Female Pleasure and Car Accidents: Signifying Alice Munro’s Middle Stories

ABSTRACT

Alice Munro is a chronicler of women’s lives in her contextual time and space, although her subtle and incisive psychological insight and understanding of womanhood render certain aspects of her characters’ nature universal. Her short fiction describes and gives voice to a range of female identities and realities, often outlining sexual pleasure and desire with a sincerity and ingenuousness atypical for her time. This paper explores four Munro stories – “Memorial” (1974), “Accident” (1982), “Nettles” (2001), and “Trespasses” (2004) – included in her middle collections, which combine the female experience of an adulterous sexual act with a child’s traffic-related death, focusing on the voice and sexual role of the protagonists to establish coherent links with the seemingly disengaged fatal accidents. My reading and interpretation of the stories attempt to signify the connection between the two themes in the author’s corpus which, I argue, stems from her personal biography. The literary analysis is built on previous literature on the author and short story theory, and ultimately aims to understand, support, and extend the often-claimed autobiographical dimension of Munro’s literature.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Iris Lucio-Villegas Spillard

Iris Lucio-Villegas Spillard (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Modern Philology of the University of La Rioja in Spain. Her PhD thesis is an exploration and analysis of certain autobiographical aspects of Alice Munro’s literature. She has published articles in the International Journal of English Studies (IJES) and in a special issue dedicated to Alice Munro of English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries (ELOPE). She teaches English language history, academic English, and translation theory and practice at Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid. She also works as a translator of academic texts for publication.