Compared with women writers like susan sontag or hannah arendt we like to talk about, Alice Munro looks so mediocre. She has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature and is "the best living master of short stories". However, biographers may still find it hard to find an amazing legendary life from her: she has been a housewife for 63 years and published 1 1 short stories and a similar long story, all of which are stories of civilians in suburban towns in Canada. More importantly, this is what her own life looks like: living in a small place, without intersection with big people, without modern love and marriage, even though she has been famous for a long time, she has never been used to expressing her profound views on politics, philosophy or women's rights issues.
In an interview from June, 5438 to October, 2007, Monroe talked a little about her private life: I actually published my first book at the age of 367. I started writing at the age of 20, when I was married, had children and did housework. Writing is not a problem even in the absence of household appliances such as washing machines. As long as people can control their own lives, they can always find time.
But if you are a woman, especially a woman with a family, you should take care of everyone who needs you, whether you need your help or your company. At that time, women's lives seemed amorphous. They write at home, but there seems to be a lot of informal social activities and phone calls in their spare time.
There is no motto to wake up the world in her turbulent story. We just know more about the difficulties of housewives writing at the same time. For example, "When children are taking a nap, it is difficult to write. I dare not say such big words. I'm afraid women can't do it now. This is the most difficult place when I was young. "
Catherine Sheldrick derrick rose, a female writer who teaches at Monroe's alma mater, wrote a biography for her in 1992: The Double Life of Alice Munro, which tells how she found the greatest possible balance between the roles of wife, mother and writer. Monroe was married twice. Her current surname comes from her first husband James. They are college classmates. Alice Munro married him in her sophomore year when she was only 20 years old. Alice Munro's hometown is Winham, Ontario. Like other parts of Ontario, Winham is also a small town inhabited by immigrants: Monroe's father Robert Laidlaw is a descendant of Scottish immigrants in the19th century. He raised silver foxes and minks on a farm on the edge of the town, and his mother Anna was a teacher. As the eldest of three children, Monroe shared the obligation to support her family. Later, she recalled that she was used to helping her mother with housework since she was a child. 17 years old immediately took up the post of teacher after graduating from high school, so that her family could earn more money. If she doesn't get a scholarship from the English Department of the University of Western Ontario, she will stay in her hometown and stop studying. The University of Western Ontario used to be a religious university in history, but when Monroe entered the school, it was already secularized. Among her predecessors, there was a Nobel Prize winner named Sir Frederick Grant Banting, who won the 1923 medicine prize for her discovery of insulin. Monroe is the second Nobel Prize winner trained by this school.
But Alice Munro was very ordinary when he was a student. During her study, she worked as a waitress, tobacco picker and librarian to make a living. However, the writing talent inherited from her father has not been abandoned. In her second year of college, she published her first novel The Size of the Shadow. She only had a two-year scholarship, so 195 1 dropped out of school and married james monroe. After marriage, she and her husband moved from eastern Ontario to the distant west coast and settled in a small town near Vancouver. James grew up in an upper-middle class family in the suburb of Toronto, which is a completely strange world for Alice, a rural girl. Many years later, in her novel Furniture, she indirectly wrote down the feeling brought by this social difference: "Our family lacks a regular social life-people don't go home for dinner, let alone get together. Maybe it's a class Table scene Five years later, the in-laws invited people who had nothing to do with them to dinner. They casually talked about the afternoon party, which was a cocktail party. This is a life I read about in magazine stories. For me, my husband's family seems to live in a privileged world in the novel. "
20 13 12 10, the nobel prize ceremony was held in Stockholm, Sweden. Alice Munro was unable to attend due to physical reasons, and her daughter Jenny accepted the award on her behalf.
James works in the largest local department store and is basically carefree. As Monroe later told reporters: "At that time, we were only 20 and 22 years old and soon lived a decent middle class life. We are going to buy a house and have a baby. It wasn't long before our dream came true. I gave birth to my first child when I was 2 1 year old. " Monroe recalled that she worked hard when she was pregnant, because she felt that once the baby was born, she would have no time to write, so she had to write something earth-shattering before that. As a result, when she was writing her first novel collection "Thanks for the ride", her first daughter Sheila was lying in the cradle next to her and watching her. They soon had three daughters. Sadly, the second daughter died 15 hours after birth.
