Abstract
The title story of Munro’s eighth collection is long, dense, and intricately structured. The story’s complexities are multiply caused and situated: for example, some segments of the narrative are disarranged and anach-ronous; instances of irony and ambiguity are numerous; omniscient and focalized perspectives are significantly, and at times disconcertingly, juxtaposed; tropes of metonymy and metaphor test the reader’s cognitive and interpretative capacities. John Gerlach begins his essay on “The Love of a Good Woman” with the assertion that the story “poses problems for the reader at its conclusion — which is virtually no conclusion at all.”1 I believe that the problems are posed in other places besides the ending: to negotiate one’s way through fiction that Catherine Sheldrick Ross calls “a garden of forking paths” is an exhilarating but also demanding experience, where the reader is on constant alert for diversions and ambushes.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Gerlach, “To Close or Not to Close: Alice Munro’s ‘The Love of a Good Woman,’” Journal of Narrative Theory 37, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 146–58.
Catherine Sheldrick Ross, “‘Too Many Things’: Reading Alice Munro’s ‘Love of a Good Woman,’” University of Toronto Quarterly 71 (Summer 2002): 808.
Dennis Duffy, “‘A Dark Sort of Mirror’: ‘The Love of a Good Woman’ as Pauline Poetic,” Essays on Canadian Writing 66 (Winter 1998): 179.
Heta Pyrhönen, “Retardatory Devices,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), 499–500.
Coral Ann Howells, Alice Munro (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 151.
Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartnik, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (London: Longman, 1985), 1088.
Copyright information
© 2011 Isla Duncan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Duncan, I. (2011). “The Love of a Good Woman”. In: Alice Munro’s Narrative Art. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000682_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000682_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34159-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-00068-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)