Dance of the Happy Shades Study Guide

Alice Munro was born in 1931 in Wingham, a small rural town in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Munro started writing as a teenager and published her first story at the age of 19. She studied English literature at the University of Western Ontario for two years. In 1951, she married James Munro. The couple moved to Vancouver, had three daughters, and opened a bookstore in Victoria, British Columbia. After having a fourth daughter, Munro published the short story collection Dance of the Happy Shades and the novel Lives of Girls and Women. In 1972, Munro and her husband separated, and Munro returned to the University of Western Ontario as a writer in residence. She later married Gerald Fremlin and moved to Clinton, Ontario. Throughout her career, Munro has published 13 short story collections, many of which are set in the same region where she grew up and take inspiration from her life. Her most recent book is the short story collection Dear Life, published in 2012. Her writing has appeared in many different periodicals, including The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and has won international critical acclaim. Munro is widely considered a master of the short story form.

Munro published Dance of the Happy Shades during the second-wave feminist movement. This movement was active from the 1960s through the 1980s and fought to achieve greater gender equality. It moved beyond women’s suffrage—which was the main focus of first-wave feminism—to challenge more aspects of patriarchal culture and to address issues such as reproductive rights, domestic roles, and workplace inequalities. Even Munro’s earliest writing touches on the restrictive social pressures and marginalization that girls and women face in a patriarchal society. In “Dance of the Happy Shades,” Miss Marsalles suffers from society’s disvaluing of women: her identity as a spinster is stigmatized, she struggles financially because she isn’t married, and she’s regarded as an outcast even by other women for her childlessness and old age. Munro also writes about children with Down syndrome in “Dance of the Happy Shades.” Historically, people with Down syndrome have been mistreated. In Canada in the 1950s, it was common for children with Down syndrome to be separated from their families and placed in inhumane institutions. It wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that legal and social reforms began to better protect people with Down syndrome from discrimination. Munro’s humanizing representation of children with Down syndrome in 1968 offered an empathetic perspective on the rights of people with Down syndrome before those rights were officially recognized and supported.

Much of Munro’s writing, including the short story “Dance of the Happy Shades,” follows the conventions of literary realism. This means that her stories deal frankly with ordinary, everyday events, which are often drawn from Munro’s own life experiences. Munro also frequently centers girls and women in her stories, imbuing a staunchly feminist perspective in her work. Like “Dance of the Happy Shades,” many of the other 14 stories in Munro’s anthology Dance of the Happy Shades are multilayered, intricate narratives that appear simple at first glance. They also focus on mundane moments in the lives of young girls, middle-aged women, and elderly women that give rise to subtle revelations and showcase the complexities of human relationships. As an author, Munro shares similarities with the Russian short story writer Anton Chekhov, whose stories and writing style influenced her own. Both writers favor realism, prioritize characters’ internal emotions and transformations over plot, and use nonlinear narratives. Furthermore, Munro’s literary career was influenced by her friend Margaret Laurence, the feminist Canadian short story writer and novelist. Margaret Atwood is another famous Canadian writer whose poems and novels concern the lives of girls and women through a feminist lens and often take place in Southern Ontario.