Female Body as a Source of Shared (Hi)stories: On Munro’s Del and Joyce’s Eveline

Abstract

Every society and culture has its own social conventions that provide specific models for ways of behaving, thinking, and communicating. According to Cordelia Fine (2012), such values are shared and reflected on and by our body (through our social roles and positions, expressions, and behaviour). This paper elicits and compares shared (hi)stories told on and by the bodies of two female characters – Del Jordan in Alice Munro’s short story cycle Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and Eveline Hill from James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” from the collection Dubliners (1914). The paper approaches Del’s and Eveline’s body as a source for a broader semantic notion: a (re)source for (re)creating and understanding both characters’ sociocultural and family surroundings that, consequently, act as a (re)source for all their silenced desires, life choices and identities. Although geographically set in different spatiotemporal contexts, the stories and their characters share other elements.

Keywords

• Alice Munro
• James Joyce
• Lives of Girls and Women
• Dubliners
• body
• gender