1963, the Monroe family moved to Victoria, British Columbia. Alice gave birth to her youngest daughter, and now she has to take care of three children and help her husband James run the new "Monroe Bookstore" two days a week-although they divorced at 1972, the bookstore is still open. Monroe said that the bookstore almost went bankrupt and their financial situation was not as good as before, but this was the happiest time in her first marriage. Despite the heavy housework, the bookstore gave her friends to communicate with, and she was still able to keep writing: she started writing as soon as the children went to school until they came back for lunch. If she doesn't have to go to the bookstore to help, she will try to finish all the housework before evening and then start writing. In those years, most of her novels were published in a magazine so small that the editor could name all the readers. Until 1968, she published her first collection of short stories, Dance of Happy Shadows, and won the highest literary prize in Canada-the Governor's Award. 197 1 year, she published her second story collection, The Life of Girls and Women. Monroe once admitted that this book has a strong autobiographical significance. In the story of the same name as the collection of novels, Monroe wrote about a mother in a rural town-there are always various mothers in her novels-and solemnly warned her daughter: Use your head and don't be confused. Once you make a mistake and get lost-your life is no longer yours if you are cheated by a man. You will bear a heavy burden, as women always do. The daughter's inner answer is: I don't know much. Or even if I really understood, I decided to resist. Everything she says to me, I will resist so eagerly, stubbornly and hopefully. In the biography Mother and Daughter written by Sheila, the eldest daughter, Monroe sometimes looks like an absent-minded mother. In fact, she can only get a little writing space in this way, but Sheila said that she still feels happy around her. When Monroe became famous, Sheila was fifteen or sixteen years old. She felt her mother's struggle in managing writing and life better than her sisters. She said that although she lives in a story about her mother, more often, everything she knows about her mother is actually from her words. As an adult, she embarked on the road of writing like her mother. She repeated a common scene when she was a child: she kept her family's daily life and diet in order, and she could only go to the corner to write for a while when she was idle. Many times, Monroe used the time of doing housework and drinking coffee to meditate on the story to be written, and then sat down and wrote it on paper when she could be alone. After becoming famous, she seldom participated in social activities in the literary circle because she wanted to set aside enough time for her role as a housewife and mother. Her day, just like that of Juliet, a housewife in the small town in Escape, was awakened early in the morning by the sound of a vacuum cleaner. She taught her eldest daughter to prepare checkered cloth covers and labels for jam bottles in the kitchen to cope with countless problems of adolescent girls, and at the same time, she held her youngest daughter to prepare food for the whole family. "She didn't want to put Penelope down-it didn't seem safe here-so she put the child on one side of her leg and fished out the egg with a spoon, so she broke it with one hand, peeled it off and crushed it."
This was the ordinary life of housewives in North America at that time. Later, someone asked Monroe why he only wrote short stories. The first reason Monroe answered was that his writing time was limited. In the first half of the 20th century, the United States published a research data, which showed that at that time, 90% urban housewives spent at least three quarters of their time on housework every week, while rural housewives spent even longer. The suburban town of Canada where Monroe lives is similar. Stephanie Cootes, an American sociologist, pointed out in her "A Brief History of Marriage" that in the first 30 years of the 20th century, women's work and social activities outside the home were not recognized more than before the First World War, and most people still believed that women should go home to teach their children after marriage. "Most American children live in a family where men are the main wage earners, wives don't work outside the family or with their husbands, and children go to school instead of working as family laborers." During the Great Depression, European governments tried to introduce social programs to encourage men to support their families. After World War II, welfare countries in Europe and North America provided more practical policies for the marriage mode of "men support the family and women keep the house". An example is: 1947, the University of Illinois exempted female students from term papers, so that they could learn to be nannies for six hours in order to be wives, mothers and children in the future. Another data is that by 1950, almost half of women in the United States got married at 19, and 70% got married at 24. "Of the women who went to college in the 1950s, two thirds dropped out of school, usually to get married." This passion for marriage lasted until the early 1960s, which sociologists called a "long decade", which was the unique golden age of western marriage in history. "As late as 196 1, a survey of young women found that almost all people expect to marry themselves at the age of 22, most people want to have four children, and all people want to leave their jobs permanently when the first child is born." The best career choice provided by marriage counseling experts for women is that women should engage in jobs that do not conflict with the main roles of their wives and mothers, such as art or community volunteers.
