Romance beyond Obsession: Mourning Lost Love in Alice Munro’s “Bardon Bus”

Abstract

In her short-story “Bardon Bus,” from her 1982 collection The Moons of Jupiter, Canadian writer Alice Munro dissects the memories of a middle-aged woman living in Toronto about a love affair she had had a few months earlier, while on a research trip to Australia, with an anthropologist whom she just names “X.” Through a constant time-leap from the Australian past to the Canadian present and back, Munro describes the strategies that the unnamed main character develops in order to deal with the sense of loss after the end of the affair. In this essay the influence and effects of love on female and male individuals, as exemplified in Munro’s story, will be analysed under the light of emotion and romantic love, and in relation to the masquerade of femininity, within the framework of Sara Ahmed’s theories and other feminist theoretical trends. The connection and/or the clash between the emotionally charged past and the loveless present is revealed to grow and strengthen its influence on the narrator’s psyche under the mask of romantic love, a stereotype that takes its roots from conventional and sexist assumptions about love and its absence.