The Dance of the Happy Shades Symbol Analysis

The piano piece that Dolores Boyle performs at Miss Marsalles’s party, called “The Dance of the Happy Shades,” symbolizes unlikely joy. The music itself is unexpectedly joyful. Dolores’s expressive playing carries “the freedom of a great unemotional happiness,” which surprises Dolores’s listeners because they didn’t anticipate such a skillful performance at the dull recital. The music’s title also hints at this idea of unexpected joy—after all, it might seem strange or even impossible for “shades,” or spirits of the dead, to be happy and to dance. Nevertheless, the music’s title declares that the shades are happy, whether or not the living can comprehend this happiness. Importantly, “The Dance of the Happy Shades” is a real piece of music from the opera Orfeo ed Euridice by Christoph Gluck, which also illustrates unlikely joy. The opera retells the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which Orpheus descends into the Underworld to bring his deceased lover back to life. In many versions of the story, Orpheus fails, but Gluck’s opera allows Orpheus and Eurydice to experience unexpected joy in its happy conclusion. Thus, in many ways, the music piece encapsulates the notion of vibrant, undeniable happiness enjoyed by people who, like shades, aren’t ordinarily expected to be happy. Crucially, at the end of Munro’s story, the narrator realizes she can’t pity Miss Marsalles because she recognizes that Miss Marsalles, against all expectation, genuinely happy. The Dance of the Happy Shades—through literal music and the music’s symbolic meaning—has communicated Miss Marsalles’s profound joy, which goes against the expectations of people like the narrator’s mother. That Munro chose to title this short story after “The Dance of the Happy Shades” signifies the central importance of unlikely joy to the narrative as a whole and to Miss Marsalles’s character in particular.