Fathers and Other Clowns: Representations of Masculinity in Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".