‘Know Thyself’? Borderlinearity in Alice Munro’s ‘Dimension’

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Alice Munro’s short story, ‘Dimension,’ the protagonist Doree shifts through the nightmare aftermath of her children’s murder. Her husband Lloyd, the murderer, has been incarcerated in a facility for the criminally insane, and his madness can be read as ‘clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic’.1 Lloyd demonstrably endures some kind of ‘narcissistic crisis’ (Kristeva, 14) and, his drives and impulses disordered, his actions are regulated instead by ‘repugnance, disgust, abjection’ (Kristeva, 11). Munro begins her story with Doree making a third trip to visit her antagonist; the first two he has ‘refused to see her’,2 and at work within these narrative structures are spatial, psychic, and potentially cathartic drives. Doree explores a boundary containing a monstrous presence, circling as if locked in the afterwardsness of repetition compulsion. She is at once searching for a means to anesthetise her trauma while seeking for ways to shatter those imago her much older husband has so expertly (and toxically) constructed.