Social Class in Alice Munro's 'Sunday Afternoon' and 'Hired Girl'

Abstract

This essay identifies and examines the ways in which Alice Munro, in her revision of the story 'Hired Girl' from The View from Castle Rock (2006), makes more salient the inequities of class distinctions. The nuances of social class are explored in the New Yorker version published 12 years before, but Munro's revisions, I argue, have produced a much more critical and incisive social commentary. In my argument I use, principally, the tools of narratology, pragmatics and literary linguistics.