Gender Construction in Alice Munro´s Writing A Comparative Study of Early and Late Stories

Abstract

Abstract: It is civilization, and not biology, that constructs gender. The formation of children into gendered adults is made “naturally” by invisible societal structures and is consequently troublesome to reveal. My thesis is that often literary works expose implied gender patterns and hence can assist in increasing the awareness about gender formation in society. In this essay, I explore the formation of young girls into women depicted in six short stories from two collections by the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro. The focus of the study is on the relation between mothers and daughters and on the division of space and power, areas acknowledged to be of importance in the construction of gender. An element of time is added to the study in order to examine whether Munro´s critique is different in the two collections and whether there is an observable change concerning women´s conditions in her more recent stories compared to her earlier ones. My findings show that gender is still seen as a construction and that the struggle for selfhood goes on in Munro´s writing. Despite economic and civic liberties, Munro´s characters still fight to define themselves beyond gender boundaries. However, in her later stories, society´s expectations are mainly manifested psychologically within the female characters, while in the earlier stories, the expectations are of a more social character