93ARTICLES
2022, Vol. 19 (1), 93-106(126)
journals.uni-lj.si/elope
https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.19.1.93-106
UDC: 821.111(71).09-32Munro A.:81’38
Katja Težak
University of Maribor, Slovenia
Adverbials of Time, Time Expressions and Tense Shifts 
in Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades”
ABSTRACT
Alice Munro, the first female Canadian to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, 
is a literary challenge and delight for the reader also with regards to the usage of references 
to time and their linguistic construction. Her literary work comprises short stories and one 
novel, which can more accurately be described as a short story cycle. She takes interest in 
everyday, small-town life and the human relationships in it, all described in concise, down-
to-earth language. The settings in most of her stories are limited communities in a typically 
Canadian context. This paper deals with her short story “Dance of the Happy Shades” from 
the collection of the same name (1968), and focuses on a stylistic analysis of time expressions, 
tense shifts and adverbials of time. Munro has been praised for constructing moods of 
familiarity, home and small-town safety. The paper attempts to show that she achieves this 
not solely through the plot and themes, but also with the meticulous care with which she uses 
time expressions, time adverbials and tense shifts. 
Keywords:  Alice Munro, “Dance of the Happy Shades”, stylistics, adverbials of time, time 
expressions, tense shifts  
Časovni prislovi, izražanje časa in menjavanje slovničnih časov v 
zgodbi Alice Munro “Dance of the Happy Shades” 
IZVLEČEK
Pisanje Alice Munro, prve Kanadčanke, ki je prejela Nobelovo nagrado za književnost, 
predstavlja literarni izziv in užitek za bralca tudi v smislu rabe časovnih referenc in njihovih 
jezikovnih konstrukcij. Literarni opus Alice Munro sestavljajo kratke zgodbe in roman oz. 
cikel kratkih zgodb. Avtorica se v njih osredotoča na vsakdanje življenje v majhnem mestu 
in tamkajšnje človeške odnose, vse to pa opisuje v prizemljenem, na videz jedrnatem jeziku. 
Večina njenih zgodb se odvija v majhnih, tipično kanadskih skupnostih. Pričujoči prispevek 
obravnava kratko zgodbo »Dance of the Happy Shades« iz zbirke z istim naslovom (1968) 
in v njej slogovno analizira časovne prislove, izražanje časa in menjavanje slovničnih časov. 
Alice Munro slovi po tem, da zna ustvariti občutek domačnosti in varnosti, ki sta značilni za 
majhno skupnost. Prispevek pokaže, da tega ne doseže zgolj skozi dogodke in teme, ampak 
tudi z načinom izražanja časa in uporabe časovnih prislovov ter menjavanjem slovničnih časov. 
Ključne besede: Alice Munro, »Dance of the Happy Shades«, stilistika, časovni prislovi, 
izražanje časa, menjave slovničnih časov
94 Katja Težak Adverbials of Time, Time Expressions and Tense Shifts in Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades”
1 Introduction 
A fascination with time, the various ways of expressing it as well as consciously elaborating on 
this fascination are frequently present in literary texts. Authors often refer to its unavoidable 
passing, like Andrew Marvell in his poem “To His Coy Mistress”: “But at my back I always 
hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near” (Marvell 1681), or wittily express alienation, like 
Tennessee Williams in Tom’s utterance from the final scene of The Glass Menagerie: “I didn’t 
go to the moon, I went much further – for time is the longest distance between places” 
(Williams 1999, 1379). The dangers of interfering with time, even in a supernatural way, are 
reflected in the words of Albus Dumbledore, the famous headmaster of Hogwarts from the 
Harry Potter series: “Mysterious thing, Time. Powerful, and when meddled with, dangerous” 
(Cuarón 2004). Time is a complex structure to present and use creatively in narration and 
thus requires considerable mastery of language and storytelling, yet in Munro’s writing it 
seems natural and seamless in the way it supports the flow of events and helps to lead the 
reader’s attention to certain moments in the stories’ present. Her narration keeps the reader 
in coherence with the timeline, while subtly manipulating time. She has a way of presenting 
time with linguistic means and creating a gateway for the reader into the story, making them 
feel as if the events are happening as the reader proceeds through the narrative. She achieves 
that by shifting tenses from past to present, creating the distinct step into the now of the story. 
She also links Simple Past and Present Perfect in a strategic way that corresponds to the classic 
grammatical use of perfect tenses, yet applied in her manner to weave a particular atmospheric 
effect of generational cosiness. In “Dance of the Happy Shades”, she describes how mothers 
and daughters take part in the same rituals in the same places and situations. The ritual of 
going to the same hairdresser, the same piano teacher or the same dentist for generations 
automatically spells the familiarity that is the focus of this paper, since it conceives a time 
frame without specifically mentioning dates or using explicit linguistic categories expressing 
time. These are only some of the most salient stylistic devices Munro uses when exploring 
time and which will be analysed in this paper on the example of the story “Dance of the 
Happy Shades”. Munro also orchestrates a whole lifetime passing and changing in the brief 
duration of the story, while still according it greater significance than just the sum of passing 
minutes, as observed by Inas Hassan: “Each of Munro’s stories is an attempt to survey the 
lives of girls and women in particular in an expanded way, presenting a whole life, not just 
the epiphany of the moment which is the key characteristic of the short story” (2020, 1216). 
