………………………….. 16
1. 4. Methodology …………………………………………………… 26
2. DECEPTIVE SURFACES …………………………………………………. 28
2. 1. Munro’s Realism: A Critical Overview ……………………….. 29
2. 2. The Rise of Realism …………………………………………… 35
2. 3. Munro’s Realism Re-assessed ………………………………… 40
2. 4. Realism and the Gothic ………………………………………... 44
2. 4. 1. The Rise of the Gothic ………………………………… 45
2. 4. 2. The Female Gothic …………………………………….. 52
2. 4. 3. Two Worlds ……………………………………………. 57
2. 5. Munro’s Female (Neo-)Gothic ………………………………… 59
3. MUNRO’S TWO WORLDS …………………………………………......... 65
3. 1. Worlds Alongside ……………………………………………… 67
3. 1. 1. “Open Secrets” ………………………………………… 67
3. 1. 2. “Vandals” ……………………………………………… 72
3. 2. Unhomely Homes and Homey Lies …………………………… 82
3. 2. 1. “The Love of a Good Woman” ………………………... 83
3. 2. 2. “Jakarta” ……………………………………………….. 97
3. 3. Changing Inevitabilities: “Carried Away”……………….. …… 106
4. TWO WORLDS – TWO PLOTS ………………………………….………... 121
4. 1. Happy Endings and “Real Life”……………………………….. 122
4. 2. An Un/Re/Gendered Heroine— “The Albanian Virgin” ……… 131
4. 3. Traveling on Eyre Road — “The Jack Randa Hotel” ………… 150
5. BEYOND GOTHIC MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS ………………………… 166
5. 1. Gothic Mothers ………………………………………………… 167
5. 2. Munro’s (Gothic) Mothers …………………………………….. 173
5. 3. Monstrous Housewives ……………………………………….. 180
5. 3. 1. “Cortes Island” ………………………………………… 183
5. 3. 2. “Before the Change” …………………………………... 192
5. 4. Towards a Neo-Gothic Mother: “My Mother’s Dream” ……… 197
6. CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………… 219
NOTES …………………………………………………………………………. 223
WORKS CITED …………………………………………………………………. 241
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1. Introduction
1.1. Area and Objective of Research
My dissertation proposes to read Alice Munro’s fiction appearing in her volumes of
the 1990s as female (neo-)gothic fiction, which proposition challenges the entrenched critical
view that, except for its early phase, it is to be seen as part of the aesthetic tradition of realism.
I wish to prove that her two volumes Open Secrets (1994) and The Love of a Good Woman
(1998) evince a gothic vision and follow a female gothic aesthetic practice. The double aims
of the dissertation thus are (1) to interrogate the critical myth of Munro’s realist impulse and
(2) to define the outlines of her gothic vision. Both lines of argumentation lead to claiming
Munro’s fiction of the 1990s for a female gothic tradition, which, I claim, it critically
interrogates. The prefix ‘neo-’ signals this meta-gothic impulse.
Reading Munro’s work as part of a female gothic tradition means the joint
problematization of gender and genre. I will argue that what Munro criticism somewhat
enigmatically refers to as the “Munrovian” (e.g.: Carrington, Controlling 39-40; W. R. Martin
8, 36, 43; Thacker, “Mapping” 127; Nischik 209; Redekop 230)1 quality of her fiction
originates in the use of female gothic representational strategies that take the patriarchal
gender ideology at work in contemporary culture to task; at the same time, I will also
demonstrate that Munro’s fiction goes beyond the mere recycling of female gothic
conventions by focusing on her neo-gothic challenges to some of the solutions the female
gothic has found in order to rebalance gender inequalities in a fictional space. Underlying my
proposition is the view that the gothic as an aesthetic category cannot be divorced from its
ideological determination as it was invented as a corrective to the vision of the early realist
novel, which subsists on a particular understanding of the sex-gender system of a newly
evolving bourgeois culture; it is this system that the female gothic most extensively and
intensively interrogates—and has interrogated ever since—in terms of the social and
psychological meanings of gender for women.
