Poco Feminist Undercurrents in Alice Munro's Carried Away
“This world is a wilderness in which we may get our station changed, but the move will be out of one wilderness station unto another.” (Munro 336)
This enigmatic quote; a part of ‘A Wilderness Station’ one of the stories in the anthology-‘Carried Away’ by Alice Munroe, not only justifies the title but also sets us onward through the journey into the unique sensations of Post-colonial feminist sensibilities that Munroe lends so easelessly to her work. The term, ‘wilderness’ and the desperate sense of solitude honed by the inner turmoil indicates that the real wilderness stays intact and never leaves a person by a mere change of geography and situation. This sense of being alone in company, being without an association as in the sense of “otherness” opens up and introduces the title of this article Post-colonial feminist reading of Alice Munro’s Man Booker Award winning collection of short stories- ‘Carried Away’. Born Alice Laidlaw in 1931, in Wingham Southwestern Ontario, Munro began writing and publishing stories at the university itself and slowly rose to fame. Her gradual rise to success is a story in itself, how even after many of her short stories appearing regularly in Canadian Forum, Chateline and the Tamarack review, and winning the Governor General’s Award for her first collection, Dance of The Happy Shades in 1968, she was such an obscure figure in Canadian literary circles that when in 1971, Lives of Girls and Women came out, she was called a ‘new talent’! This second book which is the only novel she has written also received Canadian Book Sellers Award. In 1974 she wrote her second collection of short stories Who Do You Think You Are? Which brought Munro her second Governor General’s Award. In 1980 Munro held the position of Writer- in- residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Munro published a short story collection about once every four years to increasing
This enigmatic quote; a part of ‘A Wilderness Station’ one of the stories in the anthology-‘Carried Away’ by Alice Munroe, not only justifies the title but also sets us onward through the journey into the unique sensations of Post-colonial feminist sensibilities that Munroe lends so easelessly to her work. The term, ‘wilderness’ and the desperate sense of solitude honed by the inner turmoil indicates that the real wilderness stays intact and never leaves a person by a mere change of geography and situation. This sense of being alone in company, being without an association as in the sense of “otherness” opens up and introduces the title of this article Post-colonial feminist reading of Alice Munro’s Man Booker Award winning collection of short stories- ‘Carried Away’. Born Alice Laidlaw in 1931, in Wingham Southwestern Ontario, Munro began writing and publishing stories at the university itself and slowly rose to fame. Her gradual rise to success is a story in itself, how even after many of her short stories appearing regularly in Canadian Forum, Chateline and the Tamarack review, and winning the Governor General’s Award for her first collection, Dance of The Happy Shades in 1968, she was such an obscure figure in Canadian literary circles that when in 1971, Lives of Girls and Women came out, she was called a ‘new talent’! This second book which is the only novel she has written also received Canadian Book Sellers Award. In 1974 she wrote her second collection of short stories Who Do You Think You Are? Which brought Munro her second Governor General’s Award. In 1980 Munro held the position of Writer- in- residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Munro published a short story collection about once every four years to increasing