From Trauma to Grace : A Close Reading of Alice Munro's "Dimensions"

Sammanfattning

This essay offers a close reading of Alice Munro’s short story “Dimensions”. The essay draws on Phelan’s rhetorical narrative concepts, such as progressions and judgements, alongside trauma theory as developed by Cathy Caruth and Michelle Balaev. The analysis examines how narrative progressions shaped by authorial choices are closely tied to the reader’s judgements, together constituting the reading experience. Details of Alice Munro’s personal life became public when her daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that she had been subjected to childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather, Gerry Fremlin, Munro’s husband, to whom Munro chose to remain married after learning of the abuse. The short story “Dimensions” was published eight months after Munro’s husband was convicted. There is no way of knowing Munro’s underlying motives in writing the story about Doree, whose husband murders her three children, and about her life afterwards, in which she chooses to visit him in a psychiatric ward. However, the story raises questions about how one can go on when the worst has happened. Knowing more about the implied author of “Dimensions” and the trauma present in the family at the time of the story’s production adds complexity to the analysis and allows the text to be read in light of this previously unknown background.