Graduation date: 2008
In this thesis I argue that Alice Munro’s work takes part in an ongoing feminist discourse that examines alterations in male and female gender relations, as they have been represented in domestic fiction by women writers since the late nineteenth century. I analyze two short stories written by Munro: “Meneseteung,” collected in Friend of My Youth (1991), and “Cortes Island,” collected in The Love of a Good Woman (1999). I contrast Munro’s depiction of the women writer figure with that of her predecessor, Virginia Woolf, and argue that in coming after Woolf, Munro’s perspective enables her to both revive the relevancies of Woolf’s portrayals, and by expanding upon them, acknowledge their shortcomings. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), and “Professions for Women” (1931) Virginia Woolf theorizes the situation of the twentieth-century woman writer figure, and in “Meneseteung,” and “Cortes Island” Munro gently parodies Woolf’s theoretical portrayals of that figure. In ironically allegorizing Woolf’s spectacle of the woman writer figure, I argue that Munro textually reconfigures a more feminist view of literary history.