Socio-Cultural reality of Canadian Women in the fiction of Alice Munro

Abstract

Throughout this paper I have systematized and studied in critical terms, a range of Alice Munro mainly women-centric short stories, with an in-depth study of their living condition under the traditional social conventions. Being concerned about women Munro in her fiction has recreated the world of Canadian women, with its true picture of the Canadian society, with culture, custom and environment. She has continuously wrote about the invaluable document of human relationship, as well as female experience under social values and expectation. In her work, Munro explores women's role in different situation of life as a young girl, a career women, a lover, wife or mother. In each of these roles Canadian women found a reflection of their selves mirrored in Munro's chronical of women's social history down the decades. She writes about past experiences of her childhood, cultural traits and social structure that she minutely observed in her different age group. Her subjects are rural landscape, lives of girls and women, their coming of age, love, hate, marriage, suffering and stuff of rural life with reference to small town locality. Lake Huron, Otawa Valley and Wowanash County. Munro's strength, as a short story writer, is the range of her portraits of a variety of female characters from childhood to old age. In this way, most of the girls and women of Munro, as the main protagonists, confront, challenges at personal, familial and social level. However, they all are not alike; some are submissive and introvert and feeble while others bold, rebellious and self-indulgent who are real girls and women of Munrovian model, search their original self, and who put aside all their pretentions, show the Canadian society, alternatively, to the world what they, in reality are. Muro is a realistic writer, her character a represent cultural reality of rural Canadianness of her age. Del and Rose are Munrovian iconic characters, with whom she reveals her own childhood, youth and maturity and they have been transfigured in her favorite books Lives of Girls and Women and Beggar Maid intentionally. Protagonists of Dance and Progress are modelled on herself