[In the following excerpt from a longer essay discussing several writers, Jansen analyzes the roles of male characters and the theme of loneliness in Munro's fiction, especially in the story "Wood."]

Loneliness in [Raymond] Carver often conveys the sense of leaping into a well, followed by a desperate attempt to break the fall. Loneliness in the work of Alice Munro occurs in a broader context and is more the consequence of a darkly deterministic worldview. The flat, featureless landscapes of her Southern Ontario towns are mirrored in the lives of her depleted but idiosyncratic characters. The spectral and alien lives of the men who inhabit this world appear to her female protagonists as riddles incapable of solution. Married or not, her men are outsiders. With varying degrees of distance, husbands haunt the outskirts of domestic arrangements as if their humanity was beyond the pale.

Munro's women appear to take the measure of their own unhappiness from the depth and distance of male isolation. In her earliest stories, Munro's pattern for men is already in place. The recluse, who dominates the consciousness of Munro's younger female characters, demarcates the extreme of social distance. Reclusive isolation attracts Munro's women as an image of freedom from the world of domesticity and repels them as evidence of the seemingly unbreachable psychic and affective distance between men and women.

Generally, though, Munro's men situate themselves in the world between the home and the "no man's land" of the bush. Frequently, we find the Munro husband doing his work in an outbuilding. He rarely involves himself with the town. There is often a feral quality to such work—a number of fathers are fox farmers or trappers. Del Jordan's father in Lives of Girls and Women raises silver foxes, an enterprise Del sees as "precarious and unusual … glamorous and ghostly". Rose's father, in The Beggar Maid, another collection of related stories, whose furniture-repair business makes him seem superficially more civilized than the other fathers and husbands, is the king of Munro's eccentric males. An isolate, nameless throughout most of the volume, he works in a shed behind the house, his unfathomable interior life hinted at by private and fragmentary mutterings that Rose occasionally overhears—"Macaroni, pepperoni, Botticelli, beans." Once, she catches a fugitive line from The Tempest, "The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces," suggesting that men live entirely in the mythic realms of their own romantic imaginings. To Rose such kingdoms are obviously superior to the mundane worlds women inhabit.

We never entirely understand what propels Munro's men to the backs of yards, to sheds and cages, to the shadow lands beyond the hearth. Yet their inchoate, inarticulate, primitive wildness fascinates Munro women before marriage, although its attraction fades after mating, when the men are sent, or migrate, from the house. The dynamic suggests a grim and implacable biological determinism.

Men's inexplicableness—their attraction, their impulse towards separateness—is what Munro has begun to explore in her more recent work. A turning point in her examination occurs in the story, "Wood", her most sustained look into male loneliness and the way out. In a rare departure from her usual narrative methods, Roy Fowler's story is unmediated by a female observer; we see Roy as he is. "Wood" tells of a wood-cutter attracted to the bush, and unfolds with fable-like simplicity. Roy Fowler has married into his wife's extended family of Voles, Pooles, and Devlins. A tribal group, his wife's family has a "limited interest in people like Roy." Partly as a consequence of this exclusion, Roy finds himself more and more drawn from his regular business of sign painting, an activity carried on, not surprisingly, in a "shed behind the house". He increasingly feels the pull of his "other interest, which is private but not secret; that is, everybody knows about it but nobody knows how much he thinks about it or how important it has become to him: wood-cutting." This drift worries his wife, but her concern doesn't lessen his desire to journey more often into the bush. Indeed, his thoughts about wood are becoming "covetous and nearly obsessive."

Munro gives this tale of isolation greater force by including two related themes that she has been developing since her first stories in Dance of the Happy Shades: the encroachment on nature by greedy, commercial impulses, and the human capacity for self-deception. Encroachers, as Munro portrays them, do not simply clear land and set down tract housing and shopping malls. What disturbs her most are the distortions of reality and rationalizations that serve this domination: everywhere there is denial of what is being done and false romanticizing of the commonplace and the everyday.

In Munro's later stories, encroachment becomes an ironic emblem of the complacent and egotistic illusions of civilization, and her isolates are its most profound, if not most articulate, critics. The motif of encroachment often resonates another Munro concern—self-deception. Here is the closest she has come to connecting a theory of fiction with a theory of life:

Self-deception seems almost like something that's a mistake, that we should learn not to do. But I'm not sure if we can. Everybody's doing their own novel of their lives. The novel changes—at first we have a romance, a very satisfying novel that has a rather simple technique, and then we grow out of that and we end up with a very discontinuous, discordant, very contemporary kind of novel. I think that what happens to a lot of us in middle age is that we can't really hang on to our fiction anymore.

If Roy Fowler is trying to compose a "romance" in the bush (the metaphoric stance of most Munro males), too much of his action is determined by others' fictions. He seeks loneliness journeying down the path of self deception. Many of Roy's signs depict the pastoral illusions that local farmers still cling to:

They always want a background of rolling farmland … even though the pigs and turkeys … never see daylight, and the cattle are often fattened in feedlots.

Perhaps part of the attraction of real trees in the bush is that they seem to be free of this distortion.

It may be our fate, though, to come full circle to the things we wish to avoid. Roy falls in the woods because he is in the grip of another fiction, a story of a rival woodcutter in his domain (and the lovingly Miltonic catalog of "his" trees is clearly a correlative of "The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces" declaimed by Rose's reclusive father). This tale is told to Roy by Percy Marshall, a Munro solitary who has declassed himself, a farmer turned eccentric scavenger, with an ear for rumors of deals and money matters. Percy is a disturbing vision of what Roy fears becoming, and Roy accepts Percy's story of "a fellow … under contract to the River Inn to get them all the wood they need for the winter." Percy later embellishes the "fellow" into a "housepainter." Readers will recognize what Roy does not, that Percy is speaking of Roy, who once sold wood to the River Inn. The inn is another symbol of encroachment, "a resort hotel built on the ruins of an old mill" where the wood they burn, "they just burn it for the looks." Roy is so anxiously turning this story over in his mind that he cannot see through the romance of what Percy has told him. Instead, he worries, foolishly goes alone to the bush, and almost immediately injures himself on the snowy ground, whose white covering disguises the ruts that trip him. The injury is so severe that he must crawl back, and during this time of rebirth Roy deconstructs the embellished fiction he has hitherto believed:

The truth is that the paperhanger, the decorator, the housepainter … is Roy himself…. Everything connected with the River Inn turns into some big fable…. Around here any set of facts get turned into a story.

While unraveling the tale, Roy has made it back to the truck, and Munro concludes "Wood" with Roy's achieving a "decent sense of victory." The story's final word is "safe": the woods are still safe for Roy, he is safe from the River Inn and the fictions that emanate from it, and he may be safer, more secure within himself. He may even be able to return to the women in his life.

Munro offers no easy answers, but she gives us the most sustained view of a decent man's drift into the isolation of a grotesque world, and then of Roy's "long, successful crawl" to a less fictive view of life. Certainly, one gets the sense from Munro that much of the resigned and saddened loneliness of her women is contingent upon the illusory isolation of the men. If men like Roy can live closer to themselves, they will be able to live closer to home.

Of course, one can't leave this Munro story without noting that "safe" may also promise a host of treacherous ironies. It may be that we need to add another characteristic of the short story to those we've enumerated: it doesn't console. The short story examines loneliness but does not solve it. If it gives no direct answers, it has communicated the feel of loneliness and especially male loneliness. It is a feeling as irreducible as a nail in the heart. As long as the cultural body remains anemically post-modern, short stories will illumine the solitary corners of our lives.