Abstract
This thesis explores Munro's discourse of sex in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. It focuses on three short stories in the text that deal with sexuality. The protagonist, Del recognizes that the most stumbling block to the change in women’s lives is conventional thinking about sex. Del, with thoughts and actions that are contrary to the guidelines of convention, tries to get sexual experiences. Del subjectively attempts body contact and sexual intercourse, then, watches her body's reaction, observes the male sexual organs, and makes new discoveries about the male body. Furthermore, she realizes that there are fallacies in traditional thinking on sex. In love with Garnet, who seems to be free from convention, Del freely releases her language of body and gets positive thinking about body. She learns that physical love is tied to spiritual love. But Munro's discourse does not allow for completeness. Del’s refusal to be baptized, which is Garnet's request contains the gist of Munro's discourse of sex. Through this, Munro deconstructs the binary thinking that divided the body and the mind, breaks the hierarchy of divinity and secularity, and dismantles the social ideology that sexual love should result in marriage.
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