The Uncanny, Open Secrets, and Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Legacy in Alice Munro’s Everyday Gothic*
Author : Wen-Shan Shieh
Keywords : the everyday, the uncanny, modernist, Gothic, secrets, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Munro
Alice Munro has sometimes been labeled as a realist, but her contribution
to what I call the “everyday Gothic” and her acknowledged debt to the modernist
narrative strategies have been largely overlooked. Drawing on John
Paul Riquelme’s insights into the link between the Gothic and modernism
and Ben Highmore’s reflection on the everyday, this essay argues that Munro
is a Gothic modernist who deploys such narrative strategies as open-endedness
of the plot, the splitting of the self, and temporal prolepsis to defy normative
expectations about the linearity of the plot, the coherence and intelligibility
of the self, and progressive temporality to produce the uncanny reading effects
of her everyday Gothic. This argument is made through analysis of Munro’s short
stories and her comments on writing in relation to those of Katherine Mansfield.
Munro and Mansfield are linked together because of their readiness to use innovative
narrative strategies to expose the everyday life as possibly traumatic,
thereby giving their stories a distinctive gothic undertone. Thus, the first part
of this essay investigates how Munro was influenced by Mansfield in her use
of modernist strategies of defamiliarization and divided self to expose the
terrifying motifs hidden beneath the banality of everyday life. Those motifs
fascinated Mansfield and include the uncanniness of social snobbery and
self-estrangement. In the second part, the author examines how Munro deploys
the concept of “open secrets” to disclose the closed mindset of the townspeople
and subverts Mansfield’s modernist emphasis on “the present moment”
by installing instances of prolepsis in her later stories such as “Open Secrets”
(1994) and “Jakarta” (1998). The conclusion of this essay claims that what is
Gothic about Munro’s stories is not so much the risk hidden in the unknown
future and places as the sense of horror evoked by the mimetic uncanny
in the hollowness of everyday lives.