Writing styles in Alice Munro’s fiction “ How I met my husband”我是如何遇见我的丈夫的
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Writing styles in Alice Munro’s fiction “How I met my husband” Alice Munro is a Canadian short-story writer and she was generally regarded to be one of the world's foremost writers of fiction, her stories focus on the human condition and relationships seen through the lens of daily life. Munro was born in the town of Wingham, Ontario into a family of fox and poultry farmers. She began writing as a teenager and published her first story while she was a student in the university. During this period she worked as a waitress, tobacco picker and library clerk. One year later, she left the university and married a geographer then they moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario. They have since moved from the farm to a house in the town of Clinton. And these experiences may have a great impact for her writing content and style. In her short story “How I Met My Husband” from her book “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” in 1974. It better reflect the variety of her writing style. And in the follow essay I will analyze some of her general style of writing. The story is about a young girl, Edie, who is hired help for Dr. Peebles and his family. One afternoon while the family is away in town, she meets Chris Watters, a pilot who travels from town to town giving rides in his plane for a fee. Edie falls in love with him, but soon learns that he is engaged to another woman, Alice Kelling. One day while Alice, Mrs. Peebles and the children were away on a picnic, Edie goes to Chris's campsite to talk with him. He reveals to her that he plans on leaving, but promises to write her. They kiss, and he leaves town. Edie waits day after day at the mailbox for his letter, which never comes. Eventually, Edie realizes this and marries the mailman, who believes that she waited by the mailbox for him every day, although Edie never tells him that she had waited for Chris because she likes "for people to think what pleases them and makes them happy." The story was told from the first-person point of view, and layers the voice of the fifteen-year-old Edie, working as a “hired girl” in the house of the comparatively wealthy Peebles family. Alice Munro particularly with respect to her male characters, she may be said to capture the essence of everyman. Her female characters, though, are more complex. In this novel, there are four main female characters, Edie, her employer Mrs. Peebles, their neighbors Loretta and Chris Watters’s fiancée Alice Keeling. Through detailed descriptions, psychological description, language and action description of the four women reflects their complex psychological. The most obvious is Edie, when she has feelings for Chris Watter, but she was also afraid that he would tell others about she wear Mrs.Peebles’s clothes without her permission. For example, in the novel the author use a long paragraph to describe her mental activity “I couldn’t think a thing but he would be coming to get his water again, he would be talking to Dr. or Mrs. Peebles, making friends with them, and he would mention seeing me that first afternoon, dresses up. Why not mention it? He would think it was funny. And no idea of the trouble it would get me into.” In addition when she was ready to send cakes for Chris Watter, She had wanted to dress prettier, but for fear of make Chris Watter remembered the first time he saw her, and that would humiliate her all over again, so she just take off her apron and comb her hair. In the end of the story, even though she knew he would not write to her, but she still looked forward. So we can see the complexity of her heart. In this article, we can also see that social hierarchy effects on people. Compare to these four female characters’ family, Mrs. Peebles’s kitchen was “all white and bright yellow, with fluorescent lights and the same as the bathroom. The basin and the tub and the toilet were all pink, and there were glass doors with flamingoes painted on them, to shut off the tub. The light had a rosy cast and the mat sank under your feet like snow, except that it was warm. The mirror was three-way. With the mirror all steamed up and the air like a perfume cloud…” The same as Alice Keeling, the author uses a paragraph describing her dress “This is Alice Keeling had a pair of brown and white checked slacks and a yellow top…and she wore a yellow band to keep it off her face. Nothing in 1 the least pretty or even young-looking about her, but you could tell from how she talked she was from the city, or educated, or both.” Regardless of their homes or dresses is luxury. But look at Loretta and Edie, Mrs. Peebles thought Loretta was a countrywoman; they worked on the roads and had a bad name for drinking. They had seven children and couldn’t get credit. Besides there is a full manifestation of this point, when Edie told Chris Watters that she was only a hired girl, she thought Chris Watters would just as others “Some people change when they find that you social position, their whole way of looking at you and speaking to you changes.” That’s maybe the reason why Edie fall in love with him. And later, when Edie second time to see Chris Watters, he didn’t recognize her immediately. What he said was knocking Edie’s heart “Oh, it’s you. I didn’t know you without your long dress on.” What’s more, when the fiancée found that the relationship between Chris Watters and Edie, from her performance, we can also see the impact of the social system. She said “I knew by the look of her as soon as I saw her. We get them at the hospital all the time...having their babies. We have to put them in a special Ward because of their dieses.” And “Men despise girls like you. He just made use of you and went off; you know that, don’t you? Girls like you are just nothing; they’re just public conveniences, just filthy little rags!” Those harsh words fully reflect the sharp divide between people. Another writing style of Alice Munro’s is the characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions. In this fiction mentioned “Dessert was never anything to write home about, at their place. A dish of Jell-O or slices bananas or fruit out of a tin, have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die.” That’s the customer Edie’s mother used to tell her, but Mrs. Peebles operated differently. In addition, in Alice Munro’s stories, plot is secondary and "little happens." As with Chekhov, Garan Holcombe notes: "All is based on the epiphany moment, the sudden enlightenment, and the concise, subtle, revelatory detail." Munro's work deals with "love and work, and the failings of both. To prove this point, in this fiction we can see, when Edie fall in love with Chris Watters, she also afraid of lose her first job. “Mrs. Peebles might not fire me, when she found out, but it would give her a different feeling about me altogether…They like to think you aren’t curious. Not just that you don’t notice things that you don’t think o wonder about anything but what they liked to eat and how they liked things ironed, and so on.” But at last, she still told everything. The novel also reveals the lives of women at that time, but in the end of the article, Edie realizes what is the really happiness of the life, she finally understands that waiting will not give her happiness, and she marries the mailman, who believes that she waited by the mailbox for him every day, although Edie never tells him the truth that she had waited for Chris, but they lived a happy life, just as “for people to think what pleases them and makes them happy” By telling her own story and seizing opportunities to make life good for herself, Edie refuses to deceive herself that life is other than what it is, which is something joyful if lived with vitality and honesty. Alice Munro’s spare and lucid language and command of detail gives her fiction a "remarkable precision," as Helen Hoy observes. Munro's prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time," "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry," "special, useless knowledge," "tones of shrill and happy outrage," "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it." Her style places the fantastic next to the ordinary with each undercutting the other in ways that simply, and effortlessly, evoke life. That’s some general introduction of Alice Munro and her writing styles. From the fiction “How I met my husband” we better understand it. 2 本文来源：https://www.wddqw.com/doc/006ec2e0d938376baf1ffc4ffe4733687e21fc6b.html