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Contemporary Women's Writing Advance Access published online on October 6, 2009
Contemporary Women's Writing, doi:10.1093/cww/vpp017
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

To Leave and to Return: Frustrated Departures and Female Quest in Alice Munro's "Runaway"

Fiona Tolan

Liverpool John Moores University, UK f.tolan@ljmu.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Runaway, the title of Alice Munro's 2004 collection of short stories, directs the reader to Munro's recurring and interweaving themes of entrapment and escape more explicitly than any of her other titles.1 In each of the collected stories, flight or abandonment is either undertaken, with varying success, or anticipated. Ildiko de Papp Carrington notes that: "Clearly recognizable patterns unify almost all of [Munro’s] fiction" (3), and with its repeated description of the figure of the escaper who undertakes or contemplates a necessary journey, Runaway points to its location within the quest romance pattern. Nevertheless, the title story, "Runaway," opens, not with a departure, but with a return:

Carla heard the car coming before it topped the little rise in the road that around here they called a hill. It's her, she thought. Mrs. Jamieson – Sylvia – home from her holiday in Greece. (3)

This initial return willfully subverts the expectations . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Munro's Quest Narrative
 

   The Impossibility of a Female Quest
 

   Imagining a Female Quest
 

   Individual Heroes and Communal Journeys
 

   "A Constant Low-lying Temptation"
 

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