Abstract:

Alice Munro is one of the noted female writers in the contemporary literature of Canada, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. Munro has been characterized as a “Canadian Chekhov”, though her characters are not Chekhovian in the sense that they are passive and powerless to change their lives. Alice Munro describes sensitively the lifestyles, customs, and values of ordinary people, often revealing in the process hidden meanings and individual tragedies. Many of her stories deal with the lives of women. The Moons of Jupiter, a collection of her short stories, is her masterpiece published in 1982. The Moons of Jupiter, the final piece (in the collection) which bears same title as that of the collection, is taken as an example to explore Alice Munro’s the ideology of middle-aged women.

Keywords: Alice Munro, “The Moons of Jupiter”, feminism, the ideology of middle-aged women.

摘要：

艾丽丝•门罗是加拿大当代文坛著名的女作家。她获得了2013年诺贝尔文学奖。门罗被称为成加拿大的契诃夫，尽管在某种意义上她的角色和契诃夫的不同。其笔下的人物通常是被动的，无能为力来改变自己的生活。门罗敏锐地描述了普通人的生活方式,风俗习惯和价值,经常在描述或叙述过程中揭示隐含的意义和个人悲剧。她的许多故事都是关于女性的生活。她的短篇小说集《木星的卫星》，是1982出版的杰作。“木星的卫星”，是她小说集的同名压轴篇。本文通过分析解读这篇小说，以探讨艾丽丝•门罗在其作品体现出来的中年女性思想。

关键词：艾丽丝•门罗，“木星的卫星”， 女性主义，中年女性思想

Introduction: the writer and the story
Practically all of Alice Munro’s stories are set in southwestern Ontario, but her reputation as an excellent short-story writer goes well beyond the borders of Canada. Her accessible, fetching stories offer firsthand pleasures while simultaneously exploring human complexities in what appear to be straightforward anecdotal re-creations of everyday life. With about 14 collections of stories, she has established herself as a major voice among fiction writers.
Munro, the oldest of three siblings, was born Alice Laidlaw into a family of poultry and fox farmers on July 10, 1931, in the small rural town of Wingham, Ontario. Her father was named Robert Eric Laidlaw and her mother was Anne Clarke Laidlaw who was a schoolteacher. She began writing when she was a teenager. She published her first story in 1950 while a student at Western Ontario University. While at school, she also served as a library clerk, tobacco picker and waitress. However, she left the university to marry James Munro, and then moved to British Columbia, where she gave birth to three children and helped her husband set up a bookstore. She divorced with her husband in 1972. She returned to Ontario, and remarried to a geographer who was named Gerald Fremlin in 1976. Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, was not published until 1968, but it was extremely acclaimed and won that year’s Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary prize. This achievement was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of successive stories that were published as a story and won the Canadian Booksellers Association International Book Year Award.