Counterpanes and linoleum caves: Disrupted domestic materiality in Alice Munro’s ‘Vandals’, ‘Runaway’ and ‘Gravel’

This article re-reads the use of images of domestic materiality in descriptions of landscape in three of Alice Munro’s short stories concerned with memories of abuse, violence and death in light of Andrea Skinner’s revelations of July 2024. Disrupted domestic materiality is identified as domestic imagery incorporated into descriptions of landscape which destabilize spatial boundaries and intensify the shared threat of exterior and interior spaces. While it has primarily been identified through discrete images from Munro’s oeuvre (for example, the ‘linoleum cave’) this article expands on and connects three further examples of this disrupted domestic materiality to illustrate its extensive presence in Munro’s short fiction. As these images signal a preoccupation with memory and knowledge which characterize her later stories, new readings emerge from the context of Munro’s role in the denial of her daughter’s sexual abuse by Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin. The disrupted domestic materiality of ‘Vandals’, ‘Runaway’ and ‘Gravel’ requires further attention given that they, to differing extents, draw on, as material, the revelation and denial of Skinner’s experience of child sexual abuse.