Alice Munro is one of the most famous female writers in Canada and she won the Nobel prize for literature in 2013. She is generally regarded one of the most influential novelists in Canada for her nuanced portrayal of ordinary women. Published in 2004, Munro’s masterpiece Runaway is a collection of eight short stories, in which the background, experience and emotions of the characters are similar to one another, with the description of the living conditions of women in small towns, including girls, married women, single university female teachers and town nurses. Munro emphasizes their intense struggles and swing beyond the surface of life that seems serene, and also pays attention to the efforts made by these women in order to pursue physical and spiritual freedom. As the first short story in this book, “Runaway” tells the two escapes of the heroine Carla. The first is to escape from her parents, eloping with Clark. Unfortunately, her escape does not help her live the ideal life, but plunge her into a deeper predicament. For the second time, she flees again because she is unable to bear her husband’s hegemony. However, unable to bear the cost of freedom, Carla does not finish her second escape and returns back to Clark. This paper mainly focuses on the theme of female initiation in Alice Munro’s short story “Runaway”. Through the detailed description of Carla’s real life in the story, this thesis will analyze the underlying intrinsic motivation of her two escapes, so as to explore the heroine’s inner change and her mental and spiritual growth.

In foreign countries, the study on Munro’s works started in the 1980s. Some scholars have mentioned geographical backgrounds in her novels. It is generally agreed that distinctive geographical factors constitute the major feature of Munro’s works. Up to now, there are no monographs on the novel collection Runaway, and there are few papers on the collection, most of which are mainly about one or two stories in the collection. Fiona Tolan argues in her paper To Leave and to Return: Frustrated Departures and Female Quest in Alice Munro’s Runaway that Munro attempts to reflect women’s experiences through traditional narrative methods in Runaway, but the theme of women's self-exploration is still within the framework of male-dominated narrative. Bahador and Zohdi's Alice Munro's "Runaway" in the Mirror of Sigmund Freud used Freud's psycho-analysis theory to elaborate the psychology of the heroine Carla.

In China, the study of Munro's works started relatively late, and it is gradually warming up after 2009. The research mainly focuses on feminism, ethics, mythological archetypes, characters, themes, writing styles and language features, but it is not deep and systematic. Most of the studies on“Runaway” are from the perspectives of themes, feminism, symbolism, ecologism and narrative style. For example, Wang Xiao analyzed the image of Flora as the scapegoat to reveal the theme of the article in On the Scapegoat Image in Runaway.

All in all, there are some researches about “Runaway” both at home and abroad with unique insights and multifarious interpretations, while few of them emphasize the female growth, which only study one or two stages of heroine’s growth. On the basis of previous studies, this thesis will systematically and comprehensively explore the path of the heroine's growth, focusing on the germination and awakening of her female consciousness, so as to discuss the growth and maturity of her feminine thoughts.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

Contents

1 Introduction

1.1 Munro and Runaway

1.2 Literature Review

1.3 Structure of The Paper

2 Obedience