To Interpret Mother-Daughter Relationship In Dance Of The Happy Shades From The Perspective Of Psychoanalytic Feminism

The dissertation is to interpret the mother-daughter relationship in Dance of the Happy Shades from the perspective of psychoanalytic feminism. Dance of the Happy Shades is the first collection of short stories by Alice Munro, composed of 15 short stories, among which 11 are full of delicate descriptions of the mother-daughter relationship. The theme of mother-daughter relationship is a recurring theme in Alice Munro’s works, though it may take various shapes. This painful and complicated mother-daughter relationship constitutes a characteristic of Munro’s stories, which has attracted wide attention from many of the literary critics.Mother-daughter relationship has long been a focus for the feminist writers. In literary works, it can be summarized to be two aspects, namely conflict and blending, or denial and return. Meanwhile this theme has its inborn complicity and diversity.In the Dance of the Happy Shades and many later works of Alice Munro, we can find a kind of typical mother-daughter relationship. In her writing, mothers are usually middle-aged women trapped in the life of small town. They yearn for a better life, and most of them are rigid with their daughters. Sometimes they even cause mental torture for the daughters with the excuse of their illness. On the other hand, the daughters are often restricted by both the mothers and small town circumstance. The mother-daughter relationship is full of tension, fight and misunderstanding. By comparison, the father-daughter relationship in her writing appears more harmonious. Most of the fathers in her stories are symbolized with leniency, humor and generosity. The psychoanalytic feminism can provide some possible theories to help to interpret the reasons for and implications of the mother-daughter relationship in the stories. In the pre-Oedipal stage, mother and daughter are unified and the daughter enjoys the identification with her mother. However with the gradual perception and acceptation of the patriarchal language system, the daughter starts to discover the things absent from their mothers, thus she shifts her love from the mother to the father who represents patriarchal culture. The conflict between mother and daughter becomes increasingly significant. The interpretation of mother-daughter relationship in Munro’s works from the perspective of psychoanalytical feminism can help us better understand the description about modern Canadian social culture, the revelation of the complicated inner world of female characters, and author’s feminist thought in those novels.