“Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness

Dimension: A Question of Type

Since Feminism is an overly broad term, the story can be seen of a particular type of feminism; namely, socialist feminism. Socialist feminism believes that in a patriarchal society, man gains control over women by virtue of his ability to control the capital; his ability to work and provide the family with its needs. In Munro's narrative, this is presented through the fact that Doree married Lloyd after her mother's death. She was so naive and she needed someone to take her in and look after her, that is how she became submissive; because she did not have the power to stand for herself and be independent. 

Othering in Alice Munro's Dimension

Characters in Alice Munro's story can be divided into male characters and female characters. What is more iconic, however, is that a line can be drawn to differentiate between female characters as well. To begin with, there is Doree and Maggie on one hand, and their husbands on the other. The story portrays othering in so many ways. To begin with, Dimension reflects the roles assigned to women in a patriarchal society. The role of the wife and the mother that blurs the existence of the woman as a human being. These roles even determine the kind of conversation women often engage in. For instance, Doree and Maggie "talked mostly about the children, and things they cooked," These are the topics determined for women because they have been stereotyped by men. On the other hand, the male other took a broader space; he enjoyed his freedom to judge and criticize and belittle. For instance, the story represents Lloyd as a man who looks down upon his female other and criticizes them, and "Doree was pretty sure that these people weren't as bad as Lloyd thought, but it was no use contradicting him. Perhaps men just had to have enemies, the way they had to have their jokes. And sometimes Lloyd did make the enemies into jokes," In addition to the male and the female other, there is the othering of well-educated and the not-so-well-educated-because-they-married-early women. Maggie represents the first group as "Doree found out about how Maggie had trekked around Europe before training as an optometrist and Maggie found out how young Doree had been when she got married."   

The Story As a Portrayal of Domestic Violence and Emancipation

Alice Munroe’s Dimension is the story of self-finding and pursuing life despite all the odds and the challenges one might come across. The story lays out the life of Doree, a housewife and mother of three children, and the relationship between her and her husband Lloyd that inflected such physical and emotional pain into her and their children. The relationship between Doree and Lloyd can be seen from the perspective that he was everything to her after her mother’s death as he helped her come over her misery which by turn made her overlook all of the things that flawed their relationship;  at first one may think that she was extremely juvenile to notice those defects in their relationship and the way he acted as her superior, but then the reader gets the chance to know for true that she is aware of everything; however, she chose to overlook it because to her life is associated with Lloyd and it only makes sense this way. This was very evident throughout her talks with Maggie; she did not want to “over-share” with her because he knows that she would judge their relationship and that was the last thing she wanted. “she saw that there were things that she was used to that another person might not understand” (18), it is safe to say that Lloyd abused her emotionally; he made sure that she feared him to guarantee that she won’t disobey him. Moreover, he insulted her in more than one occasion; when having the problem of breastfeeding their baby he accused her of being “ a whore” saying that  “all hippies are whores”; also, in the beginning, Doree was introduced as  “a reflection less of the way she was than the way he wanted to see her”; he was controlling in every little inch of her life even her looks. In the story, it was mentioned that he did not allow her to wear any makeup and that she was only allowed to laugh on the jokes he makes and she was not allowed to “start the laughing”. On the other hand, Lloyd did not only abuse Doree; he also abused their children physically as he suffocated them to death due to a heated argument with his wife. All the previous only points out how mentally unstable and “criminally crazy” was the character of Lloyd, this mental dysfunction might be brought back to abandonment and trust issues. As illustrated previously he suffocated his children to protect them from the pain that their mother walked on them, which was not the case in the story. This might reflect that he experienced the abandonment of his family while he was a child which affected him severely when growing up.

Alice Munroe painted a lively picture of how is the life of some housewives through the story of Doree and her suffering. For the most part, the relationship between Lloyd and Doree was more of a dominant and submissive relationship than a marriage. Lloyd was a possessive, controlling, and suspicious husband. In most of their arguments, she had to inflict pain to herself, “ banging her head on the floor” (20), and repeatedly chanting that it was “untrue” (20) until he was convinced with her honesty. Furthermore, everything in their life was planned only by Lloyd and she only had to obey him in order not to provoke him; he was mostly convinced that his way was the only right way because to him in every downfall in marriage or any problem concerning the children “the reason was often the mother." Furthermore, after suffocating their children, he blamed her for it, he saw that she brought it all on herself; which was the reason that made her visit him after all that happened just to get him to deny the words that he said so she can learn to breathe again and not have the heavy sense of regret overweighing her heart. In one point of view, he severely played her along the years and always made her at wrong no matter what happened, to the extent that him killing their children made her feel as if she was one way or another responsible for it and the only way to overcome that regret is for him to give her his verdict that she was not at wrong and that ought not to feel such regret. Likewise, in the closing of the story she decides not to visit him and to go home after she saved the boy on the bus from suffocating; this acted as if she finally had the chance to breathe again, as if she was saving herself, not the boy, ““She spoke dismissively, without raising her head, as if she were the one whose breath was precious”. That is to say that she finally found the reason to live that was harshly stripped from her during her life with Lloyd. 

Women and Storytelling: An Interview

Interviewer: Was it important that the story would be told from a woman's prescriptive?
Munro: I never thought of it as being important, but I never thought of myself as being anything but a woman, and there were many good stories about little girls and women... When I was a young girl I had no feeling of inferiority at all about being a woman. And this may have been because I lived in a part of Ontario where women did most of the reading, women did most of the telling of the stories. The men were outside doing 'important' things, and they did not go in for stories, so I felt quite at home.
Alice Munro, In Her Own Words: 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

25 Stories by Alice Munro You Can Read Online

Alice Munro: In Brief

Canadian writer Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, South West Ontario and has written short fiction since 1950. 

Born in 1931 to a farming family, Alice Munro won a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, where she studied from 1949-1951, but she left before graduating and moved to Vancouver. From 1963 she ran a bookshop in Victoria, British Columbia for several years, before returning to Ontario in 1972. She now lives in Comox, British Columbia and Clinton, Ontario. Her first short story was published in Folio, a student literary magazine, in 1950. During the 1950s and '60s her stories were also accepted for broadcast by CBC and for publication in various journals. Since then many more short stories have been published regularly in prestigious periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Atlantic Monthly.
As a prolific writer, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro revitalized the short story as a literary genre that is often looked down upon and perceived as a poor relation of the novel.

A list of famous works:
Here and Now (1977)The Moons of Jupiter: Stories (1983) 
Too Much Happiness (2007)

Queenie: A Story (1999)Dear Life (2012)