The House as Liminal Space in Alice Munro’s Female Gothic
Abstract
Alice Munro’s work is part of a subgenre of the contemporary Gothic known as the Southern Ontario Gothic, which realistically depicts typical small-town life in Southern Ontario, particularly in regards to the gender dynamic. Munro’s Southern Ontario Gothic draws from the rich tradition of the 18th-century British Gothic, which was influenced by public spaces such as cathedrals, monasteries, and churches, particularly in their theatricality. In her short stories, Alice Munro crafts an architectural space based on the liminal space between the private and the public, where the characters’ inner strangeness, uncertainty about what is true or not true, what is ‘seen’ and ‘known,’ and the unheimlich of the domestic place turned public become key elements. The house turns into a nursing home or a quasi-school room, and the tension between inner/outer spaces engenders human strife. The melodramatic turn of events, almost comedic in its distorted grotesque, comes from the fact that an outsider in some kind of quasi-professional capacity is allowed access into the private space of others.
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