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"sshort 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 be&neath 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 close&d 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 wh&at 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.
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