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The Narrator
Miss Marsalles is an elderly music teacher who gives piano lessons to children. Years ago, she taught the narrator’s mother to play piano. Now, she’s the young narrator’s music teacher. Miss Marsalles isn’t married and doesn’t have children. She resides with her older sister in a small half-house on Bala Street, because they can no longer afford to live in their family home or the small bungalow on Bank Street. In spite of her sister’s ill-health and their impoverishment, Miss Marsalles is cheerful and social. She enjoys hosting parties, so she holds a music recital every June. Hearing her students perform brings her great joy. She is affectionate and tenderhearted toward children, believing that their hearts naturally love all good things. She rarely criticizes her young students and always gives them gifts at recitals. Additionally, Miss Marsalles is old-fashioned, and her lifestyle never seems to change. Her clothes, the decorations in her home, and the rituals of her annual parties remain consistent year after year. She seems ignorant of—or unaffected by—modern fashions and how other people perceive her. She is oblivious to the way other people, including the narrator’s mother, pity and infantilize her for being an old, sentimental spinster. Despite growing older, struggling financially, caring for her unwell sister, and being treated as inferior by other women, Miss Marsalles is persistently happy. Introducing music into children’s lives fulfills her. At the party, she celebrates all her students with kindness, empathy, and acceptance. Miss Marsalles recognizes and rejoices in small, everyday miracles, which add meaning to her life as she embraces them.
Miss Marsalles Quotes in Dance of the Happy Shades
The Dance of the Happy Shades quotes below are all either spoken by Miss Marsalles or refer to Miss Marsalles. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Dance of the Happy Shades
Quotes
[…] she turns her face from the telephone with that look of irritation—as if she had seen something messy which she was unable to clean up—which is her private expression of pity.
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It is one of Miss Marsalles’ indestructible beliefs that she can see into children’s hearts, and she finds there a treasury of good intentions and a natural love of all good things. The deceits which her spinster’s sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgement are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children’s hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.
It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be marked in so many ways, impossible, for they were gay as invulnerable and childish people are; they appeared sexless, wild and gentle creatures, bizarre yet domestic, living in their house in Rosedale outside the complications of time.
Here they found themselves year after year […] drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance—not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles’ living room. […] They exchanged smiles which showed no lack of good manners, and yet expressed a familiar, humorous amazement at the sameness of things […]; so they acknowledged the incredible, the wholly unrealistic persistence of Miss Marsalles and her sister and their life.
But after the house in Rosedale was gone, after it had given way to the bungalow on Bank Street, these conversations about Miss Marsalles’ means did not take place; this aspect of Miss Marsalles’ life had passed into that region of painful subjects which it is crude and unmannerly to discuss.
“Oh well I feel kind of sorry for a couple of old ladies like them. They’re a couple of babies, the pair.”
[…] people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one.
To Miss Marsalles such a thing is acceptable, but to other people, people who live in the world, it is not.
[…] why is it that we are unable to say—as we must have expected to say—Poor Miss Marsalles? It is the Dance of the Happy Shades that prevents us, it is that one communiqué from the other country where she lives.
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Miss Marsalles Quotes in Dance of the Happy Shades
The Dance of the Happy Shades quotes below are all either spoken by Miss Marsalles or refer to Miss Marsalles. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Dance of the Happy Shades
Quotes
[…] she turns her face from the telephone with that look of irritation—as if she had seen something messy which she was unable to clean up—which is her private expression of pity.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
It is one of Miss Marsalles’ indestructible beliefs that she can see into children’s hearts, and she finds there a treasury of good intentions and a natural love of all good things. The deceits which her spinster’s sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgement are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children’s hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.
It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be marked in so many ways, impossible, for they were gay as invulnerable and childish people are; they appeared sexless, wild and gentle creatures, bizarre yet domestic, living in their house in Rosedale outside the complications of time.
Here they found themselves year after year […] drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance—not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles’ living room. […] They exchanged smiles which showed no lack of good manners, and yet expressed a familiar, humorous amazement at the sameness of things […]; so they acknowledged the incredible, the wholly unrealistic persistence of Miss Marsalles and her sister and their life.
But after the house in Rosedale was gone, after it had given way to the bungalow on Bank Street, these conversations about Miss Marsalles’ means did not take place; this aspect of Miss Marsalles’ life had passed into that region of painful subjects which it is crude and unmannerly to discuss.
“Oh well I feel kind of sorry for a couple of old ladies like them. They’re a couple of babies, the pair.”
[…] people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one.
To Miss Marsalles such a thing is acceptable, but to other people, people who live in the world, it is not.
[…] why is it that we are unable to say—as we must have expected to say—Poor Miss Marsalles? It is the Dance of the Happy Shades that prevents us, it is that one communiqué from the other country where she lives.
Related Characters:
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