Alice Munro grew up in this background, and then got married in the "long decade". Getting married, dropping out of school, and becoming a young full-time housewife, it seems that everything she experienced was in her time, which was the choice that ordinary women had to face at that time. She later admitted that, just like Victorian women, marriage brought so much pressure to women at that time that she even felt that she got married so early to settle down and concentrate on writing again. In Monroe's memory, the years when she lived in the northern suburb of Vancouver were extremely boring, and there were always housewives' parties that could not escape. Her parents didn't give her washing clothes, knitting sweaters, or the best maintenance methods for wool carpets, and she felt suffocated. In her novel "Memories Still Live", there is an incisive description of this life: "At that time, young husbands were very serious. Not long ago, they were courtiers, almost playthings, servile and desperate because of sexual pain. When the marriage was confirmed, they became bold and picky. Go to work every morning, clean shaven, young with a tie around his neck, and spend day after day in an unknown job; Go home for dinner, critically look at dinner, shake out the newspaper, hold it up, and stand in the middle of a mess between yourself and the kitchen, illness, mood and children ... "
Although she was praised for her unparalleled "accurate" description of life after she became famous, Monroe was never a modern woman or an intellectual elite-not Simon Beauvoir in The Second Sex, nor a sad Sagan. She just tries her best to see the changing world outside, even if she is standing in a small kitchen. Perhaps the difference between housewife Alice Munro and other housewives is that she keeps her inner self-awareness by writing "No conflict with the main roles of wife and mother".
After his divorce from James, Alice Munro moved back to Ontario and married his second husband, Gerald Frelin, four years later. Like Monroe, Flynn studied at the University of Western Ontario. He is a veteran, three years older than Monroe. After getting degrees in English and philosophy there, he studied geography and became a geographer. Participated in the compilation of the National Atlas of Canada 1974. In the eyes of his friends, he is a curious person, who likes painting, poetry and other meaningless things in the eyes of others. A reporter asked Monroe how they met. Monroe recalled that she was fascinated by 18 years old, but Flynn had a girl he liked at that time. She plucked up the courage to show him her first novel, Shadow Size, but he absently gave her to another editor. When this novel was published, Fulin had already graduated. He wrote a letter to Monroe, praising the novel, and there was no other expression. Monroe was lost and the two broke off contact. It was not until 20 years later that Freelin heard an interview with Monroe on the radio, guessing that she was divorced, and found her according to the address provided by the radio and asked her to have lunch. For this relationship, Monroe and the reporter of Paris Review described it like this: "We went to the teachers' club and had three martinis at lunch time. We were both nervous at that time, but we soon got to know each other. By the end of the afternoon, we were already discussing cohabitation. It's really making rapid progress. "
After the marriage, Freleen agreed that Monroe would keep her ex-husband's surname. They have been living on a farm next to Clinton, a small town in southwest Ontario, which is the home of Freelin's mother, close to Monroe's birthplace. Clinton is a quiet town with only 3,000 people. 1994, two writers of Paris Review visited Monroe and described their living environment in the report: "Monroe and her husband grew up less than 20 miles from their current residence. Every building we passed, admired and even eaten, they almost knew its history like the back of their hands. We asked if there were any literary circles nearby, and then learned that although Godrich has a library, if you want to find a decent bookstore, you have to go to Strafford at least 30 miles away. We asked if there were any other writers in this area, so Monroe drove us past an old house, and a man was sitting on the porch behind the house. He opened his chest and curled up in front of the typewriter, surrounded by cats. Monroe said that he sat there every day, rain or shine. I don't know him, but I'm particularly curious to know what he's doing. " "
In Clinton, she has the most peaceful and stable marriage. At the age of 50, Monroe entered the peak of her creation by writing at the density of one novel collection every four years. Escape, Open Secret, Hatred, Friendship, Pursuit, Love, Marriage, Too Happy … all won unanimous praise from critics, among which Escape won the third Booker International Award in 2009. Monroe said she couldn't imagine stopping writing. She stipulated that she should write a certain number of pages every day and never stop. Even if an article has just been written, she will immediately move on to the next one. If she has special plans and can't work one day, she will write those pages in advance. "Living in a small town, you can learn more about all kinds of people." She stopped writing about the compromise between small town girls and their families and life in the process of growing up, but began to write about the loneliness of middle-aged women, how they escaped from daily life and tried to open up some space for themselves in family responsibilities. In Monroe's own words, her personal writing became less and less, and she turned to writing novels based on observation. Like her favorite southern American women writers: eudora welty, Flannery OConnor and carson mccullers, Monroe wrote about ordinary people around her and the corners of the town. Middle age has passed and old age is coming. Freelin accompanied her from 45 to 82. April 20 13, six months before she won the Nobel Prize, he passed away safely in Clinton Town.