Alice Munro’s short stories: Gender and girls

Abstract

This paper discusses how the young girl who is typically the first-person narrator in Alice Munro’s short stories, especially in the collection Dance of the Happy Shades, acquires a gender identity during childhood. The objective of this paper is to examine the possibilities for this narrator to establish her own principles based on women’s special qualities and personalities and to build a community for women. The organization of this paper follows the girl’s experiences through the mother’s domestic space and the father’s working space. Most of all, I focus on the characteristics of the narrating girl who does not understand the exact meaning of her parents’ behavior and attitude, but describes all that happens to her and reveals the hidden reality beyond the obvious world. Also, I pay attention to the gap between her dissatisfied moment with her mother and her unintentional disclosure of how her gendered identity has permeated her everyday life. I propose that the discordant relationship between the mother and the daughter gives rise to the possibility of her considering how to become an adult in future. In conclusion, this paper explores the possibility in Munro’s fiction to develop a new female figure that penetrates both gendered spaces. The most remarkable characteristics of characters that do so are the attention they pay to their everyday lives and their transformation into political subjects who face reality and have the ability to analyze their situation in their own voice.