Abstract:
 
Alice Munro is one of the most prominent writers in contemporary Canadian literature. She writes of women in most of her stories. She focuses on what happens to the existential dilemma of contemporary Canadian women in civilized society. Runaway is a stunning collection of eight short stories. These stories are mainly about love, family and women’s inner world. In these stories, the women characters intend to escape from their life of reality for different reasons. Alice Munro writes about depressed and dissatisfied women in their ordinary lives. She describes different choices made by women protagonists, which reflects women consciousness. In Runaway, Alice Munro uses different symbols to reveal women’s tragic fate. The thesis analyzes female self-consciousness, male chauvinism, the reasons and results of the women characters’ running away and the factors leading to their failure to run away by looking at the prominent symbols in the selected stories from the perspective of feminism. 

Key Words: Alice Munro; Runaway; feminism; male chauvinism; female consciousness

摘  要：

爱丽丝•门罗是加拿大文坛上最伟大的小说家之一。她的作品大多是关于女性，她关注发生在加拿大女性文明社会的生存困境。《逃离》是一部由八篇故事组成的出色的短篇小说集，主要关于女性的爱情、家庭和内心世界。故事中女主人公由于各种各样的原因想要逃离现有的生活。爱丽丝•门罗通过描述她们在平凡生活中的压抑及她们做出的不同的选择以反映女性意识。爱丽丝•门罗通过运用《逃离》中不同的象征来揭露女性悲惨的命运。本文基于意象,从女性主义的角度分析《逃离》中的女性意识、男性主义，逃离的原因和结果以及导致逃离失败的因素。

关键词：爱丽丝•门罗；逃离；女性主义；男子主义；女性意识

1  Introduction
Alice Munro (1931-) is one of the most famous Canadian writers with a great literary reputation for her short stories. Her writing has established her as the “Canadian Chekhov” (Rigelhof 73). Alice Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her works as “master of the contemporary short story” (Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 12 Dec 2013). She is also a three-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award, Canadian’s highest literary prize. Lives of Girls and Women, her survey of rural women’s aspirations and compromise, won the Canadian Bookseller Award in 1971.