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THE CLASSICAL MYTH of Orpheus and Eurydice tells the story of the young lovers' marriage, Eurydice's accidental death, and Orpheus's grief-stricken descent into the underworld to bring his beloved wife back into the world of the living. A poet and a musician, Orpheus sings so beautifully that he charms Hades into allowing him to take her back. But the Lord of the Dead imposes one condition: Orpheus must not look at her until they have completed their ascent to the upper world. Just as they reach it, however, he turns to see whether she is following him, and she is lost to him again and forever (Graves III-I 2).
Alice Munro's first reference to this myth is a brief but climactic musical allusion to Orfeo ed Euridice, Christoph Gluck's eighteenthcentury opera, in the title story of Dance of the Happy Shades (211-z4), her first collection. When a handicapped girl, an unexpected performer in a children's piano recital, plays "The Dance of the Happy Shades," "something fragile, courtly and gay, that carries with it the freedom of a great unemotional happiness," the snobbish mothers in the audience do not know how to react to her indisputable talent (zzz). Although the piano teacher mentions the French title of the piece, Danse des ombres heureuses, nobody recognizes it as part of the opera based on the Orpheus myth (zz3). But through the contrast between the mothers' world and Gluck's otherworldly music, Munro emphasizes the unexpected effect of art on life.
In her second use of the Orpheus myth, Munro devotes an entire story to developing this powerful effect in an ironic intertextualization of Jean Anouilh's Eurydice (Legend of Lovers), a dramatic retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in modern France.I In "The Children Stay," one of Munro's revised New Yorker stories in The Love of a Good Woman ( I 8 I4), her latest collection, Pauline Keating is a disturbingly beautiful young mother rehearsing for the title role in an amateur Canadian production of Anouilh's play. With her husband, Brian, and his parents, Pauline discusses Anouilh's plot, quoting and paraphrasing the dialogue and analysing both the characters and the director's unexpected casting of the various roles. "What he sees in us is something only he can see,"...