A Study Guide for Alice Munro's "Day of the Butterfly"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Alice Munro's "Day of the Butterfly," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535821575

Book preview

10

Day of the Butterfly

Alice Munro

1968

Introduction

Day of the Butterfly was included in Alice Munro's first published collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories, published in 1968. Many of Munro's early stories, including Day of the Butterfly, are set in Ontario, Canada, where she grew up.

An earlier version of the story was written in 1953 and published in July 1956 as Goodbye Myra in Chatelaine, a women's magazine. Munro revised the story for publication in 1968 in Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories, changing the ending slightly and transforming the narrative from a story suitable for a popular women's magazine into a more literary work. To do this, the child narrator changed from a simple first-person narrator to a more introspective narrator, who is more cynical and more adult in considering the events of the story. Day of the Butterfly is also included in the 2004 anthology World Literature: Anthology of Short Stories, Poetry, and Drama, published by McGraw-Hill.

Author Biography

Munro was born on July 10, 1931, just outside Wingham, a small town in western Ontario. Her father, Robert Laidlaw, was an unsuccessful silver fox breeder whose business failed completely during the Depression. Her mother, Ann, who had been a teacher, helped her husband sell the pelts from their foxes. The Laidlaw family was poor, especially after the fox farm failed, and they lived in a poor area just outside town.

Munro began writing short stories when she was twelve and continued to write after she left Wingham to attend university. She won a scholarship to attend the University of Western Ontario in 1949 but was forced to leave after two years when the scholarship ended. Rather than return to her home in 1951, she decided to marry fellow student James Munro. During the more than twenty years of their marriage, they had four daughters, one of whom died in infancy. The Munro family lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, for many years, but eventually they moved to Victoria, where they opened a bookstore. During the time in Vancouver, Munro wrote infrequently, but after the move to Victoria, she once again began writing short stories.

Munro's first collection of short stories, which includes Day of the Butterfly