This paper addresses the fictional creation of a sense of time, primarily with the use of time 
adverbials and other expressions of time in the selected story from her first collection. The 
choice of text was based on its conformist narrative usage of time in Munro’s early writing, 
which indicates her fascination with simple, everyday occurrences, rituals and social gatherings 
from an early stage in her publishing, and which seems to have remained in Munro’s writing 
throughout her career. In compliance with this stylistic principle, “simple, everyday” time is 
ingrained in her early writing and thus in this story.  
2 “Dance of the Happy Shades” and Munro’s Writing Style 
“Dance of the Happy Shades” was published in Munro’s first short story collection of the 
same name by Ryerson Press  in 1968 (Shearer 2015, 195) and won the 1968 Governor 
95ARTICLES
General’s Award for English Fiction. The story revolves around an annual recital organised by 
a seemingly naive piano teacher whose passage through life is represented through the changes 
occurring from year to year at the recital. Her shrinking housing, downsized from the previous 
location, the health deterioration of her sister and the snacks that remain unfashionably the 
same illustrate the subtle way in which Munro spins time into her narrative web to make the 
reader subconsciously aware of it. A significant juxtaposition in the story is created in the 
scene of the performing children when a special-needs pupil delivers the best performance of 
all the participating children.1 To Miss Marsalles, such unexpected talent is the simple reward 
of a lifetime of service to art and not a discordant terminal marker in the temporal flow of her 
life. As Munro’s narrator constructs it, however, the unusual event punctuates fictive temporal 
flow, casting a retrospective glance back over the decades of change that have been mediated 
by adverbials and verb tenses.    
Dance of the Happy Shades (the collection and its title story) forms part of the greater Canadian 
opus of short stories that spans centuries. As Michelle Gadpaille (1989, 11–12) states in her 
overview of the Canadian short story, it goes back to Thomas McCulloch and Thomas Chandler 
Haliburton in the 19th century, then over the comic touch of Stephen Leacock and all the way 
to turn-of-the century writers like Isabella Valancy Crawford and Susie Frances Harrison, and 
then to 20th-century masters like Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.
Both Canadian geography and colonial culture have been evoked to explain the nation’s rich 
and prolific production in short fiction; theories by authors like W. H. New (1986, 8) suggest 
that the popularity of the short story in Canada results from a marginalized colonial culture 
and a marginalised genre. It is, however, clear that this genre has long moved to the central 
place in Canadian literature and has acquired a status that many contemporary writers have 
consolidated. One of the most visible authors, apart from Munro, is Margaret Atwood, who 
became “a voice of Canada” with “her ability to serve up quips, her outright humour, and 
her genius at interweaving the past and the present, even as she explores modern Canadian 
myths” (Onič et al. 2020, 38). The genre itself seems to have been influenced by the way 
foreign observers see the world through their culture. Gerald Lynch (2001) points out that 
short fiction enables Canadian writers to work with subversive irony in a form that is not 
the dominant genre in the overwhelming culture to the south or in the colonial homeland 
of Great Britain. In “Dance of the Happy Shades” the short story demonstrates its capacity 
to express both the rootedness in community, their culture and their rituals flowing through 
time and a broader Canadian cultural  framework.
Munro, as one of the most salient writers of the Canadian short story, displays these roots in 
culture, particularly in the culture and thoughts of ordinary people. “Labelled a ‘post‐modernist’ 
author, or a writer of ‘magic realism’, Alice Munro has been praised for her vivid and lifelike 
descriptions of ordinary people and settings in her fiction” (Powell 2008, 12), and as Bosman 
(2013, 121) further suggests, her work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture 
of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Munro 
1 For a discussion of this story’s treatment of Down Syndrome and dementia, see Marlene Goldman. 2016. “Re-
imagining Dementia in the Fourth Age: The Ironic Fictions of Alice Munro,” Sociology of Health & Illness 39 (2): 
285–302.
96 Katja Težak Adverbials of Time, Time Expressions and Tense Shifts in Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades”
has been the recipient of many literary prizes such as the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 
2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, three Canada’s Governor 
General’s Awards for fiction, the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s 1996 Marian Engel Award, and the 
2004 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway. As highlighted in this paper, her writing 
style is recognised as presenting an illusion of the comfortable and familiar. 
Throughout Munro’s stories, intangible impulses between the protagonist and some other 
element – other characters, the past, a code of morality or behaviour – shift between the 
rational and the irrational, between the familiar comfortable world and uncertainty and 
illusion ‒ to create a tension which gives Munro’s writing its haunting and disturbing quality 
(Pfaus 1984, 23).
