Staying in ‘the Abyss of Freedom’: Alice Munro’s ‘Runaway’

This paper aims to explicate why Carla, the main character of Alice Munro’s “Runaway,” decides to stay with her cranky and conniving husband, Clark, which has been puzzling to many feminist readers who expect Carla to liberate herself from uncomfort just as many modern fictional characters such as Nora and Strickland did. It argues that the modern definition of freedom as the liberation from oppression and domination requires a revision when multiplicity has emerged with a multitude of subjects who have already achieved subject-position. What is needed is not “freedom from” but “freedom to” in Erich Fromm’s terms, where subjects, continuously negotiating with other subjects without any predetermined principles, keep creating a new beginning by fully engaging in the abyss-like present without escaping from it. In order to elaborate the “freedom to,” Hannah Arendt, Linda Zerilli, and Donna Haraway besides Fromm are discussed for its theoretical foundation. (Chungnam National University)