The dissertation focuses on selected short stories as published in Open Secrets and The
Love of a Good Woman. The reason for choosing these volumes as the object of study is both
theoretical and practical. (1) It is theoretical in the sense that I claim Open Secrets heralds a
new phase in Munro’s aesthetic whose initial signs appeared in The Progress of Love (1986)
and Friend of My Youth (1990). This aesthetic gained its full-blown articulation by the 1994
collection, making it a landmark in her oeuvre. Although critics tend to disagree about many
things in connection with Munro’s work, there is a critical consensus about the significance of
this volume, which has “reinvented” (McCaig 81-111) the short story form. Munro’s own
comments about it as “risky” underlines its place as unique and as signaling new directions in
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her writing career.2 The Love of a Good Woman, praised by readers and critcis alike,
establishing her as the leading short fiction writer in English, is in many ways the culmination
of Munro’s risk-taking. Thus a discussion of Open Secrets and The Love of a Good Woman in
tandem as representatives of a new phase in Munro’s oeuvre is well-grounded. (I must note
that her later volumes do not clearly follow in their footsteps.3) (2) The choice is practical in
the sense that Munro criticism has been burgeoning ever since the 1980s; today her work
belongs to the most researched works by a contemporary artist. Most criticism focuses,
however, on her early volumes Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Lives of Girls and Women
(1971), and Who Do You Think You Are? (1978). Book-length discussions of her fiction
appeared mostly in the 1990s, which thus address volumes published before. Only three
critical book-length studies discuss stories from Open Secrets to date (Howells, Alice; 1998;
Cox; 2004; Hooper, 2008), and some of these had appeared by the time only in magazines and
not as stories collected in volumes. This is significant because Munro is known to make
considerable changes in the stories before they are published in book format.4 In the present
study, however, these changes and their possible ramifications will not appear as focal; I will
concentrate on the texts published as stories in collections. The reason for this is the fact that,
although Munro does not conceive of her short stories as episodes in novels or whole-books,
she arranges them into groups that exert their effects entirely differently than when they are
read individually. In sum, the practical reason for choosing these volumes as the object of
examination here is the fact that these have not been discussed in a sustained study.
The selection of the short stories discussed is similarly governed by theoretical and
practical reasons. The practical reason is related to spatial restraints. Since a full, detailed
discussion of all is made impossible by their sheer number, not mentioning their complexity
(Dennis Duffy has aptly characterized them as “add-water-and-stir” novels [179]), I selected
those that most emphatically prove my thesis, though this means that I do not discuss some of
her instant classics.5 Also, I will not follow the method of discussing each and every story in
the order they appear in print as seems to be rule in sustained studies of Munro’s fiction. I
arranged stories from both voulmes into thematic groups. A theoretical consideration
governing the selection of the short stories is related to the argument that the stories in these
volumes are female (neo-)gothic because (1) they utilize fundamental female gothic
conventions and because (2) they interrogate them in order to reroute the gender discourse of
female gothic subjectification.
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1. 2. Position and Significance within Scholarship
My reading of Munro’s narratives as neo-gothic texts attempts to resituate Munro as a
female (neo-)gothic writer. I engage with critical traditions in three ways:
(1) Challenging the critical tradition of Munro’s realism:
I argue that notwithstanding the varied critical approaches to Munro’s fiction, realism (both as
an aesthetic practice and as an ideological construct) has functioned as an insufficiently
problematized reference point in Munro criticism, the reasons of which are to be sought in the
histories of Munro and of gothic criticism rather than in her artistic vision and aesthetic
practice.
The beginning of Munro’s literary career coincided with the rise of critical interest in
Canadian literature; therefore, the reception of her work was determined by the issues raised
in the canonization process of Canadian literature. In the 1960s and 1970s several Canadian
writers whose works displayed values “typically Canadian”—Munro among them—gained a
widespread international recognition as a result of Canadian cultural policy (Hammill 538-39;
Wolfreys 214-28). Consequently, it was the era and its cultural policy that set the course for
the kind of questions that critics deeply immersed in the process of canonization asked in
connection with her prose. Robert Thacker even claims that Munro seems to be “in many
ways something of a paradigm case of ‘the canonization of a Canadian Author’” (“Go” 157).
The Munro critical industry, set into motion by the first conference devoted entirely to
her work in 1982 (University of Calgary) and never losing momentum since, started out on
the premise that Munro is first and foremost a regionalist-realist writer of Canada. At the
same time, the Munrovian peculiarity of her prose was also registered, which critics explained
by describing it as hyper- or super-realist (“hyper-” and “super” because it pays minute
attention to surface details; thus the prefixes are used as synonyms for ‘heightened’) or magic
realist (“magic” because the effects of her fiction—but not its techniques—may be compared
to the magic realism of contemporary Latin-American literature; see discussions especially by
Moss, A Reader’s [215], Thacker [“Clear” 37-60], Struthers [“Alice” 103-12], W. R. Martin
[Alice xiv, 206], MacKendrick [1], Rasporich [131-32], Howells [Alice 4, 18], Canitz and
Seamon [67-80]). Significantly, not even the postmodern turn ni critical discourse has
challenged the centrality of realism in Munro’s fiction (see Hutcheon, Canadian 208).