Munro has herself pointed to the fact that she enjoys meddling with time in her narration, 
allowing time and its expressions in her stories a way to create her own unmistakeable style: 
In commenting on her writing technique, Munro explains that she never adopts a 
chronological or linear development. Munro’s stories are not meant to be read in 
the traditional way from beginning to end. Though traditional short stories are 
conventionally characterized by unity of time and place, the contrary is found in 
Munro’s collections. (Hassan 2020, 1216)
The connection of the familiar and the comfortable with time in Munro’s writing is 
evident from the observations of both literary critics and readers. Considering her passion 
for manipulating time, it makes sense to consider time in literature as a concept. In his 
overview paper on concepts of time and literary criticism, Carsten Elbro (1986, 99–100) 
categorizes views on time into three general views: the idealist, the realist and the relational 
one. In this paper, time in Munro’s writing is viewed as relational: “time is a result of 
the interaction between man and his surroundings” (Elbro 1986, 100), and it will be 
demonstrated that the repeated actions and observations of the characters create the steady 
flow of time in the story.
3 Representation of Time in “Dance of the Happy Shades” 
Munro’s characters in “Dance of the Happy Shades” are ordinary people, who perceive time 
by observing the ordinary moments around them. They live from annual recital to annual 
recital of the local piano teacher, where they get to see time pass in minuscule changes to the 
environment and the people they see each year. The rootedness in the culture and repetition of 
ordinary events create a sense of familiarity and an impression of being stuck in a moment in 
time. Munro’s use of time expressions, adverbs of time and tense shifts co-create her signature 
feel of familiarity in the constant and repetitive rhythm of life perceived by simple people in 
Canadian towns and suburbs, as well as by the reader. The stylistic analysis will first focus on 
analysis of the adverbs of time. 
3.1 Adverbs of Time
General definitions of adverbs usually determine them as words which further describe or 
define other words such as verbs, adjectives and other adverbs (Richards, Platt, and Platt 
97ARTICLES
1992,  2) or define circumstances of things happening, such as time, place, manner and 
frequency, as well as sentence adverbs (Eastwood 1999, 270–1). This chapter primarily 
focuses on adverbs of time and frequency and closely examines their function and impact. 
Looking at the theory of time adverb classification will help to illustrate which categories are 
used in Munro’s story and in what way. 
Adverbs of time and frequency express when and how often something happens, or when it 
is happening, for example, often, now, never, daily, or occasionally. (Swan 2005, xix). Now, 
which has a specific role in this story, is a general adverb of time. According to Quirk et al. 
(1985, 542–43), adverbs of frequency describe a span of time; in other words, they respond 
to wh-questions like how many times, how often, etc. The classification of adverbs of frequency 
is sub-divided into definite and indefinite frequency. The former group contains adjuncts 
which name explicitly the times by which the frequency is measured, while the latter contains 
adjuncts which do not name explicitly the time by which frequency is measured. Definite 
frequency can be sub-divided into period frequency (hourly, daily, nightly, weekly, monthly, 
quarterly, annually, etc.), occasion frequency (once, twice, thrice), usual occurrences (usually, 
commonly, customarily, normally, etc.), continuous universal frequency (always, constantly, 
continuously, etc.), high frequency (frequently, often, regularly, repeatedly), low frequency 
(infrequently, irregularly, occasionally, etc.) or adverbs that denote rare occurrences (seldom, 
rarely, scarcely) (Quirk et al. 1985).
Martin and White (2005, 54) also point out an interesting connection between adverbs of 
frequency and modality. They explain that modality is subdivided into modalization and 
modulation, and modalization is further divided into probability and usuality, which is 
further connected to judgements of normality. The following quote illustrates the connection 
of usuality and judgements of normality: 
Similarly, modalities of usuality can be related to judgements of normality: He’s 
naughty. He’s often naughty. It’s usual for him to be naughty. It’s normal for him to be 
naughty. It’s normal, average, fashionable, peculiar, odd, etc. [judgement: normality]. 
(Martin and White 2005, 54)  
This finding illustrates how adverbs of frequency can aid the feelings of what we deem 
normal, abnormal, usual and familiar; how these can influence the mood of a story will be 
illustrated further, since “Dance of the Happy Shades” depends for its effect on the illusion of 
predictable normality interrupted by the uncannily abnormal. 
Adverbs of time fulfil these functions in Munro’s story, i.e., they create the feel of time 
frequency, time passage, general time location and feelings of normality, as in the case of now. 
In the story, we can observe adverbs of period frequency (yearly and year after year, an idiom 
serving as an adverb of period frequency), occasional frequency (once), unusual occurrences 
(unusually) and continuous universal frequency (always, forever). Of Quirk’s seven categories 
of adverbs of frequency, Munro uses four, which is a relatively high number of categories. 
