The Spirit of Humanistic Care in Alice Munro’s Dear life

Abstract

Dear Life is considered to be Munro’ s last work, which Munro said was “the first, last, and most intimate words” about her life. This work not only takes women as the protagonists, grabs the fragments of women’s life to observe their living conditions and explores their rich inner world, but also creates a large number of male images with marginal status, vague identity, passive behavior and even subordinate to women. These men no longer represent the traditional powerful patriarchy and the supreme male power. Instead, they display anxiety about their own masculinity and their male submissive identity, thus presenting a crisis of masculinity and gender paradox. Whether in her description of the plight of women’s survival or in her portrayal of male images losing their subject identity, Munro, in this work, manages to express a humanistic concern for human nature. From the perspective of her understanding of women and her care for men, this paper will discuss Munro’s spirit of humanistic care in Dear life.