Fantasy As Screen Memory: Mise-En-Scène of Desire in Alice Munro’s Runaway (Published)
Alice Munro’s character-based short story “Runaway” (2004) mirrors the complexities of the unconscious psyche of the characters, especially the repressed psyche of the female characters as a result of suppression and asocial drives and desires. This paper will show how Alice Munro places fantasy as a setting for her characters where desires are screened through fantasies of the characters where they are planning and creating imaginary scene/s existing between the poles of reality and imagination. This paper will also explain how the whole story is actually the ‘Mise-en-scène’ of desires where the latent aspects of the characters are developed and evolved as a subject through fantasizing the self and other by transgressing the uncertainty and ambiguity of life.
Keywords: Alice Munro, Mise-En-Scène, Runaway, desire, fantasy