They create an interplay in presentation of the repetitiveness that creates a cosy, familiar 
feeling with adverbs of higher frequency as in this passage:
98 Katja Težak Adverbials of Time, Time Expressions and Tense Shifts in Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades”
It was the same room, exactly the same room, in which they had performed themselves; 
a room whose dim impersonal style (the flossy bunch of peonies and spirea dropping 
petals on the piano was Miss Marsalles’ own touch and not entirely happy) was at 
the same time uncomfortable and reassuring. Here they found themselves year after 
year … (Munro 1989, 154; my emphasis)
This passage illustrates how the sameness and repetitiveness in the surroundings play on the 
reader’s temporal sense to create an atmosphere of the familiar and cosy. Each generation 
grows up in the same environment and has the same mundane experiences from a slightly 
different angle, as a child or, in turn, as a parent. Those are repetitive cycles with which almost 
every reader can identify and experience as familiar and cosy. The familiarity effect that I 
am suggesting has much in common with the theory of transactive memory as posited by 
Michelle Gadpaille: “By deploying rhetorically loaded words such as afterwards or whatever, 
Munro’s narrator coopts us into sharing a space that includes a memory or experience that 
we do not literally possess” (Gadpaille 2016, 6). The adverbials highlighted in “Dance of the 
Happy Shades” perform a similar co-optation function by ascribing shared time as well as 
space. The following excerpt offers another example of continuous universal frequency:
After the piano-playing came a little ceremony which always caused some 
embarrassment. (Munro 1989, 154; my emphasis)
Here we see the same effect at play: the ceremony of Miss Marsalles giving out gift-wrapped 
books to the children who have performed, an awkward ceremony held after each piano 
recital, and which causes the same emotions for several generations, and that too is something 
every reader can recognise as familiar. 
Some adverbs point out the rare occasions when something unusual occurs and do that as a 
contrastive emphasis of the repetitiveness itself:
Miss Marsalles’ idealistic view of children, her tender- or simple-mindedness in that 
regard, made her almost useless as a teacher; she was unable to criticize except in the 
most delicate and apologetic way and her praises were unforgivably dishonest; it took 
an unusually conscientious pupil to come through with anything like a creditable 
performance. (Munro 1989, 153; my emphasis)
The time adverb unusually is the direct opposite of Quirk’s usual occurrences category, 
which contains usually as a time frequency indicator of how often something happens; the 
contrasting case of the time adverbial unusually in the passage above indicates the rarity of 
an occurrence. Miss Marsalles is so predictable and repetitive in her instruction and feedback 
to her students, that it would merit an unusual child, thus an unusual occurrence in time to 
change anything. The exception to the rule highlights the familiar ritual the piano teacher 
goes through with all the generations she teaches, and knowing what feedback may come 
from a teacher creates a lulling familiarity, whereas a completely different one would destroy 
the cosy atmosphere and show how unusual change would be in the time suspension of Miss 
Marsalles and her life. 
99ARTICLES
Another adverb of time that has significance in Munro’s story is now. It notably occurs in the 
first two paragraphs: 
Poor Carrie is having her tonsils out. In the end all she can say is: Oh, but won’t 
all that be too much trouble, now? Now being weighted with several troublesome 
meanings; you may take your choice. (Munro 1998, 152; my emphasis)
In this instance, the adverb is used in the context of a banal everyday occurrence of a standard, 
minor surgical procedure and evokes the question of convenience in the adverb now, followed 
by an unmistakable meta-comment on the meaning of time in the adverbial use, inviting the 
reader to create their own interpretation. Here Munro exhibits one of her marriages between 
familiar and odd, mundane and weird, which mark her writing style. Even though having 
one’s tonsils removed would not have been unusual at that time, the fact that it is highlighted 
as inconvenient in the story underlines the cosy, routine unfolding of life in the story. For 
such a mundane occurrence to be a disturbance now or at any given time, the temporal 
progression must be uneventful overall. The adverb now also continues to haunt the story’s 
opening paragraph: 
Now that Miss Marsalles has moved from the brick and frame bungalow on Bank 
Street, where the last three parties have been rather squashed, to an even smaller place 
– if she has described it correctly – on Bala Street. (Bala Street, where is that?) Or: now 
that Miss Marsalles’ older sister is in bed, following a stroke; now that Miss Marsalles 
herself – as my mother says, we must face these things – is simply getting too old. 
(Munro 1998, 152; my emphasis)
The extension to the phrase now that indicates the well-developed construction of time passing 
through change. Now that indicates that it was not like this before.2 Two more examples of 
this juxtaposition of then and now and the temporal shift appear in this passage: 
Piano lessons are not so important now as they once were; everybody knows that. 
(Munro 1998, 153; my emphasis)
In these two passages, the author ventures into a stylistic antithesis of then and now that points 
out minuscule changes we might notice only in a cosy, familiar environment where everything 
is so well-known that only there do they become salient. Antithesis, etymologically suggesting 
opposition, “a stylistic pair figure in the text used for expressive-visual, humorous, ironic, 
evaluative and other purposes” (Ruzibaeva 2019, 149), illustrates how a stylistic feature serves 
both ironic and evaluative purposes; Munro has foregrounded a mundane shift in local habits 
conjuring temporal depth into the cosy, small-town narrative mood. The following example 
adds another layer of awareness of the present:
The door is standing open. Miss Marsalles is wedged between the door, the coatrack 
and the stairs; there is barely room to get past her into the living room, and it would 
2 The phrase now that also has a causal meaning as stated in the Cambridge Online Dictionary (n.d.): ”now (that) 
conjunction US /ˈnɑʊ (ðət)/ You use now that to give an explanation of a new situation: Now that I  live only a 
few blocks from work, I walk to work and enjoy it.” 
100 Katja Težak Adverbials of Time, Time Expressions and Tense Shifts in Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades”
be impossible, the way things are now, for anyone to get from the living room upstairs. 