Moreover, the critical tradition has been equally preserved in discussions that cannot
be immediately linked to the canonization of Canadian literature. By the end of the 1980s and
the early 1990s, Munro was seen not only as the faithful recorder of small-town Ontario life
but of female existence as well, which generated a myriad of studies written from a feminist
critical point of view.6 Because she is of Scotch-Irish descent and because in her later fiction
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she has increasingly addressed her Scottish heritage her work also appears as rich material for
Scottish Studies.7 Similarly, because of her faithful portrayal of women’s inner life, scholars
of the intersections between Literature and Psychology are also apt to scrutinize her work.
Furthermore, Munro in her very early interviews made it clear that she sees the influences on
her work as rooted mainly in the literature of English Romanticism (the writings by and of
Mary Shelley), English Victorian literature (the novels of Emily and Charlotte Brontë and of
Thomas Hardy, the poetry of Lord Alfred Tennyson), and American literature (Willa Cather);
especially, the literature of the American South (James Agee, Carson McCullers, Eudora
Welty, and Flannery O’Connor) (e.g.: Struthers, “American” 196-204; Metcalf 56), therefore,
her work has become a critical favorite outside Canada; all the more so because she has won
major literary prizes in the United States and in Great Britain as well. Such wide-ranging
critical interests will understandably engender varied evaluations and interpretations;
notwithstanding, realism as an aesthetic practice has functioned as a point of reference that
Munro critics gravitate to, whether affirming or denying it (in encyclopedic volumes she is
still customarily referred to as a realist writer [e.g.: Klinck 49; Keith 155, 161; Moss,
“Introduction” 8; Woodcock, Northern 132; Stouck 269; Arkin and Schollar 832; Andrew
Gurr qtd. in Holland 116; Magill 3395; Pryke and Soderlund 294; J. E. Miller 228; ; Huggan
221; New, History 238; Creelman 175; Kruk 93; Fiamengo 251; Lawn 576; and Wishart
495]).
Yet, the compatibility of her aesthetic practices with those writers’ who are
traditionally seen as belonging to a realist canon has always seemed problematic, which is
signaled by the fact that beside such supposedly neutral adjectives as “regional,” “feminist,”
and “Canadian” there have also appeared others describing her fiction as “paradoxical” and
therefore “contemporary” (Canitz and Seamon 69, 68), “inconclusive,” “incongruous,” and
“accommodating” (Hoy, “Alice” 19), “grotesque” (Redekop 116), and “chaotic” and thus
“defensive” (Lamont-Stewart 120). A variety of critics discuss profusely why Munro’s fiction
shows kinship with the tradition regardless of how much their own analyses gesture towards
the inapplicability of the term. Rather than address the ideological underpinnings of her art,
they validate their own insistence by calling Munro’s vision dialectical (Thacker, “Clear” 58;
Lamont-Stewart 120; Hoy, “Alice” 14; Osmond 92; Redekop 33), which, they argue,
improves a putative naive, regionalist-realist-documentarist aesthetic practice by expanding
its thematic, generic, and technical repertoire.
I claim that the critical framework of the gothic for the discussion of her work has
numerous benefits: (1) it connects many of the previous critical discussions since her
gothicism explains why in most discussions she is considered as part of the canonical realist
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tradition notwithstanding the fact that there is a constant need felt to qualify her aesthetic
practice and even why her fiction is sometimes referred to as postmodern. (2) It redraws the
perimeters of her portrayal of female life by lifting it out of second wave feminist critical
discourse that has proved to be an impasse while (3) it also accounts for the adaptability of her
fiction for the problematizatoin of gender and (4) for psychological-psychoanalytical
interpretations of women’s inner life. (5) In addition, it provides a so far unaccounted for link
between her interests in Shelley, the Brontës, the literature of the American South, and even
her view of her Scottish heritage, which have come to assume an increasingly significant
point of reference in her fiction. (5) Furthermore, and not in the least, it provides a theoretical
background against which to interpret the “Munrovian” idiosyncrasies of her fiction.
(2) Widening the critical tradition of Munrovian Gothic:
I claim that gothicism is not restricted to Munro’s early fiction but is present as the major
structuring force of her work of the 1990s.
