A Study Of Identity In Alice Munro’s The Dance Of The Happy Shades

The Dance of the Happy Shades is the earliest collection of stories published by Alice Munro,a Canadian writer.It is also her longest collection of stories from creation to publication.It shows the writing thoughts and characteristics of Alice Munro’s early novels.The 15 short stories in the book respectively describe the daily life of Canadians from the beginning to the middle of the last century,and show the contradiction between different characters,so as to reflect the survival dilemma and spiritual world of Canadians caused by identity problems.The thesis is divided into three parts: introduction,main body and conclusion.The first part is the introduction,which mainly sorts out the research background and significance of the paper,the research status at home and abroad,and briefly summarizes the research objects,methods and main viewpoints of the text.The second part is the main body,which is divided into three chapters.The first chapter mainly analyzes the father-daughter relationship and mother-daughter relationship in the family relationship,and discusses the family identity of Canadian women in Alice Munro’s works and the identity dilemma of women as "the other".The second chapter mainly analyzes the gender identity of Canadian women and the "modern" identity of the new generation of Canadians,and analyzes the influence of social ideology,social group form and the development of The Times on the construction of Canadian identity.The third chapter takes the coexistence relationship and assimilation relationship in ethnic relations as the main object of analysis.By combining the complicated history of colonization and immigration of Canada,it discusses the estranged ethnic relations in the multi-ethnic community of Canada,and the impact of the dual national identity of Canadians on Canadian national identity.The third part is the epilogue.The identity of the characters in the novel collection The Dance of the Happy Shades is closely related to Alice Munro’s identity as a female writer and a Canadian national writer.In her novels,Alice Munro subliminates individual experience to group experience,and combines reality with fiction,which makes her works have the characteristics of documentary,coherence and universality.At the same time,the regional and individual characteristics in Alice Munro’s works also laid the foundation for Alice Munro to become a world-class novelist,and also provided a certain reference significance for writers’ works creation.