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."