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Unexpected turns in lifelong sentimental journeys: redefining love, memory and old age through Alice Munro's ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ and its film adaptation, Away from Her

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2013

NÚRIA CASADO-GUAL
NÚRIA CASADO-GUAL*
Affiliation:
Department of English and Linguistics, University of Lleida, Spain.
*
Address for correspondence:Núria Casado-Gual, University of Lleida, Plaça de Víctor Siurana, 1, Lleida 25003, Catalonia, Spain E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Alice Munro's 2001 short story ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ and its 2006 film version, Away from Her, directed and adapted for the screen by Sarah Polley, are two interconnected narratives through which diverse (and even divergent) representations of romantic love and memory in later life can be analysed. Even if the two texts are constructed on an apparently simple plot line, which basically depicts the last phase of a 44-year-long marriage once the wife, Fiona, presents symptoms of dementia and is interned in a retirement home, they both allow for, at least, two contrasted interpretations. As will be demonstrated, these two possible readings unveil different cultural, social and psychological facets of memory in connection with late-life expressions of love; and each of them contributes, in their own way, to the construction of a dialogical narrative that mediates between the complexities of old age, dementia and gender difference, while at the same time demonstrating the power of literature and the cinema to reflect and refract the complexities of contemporary forms of ageing.

Keywords

narratives of ageingmemoryaffective relationshipsliteraturecinema
Type
Articles
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , February 2015 , pp. 389 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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