Sunlight and shadows, past and present : Alice Munro's Dance of the happy shades

A master of the short story genre, Alice Munro is also a literary stylist, which her debut collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, amply demonstrates. Her typical setting is her native southwestern Ontario, yet her stories are anything but prosaic. Munro has been said to defamiliarize the familiar ; she reveals the dazzle of outdoors but through the lightning cracks in the drawn-down blinds, also conjures up shadows, disquieting figures, or Gothic mother figures. She probes into patterns of exclusion or intrusion, and often conveys a sense of entrapment. Yet her text exudes a paradoxical sense of freedom as she makes the art of the short story her own. Writing from within, straying from dramatic descriptions, she depicts a landscape which is part sunlight, part shadows, and is always a mindscape. She describes lives of girls and women, exploring the haunting tensions between mothers and daughters, negotiating boundaries. Playing on intertextual scraps which she sews into the fabric of her stories, she seeks to reveal life's little ironies.