Fathers and Other Clowns: Representations of Masculinity in Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades
This essay is an analysis of selected stories from Alice Munro’s first volume of fiction, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) focusing on her representation of masculinity. It investigates the way in which the men in Munro’s stories participate in and relate to the discourse of “hegemonic masculinity”...
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| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/eccs, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lenguaje: | Anglais |
| Publicado: |
Études canadiennes / Canadian Studies
2016
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| Acceso en línea: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumario: | This essay is an analysis of selected stories from Alice Munro’s first volume of fiction, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) focusing on her representation of masculinity. It investigates the way in which the men in Munro’s stories participate in and relate to the discourse of “hegemonic masculinity” and how the stories outline moments of male crisis resulting from this. The essay pays heed to Munro’s careful location of her stories in a historical and geographical context, catering to masculinity studies’ insistence on the necessity of such contextualization. The present analysis understands itself as complementary to the already existing body of gender-based critical literature which focuses mainly on Munro’s rendition of women, suggesting that Munro understands gender as a process and a continual negotiation, and that she de-essentializes received definitions of masculinity and femininity. While concentrating on the depiction of the father figure in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and “Boys and Girls” and on the parody of the “manly modern” in “The Office,” the analysis also includes references to the re-appearance of certain kinds of male characters in Munro’s later stories, suggesting that the various embodiments of masculinity in Dance can be seen as part of what Robert Thacker calls “Munro’s reoccurrences.” |
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