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@article{207222,
        author = {Ms Anjalee and Prof. Dr. B.M. Yadav},
        title = {Displaced Selves and Quiet Disillusionment: Space, Memory, and Female Identity in Selected Stories of Alice Munro},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {3},
        pages = {114-125},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=207222},
        abstract = {Alice Munro’s fiction repeatedly places women on roads, in railway carriages, at domestic thresholds, and inside unfamiliar rooms. These movements rarely deliver the complete freedom that the characters imagine. Instead, they expose the emotional habits, gendered expectations, class anxieties, and unresolved losses that travel with them. This paper examines displacement as both a material and psychological condition in four stories drawn from different stages of Munro’s career: “Boys and Girls,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” “Dimensions,” and “To Reach Japan.” Combining close textual analysis with a limited psychoanalytical framework drawn from Freud, Jung, and Lacan, the discussion argues that Munro turns physical movement into a crisis of recognition. Her female characters leave assigned spaces or attempt new identities, but arrival does not produce a unified self. The girl in “Boys and Girls” discovers that gender has already mapped her future; Johanna converts deceptive letters into an unexpectedly habitable life; Doree’s repeated prison journeys show trauma binding mobility to the source of violence; and Greta’s train journey reveals the conflict between creative desire and maternal responsibility. Across these stories, disillusionment is not simple defeat. It is the painful recognition that home, romance, escape, and autonomy cannot be separated from relations of care, power, memory, and social judgement. Munro’s achievement lies in presenting displacement as unstable knowledge: it enlarges perception while preserving uncertainty, and it allows women to revise inherited identities without pretending that the past can be left behind.},
        keywords = {Alice Munro; displacement; female identity; disillusionment; psychoanalysis; space and place; memory},
        month = {August},
        }