"The Mark on the Floor": Alice Munro on Ageing and Alzheimer's Disease in The Bear Came Over the Mountain and Sarah Polley's Away From Her

As a postcolonial studies scholar, I based my contribution on a reading of 2013 Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro’s best-known short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain and of its transposition into a film, by the Canadian director Sarah Polley, Away from Her (2006). In this case ageing is emblematically represented by a woman who chooses a retiring home where to spend her last days for she is affected by Alzheimer’s Disease. Both the short story and the film pivot around two elderly couples, their different choices, their different social status and material conditions, their encounters inside and outside the clinic. These two mononuclear families demonstrate how ageing affects lonely people in contemporary societies, where there is no longer a sense of a community. While the short story attributes a strong agency to Fiona, the main protagonist, the film seems to pick on that to stress how all the four characters involved, disabled or not, manage to articulate their agency till the very end. Dealing with the ineluctability of Alzheimer’s, Munro could but create for her character an exit “with a little grace”.