In her short story "Runaway" (2004), Canadian writer Alice Munro meticulously inspects the painful possibilities of human interaction to shed light on the ambiguous quality of emotional attachment. On the surface, the story narrates a young woman’s failed attempt to break free from a troubled marriage with the help of an older, more sophisticated female friend. Upon closer examination, however, Clara’s return to her husband suggests a correlation between submission and security: her homecoming may limit her autonomy, but it also provides her with the reassuring feeling that there is something, and someone, to care about. Carla’s idea of freedom, drawn as a contrast to the bond with her husband, is defined by notions of absence, insufficiency, and non-existence, as well as by her sensation of being swallowed by a "fog of fright" (34). Her friend Sylvia somewhat superciliously conjectures that Carla’s ’ happiness and freedom are not the same thing’. What Sylvia fails to consider is whether it was freedom that Clara craved in the first place. In fact, Clara did not fail to achieve independence – she refused it.
Against the background of Munro’s short story, my paper addresses the question of what it means to try and live freely, i.e. to live uninhibited by the constraints imposed by external individuals and forces. The desirability of freedom is read in the context of the idiosyncratic idea of individual happiness as construed in the story.