Analysis of the Protagonist’s Escape Behaviors from the Perspective of Psychoanalysis in Runaway

Runaway, a representative masterpiece written by Alice Munro, is a perfect exemplification of interdisciplinary studies involved with literature and psychology in contemporary Canadian literature. In this book, Munro ingeniously breaks through traditional narrative methods, disclosing miserable survival predicaments of females along with the descriptions of female living conditions and their innermost secret and complex feelings which are often overlooked among community groups. This paper probes into the protagonist’s escape behaviors and the inner causes of them in Runaway with Freud’s psychoanalytical theory. The analysis shows that under the oppression of male chauvinism, the heroine Carla is subjected to double attacks of reality anxiety and moral anxiety with her spelling errors being the product of the jointed manipulation of the subconscious and male-dominated society. This paper focuses on the role of subjective psychology in the interpretation of the textual value in an attempt to highlight the tension of psychology in promoting novel plots and expanding text connotations.