Gender Roles In Alice Munro's Dance Of The Happy Shades

Gender Roles

The idea of “Gender” denotes a social construction which assigns distinctive roles and characteritics and roles to men and woman inorder to maintain a particular stats quo in the society as Tresa de Lauretis states, “The notion of gender as sexual difference has now become a limitation, something of a liablity to feminist thought. Gender is better understood as a symbolic system of meanings, that correlate sex to cultural contents according to social values and hierarchies”(55). The chapter, “Gender Roles”, is an analysis of roles that is assigned to male and female sexes since from their childhood with reference to Munro’s stories in the collection “Dance of the Happy Shades”. The chapter refers to theorists such as Simon De Beauvoir, Kate Millet to prove its argument. Alice Munro is one of the most prominent witers who is concerned with gender difference that are imposed on children right from their childhood. Her work Dance Of the Happy Shades is one such collection that deals with the sexual difference that children undergo during their phase of childhood. Many of the stories in the collection deal with children’s awareness and adaptation to an adult world of social and moral etiquette. Through the treatment of this subject in her stories Munro also reflects her own experience as a child. In the stories that treat childhood she beautifuly delineates girl children’s relationship with their mother, father, sister, grandmother, brother and the