Although several critics have pointed out affinities between Munro’s fiction and the
gothic (Rasporich xv, 22-25, 134-44; Redekop 65-67; Howells, “Canadian” 105; Alice 13-49;
Duffy 169-90; Carrington, “Double-Talking” 71-92; McCombs 32; Becker 103-50; Szalay, A
nő 23-46), only three accord a greater significance to it than a mere reference to some of its
conventions merits: Coral Ann Howells has argued most persistently for the past twenty years
that Munro’s fiction evinces a gothic vision (moreover, she finds that Lives of Girls and
Women best represents the tradition of Canadian gothic [“Canadian” 105]), while Suzanne
Becker and Edina Szalay have discussed at length how it manifests itself in this novel (or,
arguably, a volume of interlinked short stories also known as a whole book story sequence
[Howells, Alice 55]). The privileging of Lives for a discussion within a gothic framework is
not surprising since in a sense it invites gothic criticism: its main character is writing a gothic
novel about her small town and its inhabitants. Becker and Szalay, however, go further and
identify gothicism at work in the novel not only as a theme , but also as a formative
convention in the creation of its plot, characters, narrative techniques, and figurality.
Becker structures her discussion of Munro’s Lives in Gothic Forms of Feminine
Fiction (1999) around the notion of gothic “excess” (1) which manifests itself in several ways.
It appears, for instance, as the use of excessive gothic character types; but, most significantly,
it also appears as a form of subjectification in Del’s, the main character’s, tendency to
incorporate into her self all the women’s life stories that she comes to be familiar with during
her adolescence and young adulthood. Thus, Becker argues, she embodies the female gothic
heroine in an excessively magnified form because she becomes who she is by engaging with
all other characters around her (117-36, esp. 135-36).
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Szalay’s focus in her A nő többször: neogótika és női identitás a mai észak-amerikai
regényben (2002) falls elsewhere. She argues persuasively that the protagonist of the novel
makes sense of her life with the help of characters, tropes, and plot elements borrowed from
the gothic novel. In the process Del not only incorporates the female characters and their
stories into her self (thus producing what Becker describes as an excessive gothic subject), but
she continually adjusts them at the same time to the dictates of her gothic narratives.
Therefore, the gothic excess of the protagonist’s subjectivity is made even more excessive by
deliberate fictionalization. What both Becker and Szalay agree on is that in Munro’s novel the
gothic appears as a powerful fictionalizing strategy, which has its ramifications for the
individuation of the main character as an excessive gothic subject.
At the same time, Becker holds that although the gothic appears as an adequate form
to represent female experience, Munro still finds it limiting, and therefore she transforms it
from within the gothic tradition into a neo-gothic form that acts as an educational tool in
effecting a habit change in women (251-58). Szalay concurs and shows how an unquestioning
surrender to gothic fantasy delimits women’s choices, which prompts Del to free herself of
such fantasies by the end of the novel. Likewise, in an early study of Munro’s Lives, Howells
also argues that Munro finds the gothic an “unreliable structure,” which has prompted her to
search for “other ways for talking about the strange and the grotesque” (Private 76; see also
Rasporich 140-44).
In my dissertation, following in the footsteps of Becker’s and Szalay’s investigations, I
will argue, first, that gothicism is not restricted to Munro’s early fiction; instead, it is
persistently present throughout her oeuvre, but especially in her fiction of the 1990s. Second,
my argument runs somewhat counter to Becker’s and Szalay’s conclusions in that I think that
the gothic is not presented in Munro’s fiction solely as juvenile fantasy to be outgrown, even
if Lives and her own later comments seem to suggest so (Munro qtd. in Blodgett 3), while it is
undeniable that the popular gothic romance (love story), a conventional gothic plot element, is
presented here as well as a wishful fantasy of dubious value.
My discussion of Munro’s fiction of the 1990s within the framework of gothic
criticism is not unprecedented, although studies in this vein are sporadic.8 Even these consider
the gothic as a set of conventions, a few of which appear in positions emphatic enough to
allow for a brief discussion. Their approach is justified in the sense that gothic conventions
definitely abound in these narratives. The setting is as ominous as any gothic setting could be;
after all, most are set in the same Southwestern Ontario region as Lives was.9 Characters are
presented as gothic character types (the persecuted heroine, the missing mother, the villain,
the Byronic hero, the villainess, etc.): they are denied any sense of individuality, and thereby