(Munro 1998, 155; my emphasis)
The antithesis here shows the difference between how Miss Marsalles used to live and the 
current living conditions, but it also indicates that now, in the present, the spatial arrangement 
has social significance, as the phrasing issues an invitation to visualize the cramped space. The 
combination of the adverb with mundane life shifts, such as moving house, getting older 
or getting ill creates an unmistakeable Munrovian atmosphere, where the reader joins the 
narrator in their position on the story’s timeline.
In Munro’s usage, those small rituals build a constant rhythm to evoke a feeling of “I know 
this, this is familiar” and add to the mosaic of her style. The juxtaposition of constancy and 
flux comes to a ruthless halt in the closing paragraph of the story, where attendance at Miss 
Marsalles’ parties must now cease “quite certainly forever” (Munro 1998, 160), where forever 
becomes the cruellest adverb. In general, the adverbs used in the story display the interplay 
of ritual and disturbance of ritual to create the atmosphere characteristic of Munro’s writing. 
The next literary device Munro uses to show repetition and familiarity involves a selection of 
phrases expressing time. These are analysed in the following section.
3.2 Repetitiveness and Familiarity
Repetitiveness is a common phenomenon in spoken and written discourse, while repetition 
schemes are particularly frequent elements in literary texts. In the latter, recurring patterns 
can be observed on the micro- as well as the macro-structural level of the discourse. In the 
latter, these patterns emerge in the plot features, while at the level of text, the patterns of 
repetition are a significant stylistic feature as noted by many stylisticians (Leech and Short 
2007, 63–64, 164; Simpson 2004, 50; Burke 2014, 25). It has been frequently researched in 
concrete literary discourse, where it materializes in a variety of functions, such as contributing 
to the creation of gothic effects, projecting trapped emotion, creating menacing atmosphere, 
enhancing violence, or preserving rhetorical effects in translation, etc. (Zupan 2006; 
Kusovac and Pralas 2016; Onič and Prajnč Kacijan 2019; Mohar, Orthaber, and Onič 2020; 
Plemenitaš 2020; Gadpaille and Zupan 2020, 18). Several of these studies also find that 
the effects of repetitive stylistic patterns are often affected by the translation process and the 
perception and interpretative potential of the target text is different, mostly narrower, than 
that of the original.
In “Dance of the Happy Shades”, there are a micro level and a macro level of repetition 
that coexist and produce a synergy to highlight the life routine, creating the impression of 
familiarity and peace. The micro level comprises repetition in words and phrases, and the 
macro level creates repetition on the level of plot and semantic word usage. These levels of 
repetition evoke the constant passage of years in the lives and events in the story. The first 
stylistic feature involving repetition at the micro level is anadiplosis and can be observed in a 
passage already analysed for its adverbials: 
Oh, but won’t all that be too much trouble, now? Now being weighted with several 
troublesome meanings; you may take your choice. (Munro 1998, 152; my emphasis)
101ARTICLES
It is interesting that in this passage we find the anadiplosis specifically with the time adverb 
now. That indicates repetition not just on a micro level, but also a connection to the macro 
level of repetition, both creating the mood of the familiar as they place us in the now of the 
story. The next feature creating repetition on the micro level is the use of anaphora: 
Now that Miss Marsalles has moved from the brick and frame bungalow on Bank 
Street, where the last three parties have been rather squashed, to an even smaller place 
– if she has described it correctly – on Bala Street. (Bala Street, where is that?) Or: now 
that Miss Marsalles’ older sister is in bed, following a stroke; now that Miss Marsalles 
herself – as my mother says, we must face these things – is simply getting too old. 
(Munro 1998, 152; my emphasis)
But on the whole the affair in those days had solidity, it had tradition, in its own 
serenely out-of-date way it had style. (Munro 1998, 153; my emphasis)
An anaphora with variation, is reinforced by parallelism in these two passages:
And she asks how her June party could ever be too much trouble, at any time, in any 
place? (Munro 1998, 152; my emphasis)
But then driving home, driving out of the hot red-brick streets and out of the city and 
leaving Miss Marsalles and her no longer possible parties behind, … (Munro 1998, 
160; my emphasis)
The anaphora examples are intricately used with time expressions and words such as now, at 
any time, and no longer, showing the same effect of interweaving the micro and macro levels of 
repetition. The next element on the micro level are two examples of epiphora or epistrophe:
It was the same room, exactly the same room, in which they had performed themselves; 
a room whose dim impersonal style (the flossy bunch of peonies and spirea dropping 
petals on the piano was Miss Marsalles’ own touch and not entirely happy) was at the 
same time uncomfortable and reassuring. (Munro 1998, 152; my emphasis)
And all that this girl does – but this is something you would not think could ever be 
done – is to play it so that this can be felt, all this can be felt, even in Miss Marsalles’ 
living-room on Bala Street on a preposterous afternoon. (Munro 1998, 159; my 
emphasis)
Both instances of epiphora reinforce the rhythmic repetition, creating an even pace of words 
and a sense of familiarity that momentarily fends off the intrusion of the “preposterous” event 
of musical prodigy. Another micro level repetition is the following epizeuxis: 
The mothers sit, caught with a look of protest on their faces, a more profound anxiety 
than before, as if reminded of something that they had forgotten they had forgotten; 
the white-haired girl sits ungracefully at the piano with her head hanging down, and 
the music is carried through the open door and the windows to the cindery summer 
street. (Munro 1998, 159; my emphasis)
102 Katja Težak Adverbials of Time, Time Expressions and Tense Shifts in Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades”
These micro level repetitions help create the intimate style, and as seen above, some also 
correlate directly to the macro level in the types of words repeated. The next few instances will 
illustrate the macro level of repetition in the story. 
