The Immanences of Our Daily Lives- A Study of Alice Munro

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“Munro’s people are the immanences of our daily lives” (Bloom 2). This quotation, written by Harold Bloom, American literary critic, captures the essence of Alice Munro’s work splendidly. Munro does not aim to be a great literary hero, though she is, but rather to write about life as it is. Her work is naturalistic, one of the greatest appeals of her writing. Through that naturalism, Munro writes of ordinary sorrow, ordinary love, and ordinary passion. Nothing is meant to transcend the human existence, but rather exist in harmony with that existence. Within the human existence, Munro breaks societal norms by writing about the aspects of humanity that are uncomfortable and foreboding. From her methods, to her reasoning, to the importance of her work, Alice Munro disassembles societal expectations of normality in regards to sexuality.
In her novels, Alice Munro utilizes different methods in order to break down societal expectations of normality in regards to sexuality. Throughout her prose, Munro varies slightly in how she disassembles societal expectations, though all of her works contain that common thread of disassembly. One example exists when Bloom says:
The longing for sexual connection inflicts psychic as well as physical pain in Munro’s fiction. Betrayal is common. From the high-school girl of ‘An Ounce of Cure’, so mortally depressed over being dropped by the boy who played Darcy in the Christmas production of Pride and Prejudice that she gets hugely drunk, to Prue, a woman in her forties who practices cynicism in a winningly lighthearted way and drowns her sorrow in a small revenge strategy of pilferage, Munro’s stories are filled with women- and sometimes men- who have smelled love and hope and suffer for it. (Bloom 3)
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