Boys and Girls (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Dance of the Happy Shades, the collection of short stories in which “Boys and Girls” appeared, was published in 1968. The novel Lives of Girls and Women (1971) soon followed, and a second collection of stories entitled Something I’ve Been Meaning

To Tell You was published in 1974. In an essay written in 1978 in which these three books were discussed, critic Hallward Dahlie said Munro is “a writer who has quietly and firmly established herself over the past decade.” To say that Munro gained this reputation “quietly and firmly” seems an apt estimation. From the start, Munro’s critics approached her writing as that which deserved careful and serious consideration, whether their praise was highly favorable or more measured in its admiration. Her fiction has inspired a large and highly respectable body of scholarly criticism. By the time Dance of the Happy Shades was published, Munro had spent many years honing her talent. Thus, when this collection appeared, it was the work of a writer skilled and confident in her talents, talents that well justified the admiration they inspired. So, even if critic Frederick Busch found Munro’s art in her first collection somewhat lacking in “the thrilling economy, the poetry that makes the form [the short story] so valuable,” he nevertheless acknowledged that they are stories “you have to call well-made.” Most critics, however, greeted Dance of the Happy Shades like Martin Levin did. In Levin’s review in the New York Times Book Review, he said the “short story is alive and well in Canada”; the “15 tales . . . originate like fresh winds from the north.”

That Munro deserves this solid place among writers is underscored in an essay written by Rae McCarthy MacDonald in which the critic asserted that “Munro’s work bears the marks of a distinctive, vital, and unifying vision.” According to MacDonald, this vision is quite somber. Noting that so many of Munro’s stories feature minor characters who are “eccentrics, criminals, and the fatally ill,” MacDonald suggested that these marginal characters “work as a symbol or externalization of the suffering and deformity of the apparently healthy and adjusted characters.” However, other critics differ as to the bleakness of Munro’s vision. For instance, while Hallvard Dahlie also noted a pervasiveness of “existential terror or desperation” in her fiction, this “desperation” is, Dahlie suggested, finally offset by a concurrent development of a sense of “existential possibility within a total vision that is much closer to faith rather than despair.” Or, from the point of view of the famous novelist and short story writer Joyce Carol Oates, Munro’s fiction is described as being so true to its subjects that it somehow “celebrate[s]” them; in Munro’s fiction, said Oates, there is a “wonderful variety of people . . . [whom] we always want to know more about.” That more critics tend to this latter view is perhaps because, as Kildare Dobbs recorded, so many of her stories “move quietly to their modest epiphanies or moral insights.” Certainly, stories like “Walker Brothers Cowboy” or “Dance of the Happy Shades” (both from Dance of the Happy Shades) do work toward these deeply touching resolutions of sudden profound insight and emotional purgation (“epiphanies”), and they do also seem to capture what is most impressive about Munro’s art. Munro’s solid position within the contemporary canon of English language fiction is shown by the many essays and books that have been written about her fiction, such as Robert Thacker’s bibliography of Munro criticism, Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography, and E. D. Blodgett’s book, Alice Munro, which explores the complexity of Munro’s “subtly self-aware manner of narration.”

Compare & Contrast

• 1960s and 1970s: In Canada (as in the United States and other locales), the Women’s Movement flourishes and establishes itself. Along with other groups of people demanding equal rights, women activists gain significant social advances.
  1990s: In the United States, the Men’s Movement, including organizations like the Promise-keepers, begins. Organized by a few charismatic leaders, men begin to get together to renew a sense of their masculinity, or, in the case of one movement, to push for a return to societal arrangements before feminism.
• 1960s: Native Americans (whether hailing from Canada or the United States), begin to contest their status within these countries. The Canadians, whose French-English colonial history had long given them a sense of the “multicultural,” begin to expand this sense of diversity to accomodate recognition of the persons who were native to that geographical locale. The United States enacts Civil Rights legislation to guarantee equal treatment of racial minorities.
  1990s: The terms “melting pot” and “multicultural” now vie with terms like “diversity,” “difference,” and “hybridization.” All these words attempt to describe the ethnic and cultural scene in highly diverse nations, or, more recently, these notions are being used to refer to the new global space of meeting cultures and groups.