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العنوان
Victimization of Woman in Alice Munro’s
Fictional World /
المؤلف
Ashour, Mona Ahmed Alsayed.
هيئة الاعداد
باحث / Mona Ahmed Alsayed Ashour
مشرف / Ahmed Mohamed Aboud
مشرف / Abeer Alkhateeb
مناقش / Abeer Alkhateeb
تاريخ النشر
2019.
عدد الصفحات
286 P. :
اللغة
الإنجليزية
الدرجة
الدكتوراه
التخصص
الأدب والنظرية الأدبية
تاريخ الإجازة
1/1/2019
مكان الإجازة
جامعة عين شمس - كلية التربية - قسم اللغة الانجليزية
الفهرس
Only 14 pages are availabe for public view

from 286

from 286

Abstract

Summary
The concept of ”victimization” has three dimensions: self, social and natural which are clearly reflected in the fictional works of Alice Ann Munro. Munro’s main thematic concern is the nature of the lives of girls and women in her native town Huron County in Southwestern Ontario in Canada. She focuses on the Canadian woman’s conflict between independence and domesticity; creativity and obligation. Her short stories analyze various oppressive kinds of powers upon women including poverty, shame, subtleties of class distinctions, intricacies of women’s sexuality, and the complex problems of the female artist.
According to the four theories of victimization, the case of woman victimization can be analyzed from two interrelated dimensions: self and social. Tracing history of woman reveals a pattern that the female victims have a statistically higher tendency to be continuously victimized by patriarchal social ideologies. The female vulnerability to victimization is noticed and recorded in all women studies either anciently or in modern age. Reasons of why women accept the process of ”re-victimization” by social ideologies rely on the mechanism of social re-victimization relies on a body of risk factors which kept unchanged, and, by time, implemented into the lifestyle factors. Mostly, female victims can’t control these factors otherwise they have to stand against a whole society.
Re-victimization of woman is a highly complex psychological process. The inherited social mechanisms of woman victimization lead to maladaptive form of learning. It teaches inappropriate beliefs and behaviors that persist and transmitted by generations. The victim believes that abusive behaviors are normal and comes to expect it from others in the context of relationships. It runs into a kind of learned helplessness and disability. Therefore, there are examples of women who may unconsciously seek out abusive partners or cling to abusive relationships.
There are different types of victimization including victims of one’s self, the social environment and the natural environment. The first category refers to self – victimization or the various kinds of suffering induced by victims themselves. The second category incorporates collective, class or social oppression of woman. Finally, victims of natural environment embrace those women who are closely related with natural world and interpret their suffering in terms of their surrounding environment. However, women and nature are united through their shared history of oppression by patriarchal social systems and ideologies. Women have a special connection to their environment and through their daily interaction with it; all their worries, suffering, anxiety and depression are reflected in the eyes of nature.
Victimization of woman is reinforced by assuming truth within the binaries of male/female and culture/nature, and by enrooting them deep as indisputable facts through social, cultural, ideological, racial, religious and scientific constructs. This dissertation adopts the Social ecofeminist approach which is not mainly concerning with the exploitation of nature, but in the exploitation of woman or any human beings in terms of gender, class and race. This premise is reflected in Alice Munro’s literary texts in which female protagonists struggle with a connection to nature that are based on their gender, they become part of the nature /culture discourse, as they are marginalized, exploited or oppressed.
Munro places her female characters within their cultural natural context and examines the strengths and failings of traditional patriarchal systems. She portrays the victimizing impact of social ideologies upon the evolution of Canadian woman’s identity and its social, culture and natural structure. According to Munro, language creates reality, and this creation is always connected to power. She elaborates the paradoxical nature of women’s relationship to language. Through her works, Munro uses language to assert existence of women in the world, yet language exerts victimizing control over them.
At one level, Munro’s stories parody the suppressive view offered by the Canadian discourse for women which is often depicted as male discourse. At other levels, Munro analyzes females’ self-victimization because of their inherited obsessions about lack of coherence. Munro’s female characters struggle to uncover their self, social and natural victimizing influences upon them. They are involved into insightful questioning journey about the behavioral and linguistic constructs that formed their relationship with their surroundings, and their false self-images. Munro represents woman victimization through the life example of her characters that live within or without their traditional gender roles and the effects of marriage upon them. She focuses on the ability of females to impose patterns of meaning upon their lives; to adjust their sense of who they are, to stop receiving both social and self-victimization.
Munro has developed her own brand of the short story. A Munrovian short story, as the type has evolved over the course of her career, violates the standard definition of the form: which, traditionally, has the short fictional form. Munro’s most important accomplishments, on the technical level, is the retrospective narrative technique together with time shifting, allusion, analytical characterization, inserting gothic elements, and tricky open endings. Realism, magic-realism, imagism and metafiction are primary approaches to Munro’s narrative technique. Munro’s distinguished short fiction form has drawn respect on a critical level as “Munroviana” and has spurred many to consider her “master of contemporary short story”.
In Chapter one, the researcher defines the concept of woman victimization chronologically from different points of view and discusses the four theories of victimization. It is followed by debating the concept of “victim” among victim culturalists and victim rights movement pioneers. Finally, intersections between feminist studies and victimology are examined as the prominent trends of thought that studied the woman victimization conception.
Chapter two presents the various practical and theoretical elements of ecofeminism. The goal is to describe the social ecofeminist approach, trace its claims, explain its purpose, and to explore how it analyzes the root causes of woman victimization and suggests solutions. The overall idea is to illuminate the alternative ways social ecofeminists are perceiving the reality of woman victimization as related to environmental degradation. In addition to presenting a critique of social ecofeminism, its spiritual perception, and response, the vision and approach which adopted by this dissertation are declared. Included also are discussions about the Western worldview of woman and nature and how it is reflected in Canadian literary studies that focused on Munro’s oeuvre.
Chapter three presents the textual interpretations of Munro’s works to investigate how the otherization of women and nature within western ideology serves as vantage point in Munro’s stories. The social ecofeminist perspective with its association with woman victimization and nature’s violation, is located within the specifically Canadian literary and cultural context of Munro’s fictional world.
The aim of chapter four, through the technical analysis of Munro’s body of works, is to indicate how she has developed her own brand of the short story art. It tackles Munro’s most important accomplishments on the technical level like the retrospective narrative technique together with time shifting, allusion, analytical characterization, inserting gothic elements, and tricky open endings. Realism, magic-realism, imagism and metafiction are considered as primary approaches to Munro’s narrative techniques.