The piano recital party happens around the same time every year; every year the children 
learning piano are the same and different; they are taken to the recital by their mothers, who 
used to take piano lessons with the same teacher, in the same rooms, receiving the same gifts 
as their children, and this happens for many successive years. It is so repetitive that it seems 
to have become timeless; there is no mention of when and where it started, and there is no 
knowing when it will stop, apart from the inevitable death of the now elderly piano teacher, 
but there is no mention of that possibility in the story; it all continues from year to year, 
morphing into a passage from youth, to middle age, to old age. 
The time expression “Here they found themselves year after year” (Munro 1998, 154; my 
emphasis) describes repetition and constant actions taken at the same time. This creates a 
feeling of safety within a small community, apparent in the following narrator’s comment: “but 
who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance – not so much to Miss Marsalles 
as to the ceremonies of their childhood” (Munro 1998, 154), which presents a link to the past. 
The same rituals have been occurring since their childhood, in the same house, in the same 
community, in the same time frames; the mood of familiarity is constantly re-constructed, as 
every community of people has rituals that connect and changeless buildings that engulf.  
An occurrence that stands out, yet creates an atmosphere of intimacy is the narrator’s 
apparently offhand remark: “Last year a child had a nosebleed” (Munro 1998, 152; my 
emphasis). The sheer banality of the occurrence and the subsequent mild outrage immediately 
draw attention to the interwoven, rhythmical, usually undisturbed time frames of the events 
which can be “disrupted” by a simple nosebleed. The prosaic uneventfulness of those parties 
means that a nosebleed is a mildly shocking event. This scene depicts an almost generalized 
image of ordinary suburban existence.3
As shown in this section, time expressions combine with certain rhetorical figures to co-
create the signature Munro feel of familiarity and of a routine that somehow includes the 
reader. In “Dance of the Happy Shades”, we find the repetitive rhythm at both the micro 
level of language use and the macro level of the yearly recital, with the same mothers bringing 
their children, their children reliving the same recitals and receiving the same gifts. Although 
human beings do find solace in a certain amount of repetition, the insistent patterning in this 
story stifles us into the recognition that time can cycle or stand still for only so long and that 
the era of the recitals is over.  
3.3 Grammatical Tense Shifts
Tense usage is a universally important and semantically powerful feature in the English 
language, and according to Fludernik, particularly so in literary narration: 
3 In contrast to Munro’s usual small-town setting, “Dance of the Happy Shades” unfolds in Toronto, with the mention 
of its fashionable neighbourhood (Rosedale) and of other recognizable streets, to which the recital moves as Miss 
Marsalles’ budget shrinks and her housing choices become restricted. 
103ARTICLES
Tense in narrative and non-narrative texts performs a variety of functions, not all of 
which are properly temporal or aspectual. In particular, tense relates to the passing of 
time (duration), sequentiality, chronology and the expression of subjectivity (frequently 
linked with aspect). In addition, tense is here argued to fulfil textual functions of 
foregrounding and backgrounding over and above plot-related foregrounding. 
(Fludernik 2003, 117)
Accordingly, tenses in narration do not just function for moving from one moment to the 
next but can also be used for foregrounding. That is a linguistic strategy for calling attention 
to specific linguistic and thematic features,  and in “Dance of the Happy Shades” Munro does 
that with tense use. She draws attention to the present moment in the story by going from 
past tense narration to the present, pulling the reader into the story to share the atmosphere 
of familiarity and cosiness, as seen in this passage: 
But after the house in Rosedale was gone, after it had given way to the bungalow on 
Bank Street, these conversations about Miss Marsalles’ means did not take place; this 
aspect of Miss Marsalles’ life had passed into that region of painful subjects which it is 
crude and unmannerly to discuss. 
“I will die if it rains,” my mother says. “I will die of depression at this affair if it rains.” 
But the day of the party it does not rain and in fact the weather is very hot. It is a hot 
gritty summer day as we drive down into the city and get lost, looking for Bala Street. 
(Munro 1998, 155)
In this passage, Munro moves from describing the recital in previous years, to anticipating the 
upcoming recital, switching the narration from a variety of past tenses to present tense. This 
specific device is known as a verb-tense shift, which is defined by Moxley as follows: 
A verb-tense shift occurs when a writer changes tense within a single piece of writing. 
Tense is the term for what time frame verbs refer to. Standard American English 
has a number of tenses, each of which is a variation on past, present, or future. Any 
switching of tense within a sentence, paragraph, or longer piece of writing is a verb 
tense shift. (Moxley, n.d.)
