Alice Munro The Shining House

“The Shining Houses” was written by Alice Munro in 1968. The story focuses on Mary a suburban mother and wife who lives in a town that is growing rapidly. One of Mary’s neighbours, an old woman named Mrs. Fullerton lives in an old, filthy, unattractive house. The other members of the community are upset that Mrs.Fullerton refuses to fix up her ugly looking house, so they come up with a plan involving a petition that would force Mrs. Fullerton out of her house. Mary doesn’t believe Mrs. Fullerton should be forced out so she must decide whether or not she’s going to sign the petition. In “The Shining Houses”, Alice Munro uses marxist concepts to go against conformity in today’s society and demonstrate how it often leads people to forgetting their

The first example of this takes place when the neighbours are deciding what to do about Mrs. Fullerton. ‘“I’m going to stop buying them,’ Janie Inger said. ‘The supermarket’s cheaper and who cares that much about fresh?”’(Munro 69). In this quote the author critiques the oppressive socioeconomic forces in Canada during the late 1920s the era this story takes place in and the era right before the story’s author was born. Alice Munro was born the daughter of a farmer in the small town of Wingham,Ontario in 1931 right when the great depression hit, because of this she saw the effect a capitalist government had on a people. Because of capitalist socioeconomic forces more and more people moved from rural areas to urban ones. The people hit the hardest by this were the farmers like Alice Munro’s father. This is exactly the case for the character Mrs. Fullerton because of the supermarket she can no longer sell eggs or cherries. The author uses this critique to show that conformity leads to the loss of principles, the people living in this town know that these eggs are Mrs. Fullerton’s only source of income but their need for conformity forces them to buy from the supermarket because everyone else buys from the