"Dimensions" by Alice Munro

 From the collection of short stories 

"Too Much Happiness" (2009)

Dimensions

Philomela Ovid and the Censored Voice

Dimension: Dictionary definition: measurable extent, magnitude measured along a diameter.

Doree had to take three buses on her way to the facility. Doree appears suspended, floating, in an undimensional unmeasurable referentiality. Which facility is this one? Who is Doree? She is a chambermaid who doesn’t care about waiting on a bus station for long, a girl whose friends tell her she must make progress in her work. She doesn’t like to talk to people. She is the girl on the photograph that was released on the papers, after the tragedy, we will later know about; she is the girl whose hair “had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and colour, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft—a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her” (page 2). But Doree’s hair is no longer brown and wavy, the way he wanted, she has cut it short, bleached and spiked it. She is no longer the girl that did not wear make up because he told her so, she is the girl who does not wear make up because she has decided so, even if this is a scar of a perfunctory act.

Doree suffers the deprecatory treatment of her husband, who abuses and maltreats her through a vicious circle of coercive control, physical and mental isolation. The acme of violence: Lloyd kills their children. The way their bodies are described constitute a suffused pulp narrative of the deaf-tone feeling that Doree will undergo after the shock.

A muteless Philomela (see here the myth of Philomela), Doree heads to the source of her pain, Lloyd, and visits him in prison, the facility which has been mentioned at the beginning of the narrative.  She lies to Mrs Sands, who is psychologically supporting her through the trauma, and, contrariwise, sneaks to see Lloyd.  First, thinking that she can reverse the situation somehow. Later, driven by that same senseless silence of unassuaged pain. Lloyd, in an epiphanic visionary frenzy,  tells her he has seen the children on a different dimension:

“I have seen the children. I have seen and talked to them….I say they exist, not they are alive, because alive means in our particular Dimension, and I am not saying that is where they are. In fact I think they are not. But they do exist and it must be that there is another Dimension or maybe innumerable Dimensions, but what I know is that I have got across to whatever one they are in…They are fine. Really happy and smart. They don’t seem to have any memory of anything bad.…(page 25)

This vision sustains Doree with a sliver of hope. Doree seems to have recovered some kind of happiness,  “She still did not have that spontaneous sense of happiness, exactly, but she had a reminder of what it was like. It had nothing to do with the weather or flowers. It was the idea that the children were in what he had called their Dimension that came sneaking up on her in this way…” (page 27).  This does not bespeak of happiness, but a way to muffle and face her pain.  

Let us remember that the story “Dimensions” opens up the collection of short stories “Too Much Happiness” (2009). The title is a harbinger of negative connotations confirmed by the dark tone of the opening story. Other stories confirm that the misery of some transforms and metamorposes into the happiness of others. We should bear this in mind as we read and navigate through the different stories.  

At the end of the current story, there is a meaningful episode in which Doree,on her way to the facility, happens to resuscitate a man who has suffered an accident and is on the verge of dying, through a technique that Lloyd had taught her. One must be aware, in case of an accident, that the tongue does not block the breathing. After saving this man, Doree does not need to return to the prison.

The myth of Philomela comes to mind again, who deprived of her tongue, could not communicate the atrocious crime she had been a victim of, but she was turned into a bird by the Gods so her story could be heard through her trill. 

 To all women who are victims of violence, may your stories be heard, and your tongues let loose