An Incarnational Imagination? Christianity, Narrativity, and Alice Munro's "The Love of a Good Woman"

In her introduction to Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories, Margaret Atwood identifies a parallel between the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation and Munro's narrative practices: that the "denial of either/or classifying logic and an acceptance of both-at-once mystery" essential to the Incarnation seem parallel to the way in which Munro's stories "resolve themselves—or fail to resolve themselves." Atwood's insight encourages an examination of the narrative engagement with Christianity found in a wide range of Munro's stories. This paper does so in "The Love of a Good Woman" (1998), a test case for understanding the possibilities of incarnational imagination in Munro's fiction.