An Appraisal-Based Rereading of Alice Munro's “Vandals”

Alice Munro’s “Vandals”, a story of the sexual abuse of a little girl, was first published in 1993. While it received considerable scholarly attention in the past, with a specific focus on the female character Bea, who fails to protect the girl, interest in the story was reignited after the sexual abuse in Munro’s own family was revealed in 2024, shortly after the author’s death. The newly revealed biographical testimony calls for a systematic rereading of this story as potentially semi-biographical. This paper focuses on the story’s three protagonists in their respective roles of abuser, victim and bystander, and analyses Munro’s skilful use of evaluative language in the portrayal of these characters, employing the appraisal model by Martin and White (2005) and focusing specifically on attitude, one of the three main categories in the model, in an experimental attempt to apply this approach to a story containing polyfocalization.