By using this verb-tense shift, Munro creates an intimate shared past, a world where the 
reader is almost fully present. By establishing increments of mundane events playing out 
right in front of us in the present, she implicates the reader in the story; with the shift to the 
present, the narrator creates an illusion of now and invites readers to share it. A similar point 
is made by Hassan, who claims that Munro’s texts “frequently contain instances of anachrony 
that signal some relationship between the past and the present” (2020, 1216):
Munro utilizes various devices in order to create the feeling of life which is extended 
through time. One of such devices, which are frequently employed by Munro in her 
narrative universe, is the use of time shifts in favor of linear chronological order of events. 
In such a way, the author often either jumps backwards to fill in a past event or leaps 
forward surprising her reader with the changes caused by time. (Hassan 2020, 1216)
104 Katja Težak Adverbials of Time, Time Expressions and Tense Shifts in Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades”
The “I will die if it rains” passage above illustrates Hassan’s point that tense shifts serve to 
create a window for narrating the past within the story and at the same time highlight that 
jump to the present, the now of the upcoming party. This device pulls us further into the 
familiar rhythm and pace of suburban life. We tell stories while we live in the present, and 
this shift imposes bifocal vision on the reader, where a borrowed past morphs into a shared 
present. 
Munro’s use of the perfect tenses complies with their traditional grammatical use; however, it is 
the meticulous planning of their placement in the context of the seemingly conventional and 
expected discourse that foregrounds them and thus makes them stylistically interesting. This 
stylistic use corresponds to elements at the level of plot, since the talk among and about the 
multiple generations of mothers who used to attend Miss Marsalles’ classes as their children 
do now highlights the time difference that divides the events in the story. The characters’ own 
story discourse thus creates the linkage between past and present:
Every June reveals some new and surely significant dropping-out. Mary Lambert’s girl 
no longer takes; neither does Joan Crimble’s. What does this mean? think my mother 
and Marg French, women who have moved to the suburbs and are plagued sometimes 
by a feeling that they have fallen behind, that their instincts for doing the right thing 
have become confused. (Munro 1998, 153)
In this passage, Present Perfect expresses a stage that is apparently far from perfect. These 
mothers worry about their social and moral positioning, expressed in two cases by verbs 
of motion (move, fall). In the final case there is the more anxiety-inducing verb become. 
The resulting moral confusion, already fed by the deteriorating condition of the Marsalles 
household, will be exacerbated by the artistry of the marginalised child.  
4 Conclusion 
In creating generational cosiness in her stories, Munro relies on a style that has become 
recognizable for its unique ability to convince the reader that they share common memories 
with the narrator (Gadpaille 2016, 3-6). Both readers and critics often see this in her plot 
development and the choice of her geographical setting (Martin 1987, 56), but here it is 
argued that this is also created through time expressions, tense shifts and time adverbials.
The analysis has shown that the strategic stylistic deployment of these features can create a 
mood of familiarity between the reader and events in a text. This early story indicates that 
Munro had successfully achieved this even in her first collection. The adverbials point to 
foregrounding of everyday occurrences and how they depict routine, constant and familiar 
time intervals, while tense shifts allow us to zoom in to the mundane events on repeated 
occasions. 
We have also shown Munro successfully creating patterns of repetition throughout the story 
on a linguistic micro level and a semantic and plot-related macro level. She combines these 
to show the constant pace of repetitive cycles and to evoke a mood of familiarity, what I have 
chosen to call generational cosiness. The rhythmical repetition that characterizes music and 
105ARTICLES
dance extends from the story’s title through its adverbial fabric. It would not be Alice Munro, 
however, if she did not betray this cosiness with the eruption of the abnormal, the unexpected 
gift of the music offered by the special-needs pupil. For Miss Marsalles, this prodigy fits 
seamlessly into her time-resistant world view, merely the fulfilment of the prophecy for which 
every music teacher waits. For the uneasy mothers at the recital, however, this performance 
sets a marker in time – constructing a now in which they no longer wish to participate.   
The paper illustrates how time and the representation of time are utilised in creating 
atmosphere and mood in “Dance of the Happy Shades”, which is rarer than creating mood 
through, for example, imagery or adjectives. It also adds to the body of research exploring 
time as co-inclusive of the reader. 
The connections drawn here between stylistic devices of time expression and familiarity could 
spark further inquiry into Munro’s narratology in her other writing. It might help to frame 
questions about the formation of style and its narrative function in mediating narrator/reader 
positionality through expressions of time.
References
Bosman, Julie. 2013. “Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature.” New York Times, October 10, 2013. 
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/books/alice-munro-wins-nobel-prize-in-literature.html.
Burke, Michael, ed. 2014. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.
Cambridge Online Dictionary. n.d. “Now that.” Accessed May 17, 2022. https://dictionary.cambridge.org 
/dictionary/english/now-that.
Cuarón, Alfonso, dir. 2004. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Warner Bros. Pictures. https://
www.netflix.com/lu-en/title/60034567.  
Eastwood, John. 1999. Oxford Practice Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Elbro, Carsten. 1986. “The Concept of Time and Literary Criticism.” Orbis Litterarum 41: 97–118. 
https://doi .org/10.1111/j.1600-0730.1986.tb01983.x.
Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “Chronology, Time, Tense and Experientiality in Narrative.” Language and 
Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 12 (2): 117–34. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177 
%2F0963947003012002295. 
