Dance Of The Happy Shades, By Alice Munro

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Conclusion
Beverly J. Rasporich in his work, Dance Of the sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro refers to Margret Atwood’s Survival: A thematic Guide to Canadian Literature where she remarks that “the appropriate symbol for Canada is the collective victim struggling for survival against a hostile nature and a colonial environment” (20). According to Atwood, the heroines who are depicted in the Canadian stories are ‘Stuck in the tower’ and thus there is no way to rescue them and they must learn to cope with their condition. In Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades the woman characters’ yearning for liberation from the restraints of their surroundings, has become a significant theme. Despite their desire to …show more content…

She refers to her own mother’s reaction towards her family duties. Munro notes:
“Not that she (Munro’s mother) resented housework in any particular way or anything like that, but she just had all that energy that couldn’t be properly used. And the fact, too, that we were poor. I think if she had married a leading citizen she could have used that energy to be a big organizing force as there is always were women in small towns who were and that’s what she could have been quite happily” (7).
Munro reflects on her perception about the role of her mother as a house wife which is similar to the mother in “Walker brother’s Cowboy”, who tries to deny her position as a housewife and refuse to accept the poor economic status of her husband by trying to show off as a woman who belongs to an affluent family and thereby refusing to accept the stereotypes that are meant by the society for …show more content…

She also explores the hidden reality in the lives of women characters that lies beneath the artificial, disguised and misinterpreted social faces. The stories are also retrospective because Munro rebuild her past experience as a child and a young adult through her stories. For instance in Munro’s “Boys and Girls”, the duties that are meant for a girl distances the narrator from her father similar to how Munro herself got distanced from her father because of the duties that she had to perform as a girl. Thus according to Munro, the gender frames and society with stereotyped ideas caused unhappiness within the

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