“I meant the risk. The secrecy. The power”: When Secrets Become Weapons in “Before the Change” by Alice Munro
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15 juillet 2021
- doi: 10.4000/ces.5017
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Lucile Rouet-Bentley, « “I meant the risk. The secrecy. The power”: When Secrets Become Weapons in “Before the Change” by Alice Munro », Commonwealth Essays and Studies, ID : 10.4000/ces.5017
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In Alice Munro’s work secrets are related to the great tragedies of our private lives. They are shameful, hidden stories that eat away at characters. Yet in “Before the Change” Munro embraces the secret and transforms it into a central element, dramatizing it in order to show its reversing capacity: secrets are weapons that can change a situation for the protagonists. The secret is then rehabilitated and becomes an element of power, all the more so as it is the locus of irony. This essay relies mostly on Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s work on the two types of secret in Munro’s fiction, as well as on the work of Deborah Tannen who has analysed gender in conversations.