Gadpaille, Michelle. 1989. The Canadian Short Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
__. 2016. “Transactive Memory and the Narrative Appeal of Alice Munro’s Fiction.” In 25. posvet Medicina 
in pravo: Razmerje med pacientom in zdravnikom, edited by Suzana Kraljić, Jelka Reberšek Gorišek and 
Vesna Rijavec, 1–8. Maribor: Lexonomica Pess. 
Gadpaille, Michelle, and Simon Zupan. 2020. “Interpreting and Translating Shakespeare’s Heraldic 
Terminology: 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry VI in Slovene.” Annales: anali za istrske in mediteranske študije, 
Series historia et sociologia 30 (1): 13–34. https://doi.org/10.19233/ASHS.2020.02.
Hassan, Inas Hussein. 2020. “Juxtaposition of the Past and the Present: A Pragmatic Stylistic Analysis of 
the Short Story ‘Too Much Happiness’ by Alice Munro.” Cognitive and Language Sciences 14 (12): 
1211–23.
Kusovac, Olivera, and Jelena Pralas. 2016. “Repetition as Trapped Emotion in Tennessee Williams’s The 
Glass Menagerie.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 51 (4): 29–51.
Leech, Geoffrey, and Mick Short. 2007. Style in Fiction. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Lynch, Gerald. 2001. The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. Toronto: University of 
Toronto Press.
Martin, J.R., and Peter R.R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. London: 
Palgrave Macmillan. http://www.prrwhite.info/Martin%20and%20White,%202005,%20CHPT%20
3%20( sample)%20The%20Language%20of%20Evaluation.pdf.
106 Katja Težak Adverbials of Time, Time Expressions and Tense Shifts in Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades”
Martin, Walter R. 1987. Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel. Alberta: University of Alberta Press.
Marvell, Andrew. (1681) 1969. Miscellaneous Poems. Edited by Mary Marvell. Scolar Press.  https://
rpo.library .utoronto.ca/content/his-coy-mistress. 
Mazur, Carol. 2008. Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism. Lanham: Scarecrow 
Press.
Mohar, Tjaša, Sara Orthaber, and Tomaž Onič. 2020. “Machine Translated Atwood: Utopia or Dystopia?.” 
ELOPE 17 (1): 125–41. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.17.1125-141.
Moxley, Joseph M., and Jenifer Paquette. n.d. “Verb-Tense Shift.” Accessed April 29, 2022. https:// 
writingcommons.org/section/grammar/parts-of-speech/verbs/verb-tense-shift/.
Munro, Alice. (1968) 1998. Dance of the Happy Shades. New York: Vintage Books.
New, W. H. 1986. Canadian Short Fiction from Myth to Modern. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall of 
Canada Ltd.
Onič, Tomaž, Michelle Gadpaille, Jason Blake, and Tjaša Mohar. 2020. “Margaret Atwood, World-Famous 
but Yet to Be Discovered by Many Slovene Readers.” Acta Neophilologica 53 (1–2): 33–47. https://
doi.org/10 .4312/an.53.1-2.33-47. 
Onič, Tomaž, and Nastja Prajnč Kacijan. 2019. “‘A Fool, a Fool, I Met a Fool I’ th’ Forest’: Recurrence 
in Jaques’ Monologues from As You Like It and the Slovene Translations.” In Od jezika k filozofiji 
in nazaj: Festschrift ob 75-letnici Dunje Jutronić, edited by Bojan Borstner et al., 131–46. Maribor: 
University of Maribor Press.
Pfaus, Brenda. 1984. Alice Munro. Ottawa: The Golden Dog Press.
Plemenitaš, Katja. 2020. “Framing Violence in Presidential Discourse: A Study of Barack Obama’s 
Speeches.” Ars & Humanitas 14 (1): 139–55. https://doi.org/10.4312/ars.14.1.139-155.
Powell, Sarah. 2008. “Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism.” Reference Reviews 
22 (5): 30. https://doi.org/10.1108/09504120810885225.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar 
of the English Language. London: Longman.
Richards, Jack, John Platt, and Heidi Platt. 1992. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied 
Linguistics. London: Longman.
Ruzibaeva, Nigora. 2019. “Peculiarities of the Antithesis in the Literary Text.” European Journal of 
Research and Reflection in Educational Sciences 7 (11): 149–52. http://www.idpublications.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019 /09/Full-Paper-PECULIARITIES-OF-THE-ANTITHESIS-IN-THE-
LITERARY-TEXT.pdf.
Shearer, Karis. 2015. “’Now Back to Your Stories’: Framing the First Canadian Edition of Alice Munro’s 
Dance of the Happy Shades.” CALIBAN French Journal of English Studies 53: 195–200. https://
doi.org/10.4000 /caliban.1044.
Simpson, Paul. 2004. Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. London: Routledge.
Swan, Michael. 2005. Practical English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams,  Tennessee. (1945) 1999.  “The Glass Menagerie.” In The American Tradition in Literature, Vol II, 
9th Ed., edited by George Perkins and Barbara Perkins, 1338–79. Boston, New York: McGraw-Hill
Zupan, Simon. 2006. “Repetition and Translation Shifts.” ELOPE 3 (1–2): 257–68. https://
doi.org/10.4312 /elope.3.1-2.257-268.