Abstract
In this chapter Tomasz Sikora offers a reading of selected stories from Alice Munro’s collection The Progress of Love (1986). The general interpretative framework is built around a literary (and, perhaps, epistemological) convention that the author chooses to call Gothic Realism. The first part of the study is a discussion of the proposed term (as applied to the work of Munro), mostly in connection to the notion of ambivalence, such as that described by Freud in his famous essay The Uncanny, i.e. the ambivalent relationship between what is “(like) home” and what is alien or “unlike home.” In particular stories the reader finds many different kinds of ambivalence, which makes the author conclude that in the Canadian writer’s work no positivity is ever pure and free of a “drop” of negativity. At the same time, however, Munro’s writing seems to offer a sense of astonishment over the fact that despite nothingness—there is the richness of the empirical world; despite fate—there is the openness of everything that happens; despite negativity—there is a positive bond (let us call it love) which somehow keeps people together.
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Notes
- 1.
A. Belyea, Redefining the Real: Gothic Realism in Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth, Kingston, Ontario 1998 (MA thesis available online: www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/mq31181.pdf); E. Vancoppernolle, Haunted Families: Gothic Realism in Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness, Ghent 2010 (MA thesis available online: http://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/001/457/832/RUG01-001457832_2011_0001_AC.pdf).
- 2.
In a sense Munro’s stories are anti-psychological, or at least they go far beyond traditional psychologism. This is particularly evident in passages where characters disconnect from their feelings (e.g. Trudy from “Circle of Prayer”), from their motivations (e.g. Colin from “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux”) and other elements of the so-called inner life. The psyche is both familiar and alien at the same time (as everything else in Munro’s fiction), while identity is just a rather accidental resultant of many intersecting factors.
- 3.
Often, but not always, the negativity in question is a “female” one. In “White Dump,” for example, Isabel points out that the Poetic Edda abounds in bloody scenes that involve women, especially murderous mothers. One such character cuts her children’s throats and serves their blood mixed with wine to her husband.
- 4.
Coined by Jakob von Uexküll, the term Umwelt refers to a “subjective-self-world” (cf. Uexküll, 1987, p. 148), or the world as it emerges meaningfully and experientially to an organism.
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Sikora, T. (2016). ‘Shockingly Like, and Unlike, Home’: Gothic Realism in the Progress of Love . In: Buchholtz, M. (eds) Alice Munro. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24061-9_5
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