Alice Munro’s Ecocritical Imagination, Spatial Theory, and the Ethics of Place

Abstract

This paper examines the ecological imagination embedded in Alice Munro’s fiction through an interdisciplinary lens that brings together ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and spatial theory. Although Munro’s stories are deeply rooted in the ordinary textures of rural Canadian life, they reveal a sophisticated environmental consciousness that predates contemporary discourses of climate anxiety. Her meticulous depictions of riverbanks, orchards, forests, and peripheral townships demonstrate that landscape in her work functions not as passive backdrop but as an active agent shaping identity, memory, gender, and emotional experience. Drawing on theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Doreen Massey, this study argues that Munro’s spatial practice aligns with the conception of space as a lived, relational construct that is continuously produced and transformed through human and non-human interactions. Munro’s narratives frequently situate moments of self-realisation and crisis in liminal environments—the rural outskirts, wooded paths, abandoned farms—where characters confront buried memories, repressed desires, or unsettling insights. These peripheral ecologies mirror psychic transitions, revealing how environmental and emotional states are entangled. The paper further explores the ecofeminist dimensions of Munro’s work, highlighting how women and their constrained domestic lives contrast with their experiences of freedom, vulnerability, and agency in natural spaces. Munro’s fiction avoids romantic essentialism, instead presenting the woman–nature relationship as socially mediated, ambivalent, and shaped by labour, risk, and desire. A key emphasis of this study is Munro’s rendering of slow environmental changing forests, altered seasonal rhythms, and suburban encroachment which she integrates into the texture of everyday life. Such subtle environmental realism gestures towards ecological loss and precarity without overt polemic, foregrounding an ethics of attentiveness and responsibility. The paper demonstrates that Munro’s small-town settings are deeply political socio-ecological formations, shaped by class, gender, memory, and environmental histories. Ultimately, it argues that Munro’s fiction contributes significantly to contemporary ecological thought by illuminating the intertwined futures of human and natural worlds.