“Munro’s people are the immanences of our daily lives” (Bloom 2). This quotation, written by Harold Bloom, American literary critic, captures the essence of Alice Munro’s work splendidly. Munro does not aim to be a great literary hero, though she is, but rather to write about life as it is. Her work is naturalistic, one of the greatest appeals of her writing. Through that naturalism, Munro writes of ordinary sorrow, ordinary love, and ordinary passion. Nothing is meant to transcend the human existence, but rather exist in harmony with that existence. Within the human existence, Munro breaks societal norms by writing about the aspects of humanity that are uncomfortable and foreboding. From her methods, to her reasoning, to the importance of her work, Alice Munro disassembles societal expectations of normality in regards to sexuality.
In her novels, Alice Munro utilizes different methods in order to break down societal expectations of normality in regards to sexuality. Throughout her prose, Munro varies slightly in how she disassembles societal expectations, though all of her works contain that common thread of disassembly. One example exists when Bloom says:
The longing for sexual connection inflicts psychic as well as physical pain in Munro’s fiction. Betrayal is common. From the high-school girl of ‘An Ounce of Cure’, so mortally depressed over being dropped by the boy who played Darcy in the Christmas production of Pride and Prejudice that she gets hugely drunk, to Prue, a woman in her forties who practices cynicism in a winningly lighthearted way and drowns her sorrow in a small revenge strategy of pilferage, Munro’s stories are filled with women- and sometimes men- who have smelled love and hope and suffer for it. (Bloom 3)
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... Short Story Criticism. Ed. Sheila Fitzgerald. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale Reasearch, 1989. 322.
Martin, W.R. Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1987. Print.
Munro, Alice. “Prue”. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford, 2002. 467-469. Print.
---. “Wild Swans.” The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford, 2002. 459-466. Print.
Murphy, Georgeann. “The Art of Alice Munro: Memory, Identity, and the Aesthetics of Connection.” Rpt. in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Alice Munro. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York, NY: Infobase, 2009. 48. Print.
Smith, Rowland. “Rewriting the Frontier: Wilderness and Social Code in the Fiction of Alice Munro.” Rpt. in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Alice Munro. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York, NY: Infobase, 2009. 162. Print.
Bibliography:.. Works Cited Meyer, M., Ed., (1999). Bedford Introduction to Literature, 5th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin.
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That is not to say that nothing happens in Munro’s short-stories. Instead, multiple scenes take place in “Royal Beatings.” The narrator, Rose, tells us of her life as a child growing up in Hanratty, Ontario; of her stepmother, Flo’s, stories and work in the store the family owned, of her father’s habit of isolating himself in his furniture shed, of being beaten and then indulged. However, the plot is secondary to the story. The scenes created by Munro are not based in action, but emotion and character revelation.
In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” there is a time line in a young girl’s life when she leaves childhood and its freedoms behind to become a woman. The story depicts hardships in which the protagonist and her younger brother, Laird, experience in order to find their own rite of passage. The main character, who is nameless, faces difficulties and implications on her way to womanhood because of gender stereotyping. Initially, she tries to prevent her initiation into womanhood by resisting her parent’s efforts to make her more “lady-like”. The story ends with the girl socially positioned and accepted as a girl, which she accepts with some unease.
Stillinger, Jack, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. New York, N.Y: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
Society tries to place many rules upon an individual as to what is acceptable and what is not . One must decide for themselves whether to give in to these pressures and conform to society’s projected image, or rather to resist and maintain their own desired self image. In the story “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro, Munro suggests that this conflict is internal and external and a persons experiences in life will determine which of these forces will conquer. In terms of the unnamed protagonist’s experiences in the story, it becomes clear just how strong the pressure of society to conform really is, as it overcomes and replaces the girl’s self image.
2. Abrams, M.H. (editor). The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume 2. New York City, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1968. pp. 704-707.
In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” she tells a story about a young girl’s resistance to womanhood in a society infested with gender roles and stereotypes. The story takes place in the 1940s on a fox farm outside of Jubilee, Ontario, Canada. During this time, women were viewed as second class citizens, but the narrator was not going to accept this position without a fight.
Abrams, M.H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1993.
Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” is a story about a girl that struggles against society’s ideas of how a girl should be, only to find her trapped in the ways of the world.
The Bedford Introduction to Literature 4th ed. of the book. Boston: St. Louis St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 883-89.